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.

The Rise and Fall of the Society of Jesus: Part Two - The Man Beyond the Mountains

While the Jesuits had been banned from more than one country for short periods of time before, in the mid-18th century, after their reputation for financial chicanery and political machination had developed into the full-fledged Black Legend of a clandestine and occult order bent on nothing less than subjugating the world to the Vatican, the tide would finally turn on the Society of Jesus. When it turned, it happened relatively quickly, over the course of only about a decade. It started with a terrible earthquake in Portugal, which in conjunction with the resulting fires and tsunamis killed several tens of thousands in Lisbon and destroyed King Joseph I’s palace. The Jesuits were not blamed for this catastrophe, but they were blamed for an attempt on the king’s life during the aftermath, when the king was living in a tent outside the devastated city. The assassination attempt resulted in a witch hunt focused on the Távora family, relatives of the king’s mistress, whose Jesuit confessor was also implicated in the affair. Within a year of burning the family’s Jesuit confessor at the stake, the king expelled all Jesuits from the territories he controlled. Meanwhile in France, things were also coming to a head. Ever since their brush with being again banned for supposedly plotting regicide in the assassination of the first Bourbon king of France, Henri IV, they had kept their heads down and slowly but surely accumulated wealth and influence while avoiding the teaching of controversial doctrines about tyrannicide. They became the strident orthodox opponents of Jansenists and even triumphed over them in their suppression of the cult at Port-Royal abbey and the persecution of Jansenist clergy under the papal bull Unigenitus, all of which I discussed in detail in my series “The Jansenist Miracles of Enlightenment France.” But Jansenism survived in the underground convulsionnaire movement, and the enemies of the Jesuits, which included the anti-clerical Philosophes and Encyclopédistes of the Enlightenment, would eventually find their opportunity to turn all of France against the Jesuits. In the 18th century, several events provided the pretext they needed. First, Jesuits were accused of swindling an old man named Ambroise Guys out of his fortune in a scandalous court case. Then came the controversial Cadière Affair, when a Jesuit priest named Jean-Baptiste Girard was accused of sexually assaulting and corrupting a young woman, a court case that, as I explained in my patron exclusive “The Stigmatic Maiden and the Wanton Jesuit,” was used by the enemies of Jesuits to argue that all Jesuits were morally bankrupt and a corruptive influence. Finally, in 1757, an unstable man made a lame attempt at assassinating King Louis XV with a penknife, and even though the assassin appeared to be angry that French Catholic clergy were not providing the holy sacraments to Jansenists, anti-Jesuits linked him to the Society of Jesus because he worked as a servant in a Jesuit college. Following Portugal’s lead a few years later, these incidents, as well as the litany of sins attributed to the order by their Black Legend, served as the ammunition their enemies in government needed to dissolve the society in France and banish any Jesuit who would not renounce the order. In Spain, King Charles III was somewhat disposed to favor the Jesuits. However, after a law forbidding the wearing of long cloaks and broad-brimmed hats touched off a mob revolt in Madrid, rumor had it that the Jesuits had orchestrated it as a coup, despite—or more accurately because of—the fact that Jesuit priests were the ones who talked the mob down. As difficult to confirm as the truth behind the rumors of Jesuit riot incitement is the tale that anti-Jesuits who had already driven the order from France and Portugal convinced King Charles III of Spain to suppress them by forging a letter to make it seem like the Superior General of the Jesuits was claiming Charles was illegitimate. No matter the truth of Charles III’s motivations, another huge domino had fallen, and in 1767, the Jesuits were expelled from Spain and all of her colonial territories in the Americas. Pope Clement XIV, reading the room after the expulsion of the Jesuits from so many European countries and their extended empires overseas, finally ordered the abolishment of the Society of Jesus once and for all. It was a true sea change, a dramatic change of fortune for the most influential arm of the Catholic Church and a severe blow to papal power generally. Thus the fact that within fifty years the Jesuits would return and reaccumulate the influence and wealth that had been taken from them cemented forever the notion that the Jesuits were a nefarious and scheming cabal that had never been defeated and had only gone dark until such time as it could rise again to power.

Pope Clement XIV who officially suppressed the Jesuits after their expulsion from many European nations. Public Domain.

Before we can discuss the resurrection of the Jesuits decades after their papal suppression, it is important to clarify that the Jesuits did not disappear. Many, it is true, became refugees in Italy when they were expelled from other European countries, while some renounced their vows and were permitted to remain. In Prussia, Frederick the Great at first resisted the papal suppression, and in the United States Jesuits continued establishing schools and instructing students. In Russia, Catherine the Great defied the order’s suppression and encouraged their continued operation, even eventually obtaining papal approval of the continued existence of the Society of Jesus in Imperial Russia. But for the most part, the order had been extirpated in Europe. Still, this did not curtail the suspicion that Jesuits remained lurking among the clergy and the laypeople, hiding in plain sight, manipulating the political situation and waiting until the optimal moment to strike. In England, despite—or perhaps because of—their long history of Catholic persecution and anti-Catholic hysteria, sentiment began to swing more toward toleration among the middle and upper classes in the late 1770s, and legislation was passed to reduce some of the penalties previously enacted against papists. However, rumors still ran rampant, including the claims that an army of Jesuits was gathering in tunnels beneath London, planting explosives in a plot to detonate the banks of the River Thames and flood the city. The passage of legislation that many believed would make England a gathering place for Jesuits and enable their treasonous plotting led to the most destructive mob rampage in English history, the Gordon Riots. Throughout the long history of anti-Jesuitism and anti-Catholicism generally in England, the Catholics were viewed as a Fifth Column, a population working together, in concert and secrecy, to achieve the goals of the country’s enemy, the Pope. This is the doctrine at the heart of Jesuit conspiracy theories, even today. A more precise term for this loyalty not to one’s own country but to a foreign religious authority is Ultramontanism. It is derived from a medieval ecclesiastical term, papa ultramontano, referring to a pope elected from outside of Italy, beyond the Alps. However, it later became a term referring to those whose loyalty belonged only to the man beyond the mountains, the supreme pontiff, the Pope. Eventually, ultramontanism would come to describe not only religious faith and political leanings, but a more defined political movement favoring a return to theocracy, a movement closely associated, in the minds of anti-Jesuits, with the Society of Jesus.

Before counter-revolution would have to come the revolution itself. Anti-clericalism was a major component of the French Revolution. The revolutionary regime declared that all clergymen would have to swear allegiance to their National Constituent Assembly, and clerics who resisted were locked up or exiled. Persecution of Catholics increased, to the point that women would be caught on their way to Mass and assaulted in the streets. This evolved into an organized dechristianization program, in which revolutionaries established a non-religious Cult of Reason to replace the Church, and seized churches to convert them into Temples of Reason. During the Reign of Terror, tens of thousands of clergy were exiled and hundreds executed using the guillotine, a contraption, ironically, invented by a former Jesuit. This was the era in which the left-right spectrum of politics was conceived, as I spoke about in part one, and as those on the right began to formulate their paranoid view of current events, seeing secret societies at work everywhere, so too did those on the left take a paranoid view of politics. The Reign of Terror in France was perhaps the worst outgrowth of the paranoid style of politics, with the mistrust of a conspiratorial enemy becoming institutionalized and resulting in the campaign of murder. Revolutionaries saw conspiracies to overturn their new political order everywhere, and during the Terror, it was considered a civic duty to accuse any you suspected of conspiring against the Revolution. It was claimed one hero of the revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, especially disliked the Catholic Church because the Jesuits had supposedly ruined his family financially. During the French Revolutionary Wars, as Napoleon ostensibly fought to spread the ideals of the Revolution, Pope Pius VI opposed its spread and even considered restoring the Society of Jesus as a counterforce to the Revolution. Pius VI would die while imprisoned by Napoleon’s invading forces. The restoration of the order would fall to his successor, Pope Pius VII, who struggled continually against Napoleon after his seizure of power and establishment of a military dictatorship. After surviving his own imprisonment by Napoleon, Pius VII promptly issued a bull authorizing the reestablishment of the Jesuit order in all nations, believing the Society of Jesus to be the most effective bulwark against the forces of revolution. Many who were pushing for the restoration of the Jesuits appear to have believed the conspiracy theories of Abbé Barruel that the forces of revolution were orchestrated by secret societies like the Masons and the Illuminati, so it is tempting to suggest that their belief in the Jesuits as the best defense against them confirms the notion of the Jesuits as a similarly conspiratorial order, but just because some of their proponents believed this about them doesn’t mean this is what they believed about themselves. And it must be remembered that the chief ministry of the Jesuits was education, and one prong of the supposed conspiracy believed to have fomented the French Revolution was the godless Enlightenment philosophy spread by philosophes. In other words, it may have just been Jesuit education that was viewed as the best defense against revolutionary ideology. 

Pope Pius VII, who restored the Jesuits after his imprisonment by Napoleon Bonaparte. Public Domain.

The restoration of the Jesuit order coincided with the fall of Napoleon and the beginning of the Bourbon Restoration period of French history, during which the brothers of the king executed during the Revolution, Louis XVI, took back the French throne as a constitutional monarchy. This period was marked by a struggle between the supporters of the Revolution and the forces of counter-revolution, with the principal political questions being what revolutionary reforms should be retained and what aspects of the Old Regime should be restored. Under the first Restoration Bourbon monarch, Louis XVIII, a variety of political factions emerged. Those  on the far left, calling themselves Republicans and Socialists, and liberals of the center-left pushing to keep or restore democratic reforms of the French Revolution and resist any movement toward absolutist monarchy or theocracy. On the center-right, favoring the balance of monarchical power and the parliamentarism set forth in the new Royal Charter, were the so-called Doctrinaires, and on the far right were the Ultra-royalists, among whom were counted Ultramontanes, who would have liked to do away with revolutionary reforms altogether and restore entirely the old political and social order, the Ancien Régime. It was during this period that those on the Left resurrected the Black Legend of the Jesuits as a kind of whataboutism. When it was argued by the Right that the politics of the Left seemed to lead inexorably to bloodshed and regicide, those on the Left protested by raising the age-old specter of Jesuitical regicide, suggesting that it was the Jesuits and their Ultramontane political allies who were the real threat to the new Bourbon monarch, just as they had been to the very first Bourbon Monarch, Henri IV. Pointing fingers at a supposed Jesuit conspiracy behind Ultramontane politics was also a simple retort to accusations that Liberals were the front for an Illuminist conspiracy. In fact, this equivalence even led some to suggest that they might have been one and the same conspiracy, acting under different guises through different sorts of agents to accomplish the same goal of overthrowing power structures and seizing control. The growth of anti-Jesuitism on the Left in this time represented concerns about the influence and success of Ultra-royalism and Ultramontanism and the counter-revolution’s efforts to roll back democratic institutions. Therefore, when the elections of early 1824 resulted in a conservative, Ultra-royalist government, and a new monarch, Charles X, favorable to Ultramontane politics, acceded to the throne, and together they passed a spate of conservative new laws, the Liberal presses began to sound the alarm that Jesuits were no longer an underground threat but rather had seized power and become a tyrannical regime.

During the reign of Charles the X, the paranoid anti-Jesuit rhetoric of some on the Left was transformed by Liberal newspapers into a public outcry. Claims of a secret conspiracy appeared to be confirmed by the revelation that a secret society composed principally of Catholics called the Chevaliers de la Foi, or Knights of the Faith, had played a significant role in achieving the recent Ultramontane domination of the government, and that many of the Knights of the Faith had been involved with La Congrégation, or the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin, a lay religious association founded in Rome by a Jesuit professor. These facts were transformed by the anti-Jesuit press into a vast conspiracy of lay people who were supposedly secretly beholden to the Society of Jesus. The term “the Congregation” became the watchword of every conspiracy-minded polemicist, used to accuse any member of government or public official who could not be concretely tied to the Jesuits through known associations, regardless of whether they had ever actually been associated with the charitable Roman association or the Ultra-royalist Knights of the Faith. If someone acted against the democratic principles of the Revolution or enacted any ultra-royalist program, they were branded a member of the Congregation, a secret servant of the Jesuit conspiracy. The term became as loosely and frequently cast about during those years as the term Deep State is carelessly flung today by conspiracists on the Right. This rhetoric, which argued that the entire government was just a front for the Jesuits, only quieted for a time after Liberals were successful in getting the government to forbid Jesuit education just to appease them. However, the conspiracy claims peaked again after Ultra-royalist Jules de Polignac, a man supposedly known to be a member of the Congregation and thus a servant of Jesuits, rose to the position of Prime Minister. The Liberal press kicked their conspiracy-mongering into high gear again, reporting on an unsubstantiated rumor spread by a German naturalist who claimed to have overheard a secret Jesuit meeting at a traveler’s hostel in the Alps at which the members of the order indicated that their man in France, Polignac, would help them enact their final counter-revolution through another violent reign of terror. Thereafter, when Polignac enacted a series of repressive and anti-democratic ordinances in July 1830, suspending the freedom of the press, dissolving the government, and limiting the franchise before arranging a new election, the conspiracy rumor seemed confirmed. The result was the July Revolution, three days during which Jesuits were widely persecuted and King Charles X and his Ultra-royalist government were overthrown, resulting in the July Monarchy, which saw the Royal Charter of 1814 revised to establish a “Citizen King” rather than a kingship by divine right.

A romanticized depiction of the July Revolution, which in many ways was precipitated by conspiracy theories about Jesuits. Public Domain.

The struggle between Revolution and counter-revolution continued to be waged through the Revolutions of 1848 and beyond, and the specter of the Jesuits was raised again and again to characterize ultramontanist and monarchist politics. And this culture war spread across the Atlantic, to America, which had long been kept out of such controversies. Perhaps this was a result of our founding principle of religious tolerance, or perhaps because Catholics, and even specifically Jesuits, had proven themselves patriots in the American Revolution. While it is true that some Founding Fathers, specifically John Adams, were known to have harbored suspicions about the Jesuits and the spread of Roman Catholicism in America (as they might resent the influence of any European power in the young republic), among their cosignatories on the Declaration of Independence was a Jesuit-educated Catholic named Charles Carroll, whose Jesuit priest cousin, John Carroll, would become the first Bishop and Archbishop of the United States during the period of the order’s suppression. John Carroll was a champion of republican ideals, but after the restoration of the order, an influx of European Jesuits and lay Catholic immigrants brought ultramontanist attitudes that would eventually lead to the 19th century anti-Catholic conspiracy theories I have already spoken about in various episodes. In 1834, mobs destroyed the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 1835, Samuel Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States was published, and the following year, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk became the most widely read book in the country, perpetrating a hoax that would deal lasting harm to the image of Catholics in America. The 1840s saw nativist riots and anti-immigrant violence, and the 1850s brought the founding of the nativist Know-Nothing political party by a secret society called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. This party’s candidates regularly accused their political rivals of being crypto-Catholics, raising fears of the election of an American President who might be the puppet of the Man Beyond the Mountains.

Then came the US Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and after the capture of assassin John Wilkes Booth, it came out that there was a Catholic connection. Booth and his co-conspirators apparently met to plan the assassination at a boarding house owned by the Catholic Mary Surratt, who let rooms mostly to Catholic boarders. Her son John, a conspirator in the assassination, afterward escaped to seek refuge in a Montreal rectory and was helped to join the Papal Zouave, a kind of Catholic Foreign Legion, under a false name. This discovery led to conspiracy theories that the whole plot had been yet another example of Jesuit assassination. The more investigators looked for Catholic connections, the more they saw them, for a Catholic doctor had set Booth’s leg, broken when he had leapt to the stage after shooting Lincoln, and Catholic priests acted as character witnesses for Mary Surratt. But of course, to a less conspiracy-addled mind, none of this proves anything. Naturally Catholic priests witnessed on behalf of their parishioner. The Catholic doctor’s part in the plot remains unclear; he was convicted for conspiracy in a murder mainly because he didn’t report Booth’s injury for a day, but the fact remains he did report it, and eventually he received a Presidential pardon. But even if he was complicit in the assassination, there is nothing to suggest his religion was a motivating factor. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the priests in Montreal who helped John Surratt knew what he had done, and when he was recognized while serving in the Papal Zouave, he wasn’t protected but rather had to flee through sewers to avoid arrest. In the end, though this further stirred up Jesuit conspiracy claims in America, there is no evidence that Catholicism had anything to do with their reasons for murdering Lincoln, and certainly none that a single actual Jesuit was involved. The entire conspiracy theory appears to have been single-handedly cooked up by Charles Chiniquy, a former Catholic priest turned anti-Catholic nativist conspiracy monger, whose credibility we might logically question.

A newspaper drawing of Mary Surratt receiving comfort from one of the priests permitted to visit her in her prison cell. Public Domain.

Within a few years of Lincoln’s assassination, Pope Pius IX gave many who feared the influence of the Man Beyond the Mountains legitimate cause for concern when at the First Vatican Council he moved to dogmatize the doctrine of papal infallibility. This sparked Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, or cultural struggle, and the expulsion of Jesuits in some German states, such as Bavaria, as I recently discussed in my series on Ludwig II. And as I explained in my patron bonus episode, the Myth of the Iron Chancellor, Bismarckian politics would later be exploited by Hitler, who espoused anti-clerical rhetoric as well, partly because of his affinity for neopaganism, as discussed in my series on Nazi occultism. Unsurprisingly, given Hitler’s tendency to see enemies conspiring everywhere, he particularly hated the Jesuits. Conspiracy theories about the Society of Jesus, while originating from leftist rhetoric, had always appealed to some on the right, for many royalists in the 19th century also feared their reputation for regicide, but in Nazi Germany, it was taken to new levels. Jesuits were interned alongside Jews in the priest barracks of concentration camps like Dachau, and many died. They have been persecuted alongside the Jews and accused of the same sort of far-reaching world domination plots. They were the counterpart to the fabled Illuminati, said to use the same methods of intrigue and terror to achieve similar ends. They have even been likened to the Knights Templar as a secretive militaristic religious society that had gathered wealth before being suppressed, and surviving their suppression. So in the modern era, the Jesuits have entered the realm of elite conspiracy lore, mentioned breathlessly as being one and the same as the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, and the Jewish World Conspiracy. Look to the insane ramblings of one such as Eric Jon Phelps, whose website and book Vatican Assassins blames just about everything on the Jesuits. The Holocaust was their fault, he’ll say, despite the fact that Jesuits died in camps alongside Jews. They killed JFK, he’ll claim, even though JFK was our first Catholic president. They run Hollywood and the international banking system. And they even have underground military bases in which they perform genetic experiments, creating a class of hybrid creatures to pilot their antigravity aircraft—that’s right, the Gray aliens and their UFOs are also the work of the Society of Jesus. Surely Phelps lost his mind, what little of it he had left, when in 2013 a Jesuit priest was for the first time elected pope. It is hard to logically reconcile the idea of a Jesuit conspiracy bent on world domination and a return to theocratic rule with the moderating influence that Pope Francis has proven to be, or to reason why it took such a supposedly all-powerful order nearly 500 years to put one of its own into the most powerful position in the church. But then, conspiracy theorists don’t typically rely much on logic and reason, and have no problem accommodating such cognitive dissonance.

Further Reading

Barthel, Manfred. The Jesuits: History and Legend of the Society of Jesus. William Morrow and Co., 1984.

Blaskiewicz, Robert. “This Week in Conspiracy: For Fear of a Jesuit Planet.” Skeptical Inquirer, 1 April 2013, skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/this-week-in-conspiracy-for-fear-of-a-jesuit-planet/.

Carr, J.L. “The Expulsion of the Jesuits from France.” History Today, vol. 14, no, 11, Nov. 1964, pp. 774-781. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=31h&AN=87576765&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Cubitt, Geoffrey. The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France. Clarendon, 1993.

Goldwag, Arthur. “Vatican Assassins: a One-Stop Website for Conspiratologists.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 23 Nov. 2011, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2011/11/23/vatican-assassins-one-stop-website-conspiratologists.
Mitchell, David. The Jesuits, a History. F. Watts, 1981.

Stewart, David O. “The Strange Saga of Lincoln Assassination Co-Conspirator John Surrat.” History News Network, 4 March 2013, historynewsnetwork.org/article/150840.
Worcester, Thomas. "Order Restored: remembering turbulent times for the Jesuits." America, vol. 211, no. 3, 4 Aug. 2014, p. 14. Gale In Context: Biography, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A380526806/GPS?u=modestojc_main&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=6a3a2d7d.
---. “A Remnant and Rebirth: Pope Pius VII Brings the Jesuits Back.” Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, vol. 45, no. 1, 2014, pp. 5-6. ePublications@Marquette, epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1856&context=conversations.

The Rise and Fall of the Society of Jesus: Part One - The Black Legend of the Jesuits

In May of 1521, amidst the conflict of the Four Years’ War, the son of a noble Basque family was gravely injured at the French siege of Pamplona when a cannonball fired by the French-supported Navarrese forces shattered his leg. It is said that the Navarrese were so impressed with the courage of this young soldier, Inigo Lopez, that they carried him back to his home in Loyola, but this is likely an embellishment typical of hagiography, for Inigo Lopez de Loyola would go on to become a famous saint. That cannonball set young Inigo on the path to sainthood, for after a terribly bungled surgery that required the rebreaking and resetting his leg, he lay convalescing for some time, during which he pondered his future while reading about the lives of Jesus Christ and the Catholic saints. After his conversion and dedication to Catholicism, he traveled to Jerusalem, intent on helping to convert Muslims or die trying, but he was convinced by Franciscan monks there to go back home, where he began to build something of a following. He and his so-called Iniguistas, who called him simply The Pilgrim, went from city to city in Spain, barefoot and living off of alms, preaching the message that the church faithful should be receiving the Eucharist and confessing their sins weekly, rather than once a year, as was then common practice. While today this is standard, back then it was something of a disruptive doctrine, causing the Inquisition to take notice of him and his disciples. This was the beginning of Inigo Lopez’s commitment to orthodoxy. His Inquisitors instructed him that it was only the place of educated priests to instruct the laity, so Inigo and his followers traveled to France and enrolled at the Sorbonne, where he took the Latinized name Ignatius Loyola while completing his priestly training. Among his early apostles, he formed a brotherhood, the Society of Jesus, which was formally approved by Pope Paul III in 1540. Other Catholic orders suggested that it was arrogant and presumptuous to take the name of Jesus for his brotherhood, but before long it was hard to argue that Ignatius Loyola’s society, called Jesuits by their critics, did not live up to their exalted namesake. Ignatius lived to see the spread of his order through its ministry of education, when the Spanish viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples requested he set up a school in Sicily, but he never dreamed that his little priestly order would become the vast international network into which it transformed, growing within a couple hundred years to include some 22,000 priests operating 200 seminaries and 700 colleges, and acting as the confessors and counselors of princes and monarchs around the world. Nor could he have imagined the coequal growth of his order’s enemies, who would allege that the Jesuits were schemers, spies, conspirators, and even murderers. The story of the Society of Jesus is one of global power, its fearful suppression, its restoration, and the enduring conspiracy theories that surround the order even today.

In my recent series I touched on the Jesuits in Bavaria, and I mentioned in passing that they were the subject of a vast conspiracy theory. Certainly Ludwig II was not the only monarch to suppress the Society of Jesus in his kingdom, nor was he the first to see in them an insidious political force doing the bidding of the Pope and undermining his authority. Indeed, the Jesuits have been lurking in their black robes in the background of many a historical tale I have told on this podcast. They were said to have guarded the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, only entrusting it to Wilfrid Voynich because they believed he could keep it secret, as I stated in The Found Manuscript of Wilfrid Voynich. And it was a Jesuit priest, Jean Hardouin, who concocted the conspiracy theory that all of ancient history had been forged by an impious cohort of monks, as discussed in the final installment of my Chronological Revision Chronicles. The Jesuits stood as the orthodox opponents of Jansenists, as described in my series on The Jansenist Miracles of Enlightenment France, and we further discussed how Jesuits were seen as evil corrupters by their critics in France in my patron exclusive The Stigmatic Maiden and the Wanton Jesuit. The series on Jansenist miracles laid the groundwork for my discussion of the French Revolution in The Illuminati Illuminated, in which series I discussed conspiracy theories on the right that blamed revolutionary activity and Jacobinism particularly on the scheming of philosophes, Freemasons, and specifically on a Bavarian secret society inspired by Enlightenment ideals called The Illuminati, which just happened to be organized by a former Jesuit, Adam Weishaupt, and was said to be structured according to that religious order’s organizational model. What I did not discuss in these series is the so-called “Black Legend” of the Jesuits, the claims that the Society of Jesus was essentially a cabal of plotters scheming at world domination. The Society of Jesus makes no effort to hide the fact that it is a direct tool of the Pope. From its beginnings, even though it considered a mendicant order, the former soldier Ignatius Loyola conceived of it as a kind of military order, with a tightly centralized command structure, with all provincial superiors answering to a single Superior General, a commander elected to the position for life, who answers only to the Pope himself. This authority structure has led conspiracists to dub the Jesuit Superior General the “Black Pope,” arguing that the order is actually a kind of shadow government of the church. By the time of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, when those on the right sought a conspiratorial explanation of recent political developments, and later, after the Bourbon Restoration, when belief in a Jesuit conspiracy would become the overarching paranoid view of leftist politics, the Black Legend of the Jesuits would already be well established. It had arisen, unsurprisingly, during the Protestant Reformation, when Roman Catholic beliefs and practices became “papistry,” a pejorative term, among many who viewed the Pope and his Church, and especially his elite cadre of priests who controlled education and had the ear of many a sovereign, as evil.

Ignatius reading while convalescing at Loyola after a war injury. Public Domain.

A central element of the Black Legend is the belief that through the Jesuits, the Pope commits regicide, having kings and queens killed if they oppose his will. We may trace this view back to the Protestant Reformation, a time of violent upheaval and rising anti-Catholicism transpiring as Loyola’s order was growing in influence. In England and Scotland, the divisions created by the Reformation were dramatic, as I discussed at length in my Royal Blood Mystery series on Mary, Queen of Scots, and the murder of Lord Darnley. Indeed, numerous were the plots devised by Catholic conspirators to depose or even assassinate Queen Elizabeth and put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. Pope Pius V even encouraged such plots when he issued a bull granting English Catholics the authority to overthrow her. Moreover, one of these, the Babington plot, was masterminded by a Jesuit priest named John Ballard, though there is no evidence that this plot had been expressly orchestrated by the Jesuit Superior General. Rather, Mary’s French Catholic supporters seem to have urged him to undertake the task. Nevertheless, and despite the plot’s failure and its exploitation as an excuse to execute Mary, it did much to tarnish the image of all Jesuits, painting them as intriguers and assassins. Following Elizabeth’s reign, Mary’s son James acceded to the throne, garnering support from Catholic powers by leading them to believe he would bring an end to some of Elizabeth’s persecutions of Catholics, such as the execution of priests who said Mass in secret and the onerous recusancy fines that any who refused to attend Protestant church service were forced to pay. Upon taking the throne, it appeared James might actually leave these fines in place, until he agreed to suspend them in exchange for Catholic loyalty. However, by the time he gave in to their appeals, some Catholic plots were already underway and shortly thereafter came to light. The Bye and Main plots involved abducting the king, forcing declarations of Catholic toleration, and then replacing him with a Catholic queen, his cousin, Lady Arbella Stuart. This plot was actually uncovered when a Jesuit priest named Father Gerard, fearing that the plot would result in further persecution of Catholics, betrayed them by passing information to the authorities. Strangely, though, this same Jesuit, and others, would soon be implicated in the most notorious assassination plot in British history.

On the 4th of November, 1605, King James ordered a search of the cellars and vaults of the old Palace of Westminster, meeting place of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Nine days earlier an anonymous letter warning a Catholic nobleman to stay away from the meeting of Parliament scheduled for November 5th had been brought to his attention. They had been on high alert, and earlier that day, while making his rounds, the Lord Chamberlain had encountered a man named Guy Fawkes in a vault that contained a large pile of firewood. The Lord Chamberlain had initially thought little of the encounter when Fawkes stated that he worked for Thomas Percy, who had legally rented the vault. Only later was it suggested to the king that it was strange that Percy, a Catholic, would have need of renting a vault under Westminster when he owned a house in London. Upon returning to investigate further, Fawkes was discovered preparing a long match to detonate 36 barrels of old, decaying gunpowder that was hidden beneath the woodpile. The plot’s intention was clearly to blow up the building, killing King James in the same way as his father Lord Darnley had been killed at Kirk O’Field, and taking with him all of Parliament, save the few Catholic Lords the plotters had warned. “Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November,” became the perennial refrain, and Guy Fawkes, a villain to some and anti-hero to others, would be commemorated ever since. But Fawkes was not the orchestrator of this plot. In fact, he was something of a late recruit. The plot had been orchestrated by Robert Catesby, a well-known recusant Catholic. He and some of his fellow plotters were afterward killed in a dramatic shootout at the conclusion of a manhunt. Yet strangely, for many at the time, none of these plotters were seen as the real culprits, and instead blame was laid on the Jesuit order.

The Gunpowder Plot conspirators hanged, drawn and quartered. Public Domain.

While today it is remembered as the Gunpowder Plot, in its day, it was often referred to as the Jesuit Treason. The reason for this is that, as it came out during the ensuing trials, when the plotters held their initial secret meeting the year before, the Jesuit priest who had years earlier foiled the Bye and Main plots had said Mass for them, and though he denied any knowledge, it was assumed he aware of their plans. But more than this, during the summer leading up to the enactment of their plot, Robert Catesby had confessed his intentions to a Jesuit priest named Tesimond, who afterward was troubled enough to ask his superior, Father Garnet, for guidance in the matter. Garnet then went to Catesby and warned him the Pope had no desire for English Catholics to act out and cause further troubles for themselves. Clearly, this was not a Jesuit conspiracy. Nevertheless, Gerard, Tesimond, and Garnet did not go to the government with their knowledge of the plot, as Gerard had done in the past, so they were considered complicit. In reality, there is no indication that Gerard really was privy to their plans, and considering that he was known to have gone to the authorities with such knowledge before, it seems unlikely they would have entrusted him with the information. As for Tesimond and Garnet, the simple fact that the crown was known to put Catholic priests to death simply for saying Mass for crypto-Catholics and encouraging their recusancy seems reason enough for them not to go running to the authorities about anything. While King James gave a speech on the 9th of November stating that he believed the plot to be the work of a handful of zealots and would not hold the larger Catholic community responsible, he nevertheless chose to prosecute these Jesuits. While Gerard and Tesimond escaped his grasp, Garnet was arrested, tried for treason, hanged by the neck, disemboweled, and torn apart by horses.

The belief that Jesuits in particular conspired at regicide developed at the same time across the Channel, during the French Wars of Religion, when a Catholic zealot named Jacques Clément, encouraged by members of the Catholic League, murdered King Henri III with a dagger. Oddly, Henri III had been something of a champion of Catholicism, but recent concessions to Protestants had turned the ultra-orthodox against him. This was not exactly a Jesuit plot. Clément was a Dominican friar. But during later years, when anti-Jesuitism became indistinguishable from anti-Catholicism generally, it was seen as the start of a pattern in which Catholics murdered monarchs. Henri III’s successor, Henri IV, would survive multiple attempts on his life by disturbed Catholics who believed they were assassinating a tyrant, despite the fact that he had renounced Protestantism and converted to Catholicism. Only a month after his conversion, another Dominican priest, Pierre Barrière, attempted to kill him, and during his trial, it was alleged that he had confessed his intentions to certain Jesuits, who encouraged him. Suspicion of the Jesuits encouraging regicide came to a head a year and a half later, when a merchant’s son named Jean Châtel made another attempt on Henri IV’s life, and it was revealed he had been educated at a Jesuit college. The doctrinal teachings of the Jesuits came under scrutiny. Jesuits opposed the Divine Right of Kings, which many viewed as subordinating the secular authority of kings to papal authority. Additionally, Jesuits subscribed to a theoretical doctrine that the Pope’s temporal authority may in some situations extend to deposing kings, and that sometimes, in extreme circumstances, tyrannicide, the murder of tyrants, may be justified. None of these were central doctrines promoted by Jesuits, but in the wake of these assassination attempts, they seemed to confirm a conspiracy. As a result, Châtel’s college was shuttered, two of his teachers were exiled, and a third was hanged and burned at the stake. The Society of Jesus was thereafter outlawed in France, though this ban only lasted a decade. Thereafter, in 1610, one François Ravaillac, another fanatical Catholic, misconstrued Henri IV’s plans to invade the Spanish Netherlands as a declaration of war against Catholicism and murdered him in his carriage. Afterward, his interrogators tried to link him to a Jesuit conspiracy, even though Ravaillac insisted he had acted alone. They accused his Jesuit confessor of having been privy to his plans, which the priest denied. That year, as the Society of Jesus came under renewed attack for condoning and even fostering regicide, the Jesuits declared a moratorium on discussing justifications for tyrannicide. By that time, though, the Black Legend that Jesuits were little more than an order of conspirators and assassins had already taken shape.

Attack by Jean Châtel on Henri IV. The murderer's torment is depicted in the background. Public Domain.

Only a few years after this, the founding document of the Black Legend of the Jesuits appeared: the Monita Secreta Societatis Iesu, or Secret Instructions of the Society of Jesus. This document would prove to be as foundational for Jesuit conspiracy theories as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion would be for the Jewish world conspiracy theory, and just like the Protocols, it was proven entirely false early on but continued to be touted as accurate for centuries. The Monita Secreta purported to be, as the title implies, a set of instructions given by the order’s Superior General, Claudio Acquaviva, detailing how to achieve the order’s goals of hoarding wealth and seizing power and influence. Essentially, like the Protocols, it was supposedly their plan for world domination. According to the Secret Instructions, wealth was to be accumulated by the manipulation and swindling of widows and heirs, power in the church was to be pursued by working to promote Jesuits to Bishoprics and actively discrediting priests of rival medicant orders, political influence was to be achieved by positioning themselves as the advisors of kings, or as their confessors, through which role they could gather intelligence and even acquire material with which they could blackmail monarchs. At all costs, the order’s image was to be kept pure, such that the reputation of any priest who left the order was to be injured by slander. The preface even stated that, if the Monita Secreta were ever revealed, the order should put forward a member of the society who had no knowledge of these Secret Instructions to offer plausible denials to the public. The thing is, though, that these Secret Instructions were known to have been written in Kraków, by Polish former Jesuit Jerome Zaharowski as a satire and libel. Bitter over having been kicked out of the order the year before, he fabricated the Monita Secreta in an effort to lampoon the Society of Jesus. Originally, he had not even published them as genuine, but rather as a kind of caricature of the order. Nevertheless, they were subsequently republished in numerous editions, accompanied by fabricated stories about how they had been discovered in Prague, or Paderborn, or was it Antwerp, or perhaps aboard a captured ship. Despite having been proven spurious and rejected as false even by some of the Jesuits’ staunchest critics, it would be raised again and again, often as though it had only just been discovered. Much like the Protocols of Zion, it was a hoax that would far outlive its hoaxer, and it would not be the last hoax or forgery to contribute to the Black Legend of the Jesuits.

Back in Great Britain, after the English Civil War and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, anti-Catholicism, and fears of Jesuit conspiracy, remained high. Ever since the so-called Jesuit Treason, or Gunpowder Plot, Jesuits were suspected of intrigue and nefarious machinations whenever something terrible transpired. Just as Jews had been blamed for the Black Plague in prior centuries, in 1665, when the bubonic plague struck London with renewed ferocity, Jesuits were seen as the culprits. And Jesuits were likewise scapegoated the next year, 1666, which many had dreaded for decades as the “Year of the Beast,” believing that the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation would come to fruition then because the number of the year was so close to the Number of the Beast, 666. With the plague outbreak still waning, a fire broke out in September that consumed around 80 percent of the city, and amid the city’s panic and paranoia, Jesuit arson was alleged. The atmosphere was ripe for a conspiracy hoax, and one Protestant clergyman, Israel Tonge, who blamed Jesuits for the loss of his church in the fire, would help to supply it. Tonge became a rabid anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist, authoring numerous incoherent articles about the Roman Catholic Church’s plans for world domination. He shared these explicitly anti-Jesuit conspiracy theories with everyone he knew, including young Titus Oates, the son of a Baptist preacher. Tonge and Oates made plans to write some anti-Catholic pamphlets together, and Tonge even lent Oates some money, but Oates, a former chaplain of the Royal Navy, fell in with Catholics and converted. Encouraged by an English provincial Jesuit, he managed to get himself into a Jesuit College in Spain, which afterward kicked him out for his crude and foul mouth. Then, he lied his way into another Jesuit college for expatriates, this one in St. Omer, France, and again was expelled for blasphemous talk. A defeated Titus Oates finally returned to London with a definite ax to grind, and upon their reunion, he claimed to Israel Tonge that he had only converted in order to learn the Jesuit secrets, and learn them he had, he said. He then told Israel Tonge that the Jesuits were plotting something massive in London: to assassinate King Charles II, supplant him with his Catholic brother, the Duke of York, and reestablish Roman Catholicism as England’s state religion.

The Great Fire of London, 1666. Public Domain.

It is unclear whether Israel Tonge helped Titus Oates concoct this conspiracy claim or whether he was Oates’s first dupe and truly believed him, but it does seem apparent that Tonge helped Oates compose a manuscript detailing his knowledge of the conspiracy. And it is certain that he told Oates to hide the manuscript so that he could pretend to discover it. Tonge then arranged to get the information to the king by showing the manuscript to the king’s chemist, a mutual acquaintance. King Charles II thought the claims of the so-called Popish Plot were all lies. He believed, like many, that Israel Tonge was a bit touched by madness, and he believed Titus Oates, who was rather quickly revealed as the author of the manuscript, to be a wicked liar. Nevertheless, once word got around and his brother, the implicated Duke of York, demanded further investigation, he felt that it would have to be looked into further, even if just to debunk it. Oates swore out the truth of his statement for a local magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and afterward, he and Tonge were questioned by the king’s Privy Council. Oates made numerous specific accusations against many Catholic noblemen and more than 500 Jesuits, whom he called out by name. As evidence, letters supposedly written by some of the accused but probably forged by Oates were presented, and some were impressed that Oates was able to recognize each by their handwriting, even though his having forged them was a more likely explanation for his ability to identify them. While the accusations were taken seriously enough that authorities began rounding up some of the Jesuits named by Oates for questioning, the affair did not escalate to become a full-fledged moral panic until Magistrate Godfrey, to whom Oates had sworn out his initial deposition, was discovered dead. Oates insisted Godfrey had been murdered by Jesuits, and then, as one skeptical contemporary put it, “the very Cabinet of Hell…opened.” Mass panic gripped London, and anyone even suspected of being Catholic was driven from the city. Nine Jesuits were executed for their alleged parts in the conspiracy, and twelve more perished while imprisoned on suspicion. At the height of the panic, Titus Oates went as far as implicating the Queen in plans to poison the king. Before long, though, it became clear that he was a liar. In the end, Titus Oates was tried for perjury, and declared “a shame to mankind,” and sentenced to endure a public shaming before he was imprisoned. He was pilloried, and then he was marched to prison behind a cart and whipped the entire way. As for Israel Tonge, he seems to have suffered no consequences for his part in promoting the Popish Plot.

The astonishing success of Titus Oates’ lies in enflaming public ire against the Jesuits may have had the further effect of inspiring one of the most prolific and little-known forgers in history, whose fabrications were long mistaken for primary historical evidence and helped to propagate the Black Legend of the Jesuits for centuries. His name was Robert Ware, an Irish son of a distinguished historian. Given to seizures as a child, Robert Ware was not chosen to be the principal beneficiary of his father’s estate, despite being his eldest son, because he was not expected to live long. When he defied medical expectations and grew out of his afflictions and even showed great aptitude in historical study and writing, his father ended up bequeathing Robert his library and manuscripts. During the Popish Plot mass hysteria, Robert Ware saw an opportunity both to make money from his skills and his father’s papers, and to encourage the anti-Catholic sentiment that was running amok. Like his father before him, he was staunchly Protestant, but more than that, he was a royalist, so in his initial forgeries, which he presented as having been discovered among his father’s papers even though he had fabricated them, he published supposed evidence that Catholics had secretly orchestrated Protestant dissent, and thus were responsible for the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I that was still fresh in English memory. He published pamphlets purporting to be reprints of true historical documents, complete with detailed but fraudulent provenance, describing how Catholic priests, often Jesuits, posed as Protestants and gathered congregations that they then led away from the Church of England. But more than this, during his career as a forger, he claimed to have turned up letters and documents that served as evidence of Catholic and specifically Jesuit plotting against the English crown. In one of his forgeries was presented the supposed oath taken by Jesuits upon initiation, which required a promise to “wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons… to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth,” pledging to “hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants' heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.” To emphasize the secrecy of their murderous plots, the Jesuits supposedly swore that, “when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet.” In Ware’s imagination, each Jesuit was issued a dagger at initiation, and signed their oath in blood, swearing, “should I prove false, or weaken in my determination, may my brethren and fellow soldiers of the militia of the Pope cut off my hands and feet and my throat from ear to ear, my belly be opened and sulphur burned therein.” Late Victorian scholars would eventually uncover Ware and his forgeries for what they were, but by then, it would be far too late. For a hundred years, his fabrications polluted the historical record and enflamed anti-Catholic conspiracy theories. And even long after their discovery as forgeries, copies of the Jesuit Oath have turned up in reprints of vague provenance and much like the Monita Secreta continue to be touted as evidence of a worldwide Jesuit conspiracy.

Disturbances in connection with the Popish Plot. Public Domain.

These roots of the Jesuit conspiracy theory cannot be fairly characterized as a leftist political conspiracy theory and counterpart to conspiracy theories on the right. Indeed, the entire notion of a left-to-right spectrum in politics would not arise until the French Revolution. The terminology derives from the fact that, during the National Assembly of 1789, monarchists arrayed themselves on the right of the chair, while supporters of revolution gathered on the left. As years passed, this became standard practice. In 1791, during the Legislative Assembly, those seeking change, calling themselves “Innovators,” placed themselves on the left, while the defenders of the Constitution and the status quo kept to the right, with moderates in the center. And so even today, when we speak of progressive politics, which seek change, we regard them as Leftist, and conservative politics, which resist change and seek to preserve the status quo or even revert to a former political order, fall to the right of the spectrum. In the years after the Revolution, those on the right had their bogeymen, specifically the secret societies of the Enlightenment, and after the Bourbon Restoration, as we shall see in part 2 of this series, those on the left found their own in the Jesuits. And yet, in one essential way, the belief in a Jesuit conspiracy always represented conservatism, for it alleged a secret combination dedicated to fighting against and reversing change. While in the 19th century, the Society of Jesus would come to represent the forces of counterrevolution, originally, as we have seen, they represented the forces of the Counter-Reformation. But before their Black Legend underwent its 19th-century transfiguration, the Jesuits would first need to be destroyed and subsequently resurrected, just like their namesake.

Further Reading

Adams, Simon. “The Gunpowder Plot.” History Today, vol. 55, no. 11, Nov. 2005, pp. 10–17. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=18800121&site=ehost-live.

Barthel, Manfred. The Jesuits: History and Legend of the Society of Jesus. William Morrow and Co., 1984.

Cavendish, Richard. “Death of Titus Oates.” History Today, vol. 55, no. 7, July 2005, p. 60. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=17607324&site=ehost-live.

Croft, Pauline. “The Gunpowder Plot.” History Review, no. 52, Sept. 2005, pp. 9–14. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=18772146&site=ehost-live.

Cubitt, Geoffrey. The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France. Clarendon, 1993.

Ditchfield, Simon. "The Jesuits: In the Making of a World Religion." History Today, vol. 57, no. 7, July 2007, pp. 52-59. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A166432179/AONE?u=sjdc_main&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=ee906699.

Duggan, Anne E. “Criminal Profiles, Diabolical Schemes, and Infernal Punishments: The Cases Of Ravaillac and the Concinis.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 105, no. 2, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2010, pp. 366–84, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25698699.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. “Foxes, Firebrands, and Forgery: Robert Ware’s Pollution of Reformation History.” The Historical Journal, vol. 54, no. 2, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 307–46, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23017975.

Mitchell, David. The Jesuits, a History. F. Watts, 1981.

Vella, John M. "The Jesuits and political power." Modern Age, vol. 48, no. 2, spring 2006, pp. 158+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A149012372/GPS?u=modestojc_main&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=b081ec37.

Worcester, Thomas. "Order Restored: remembering turbulent times for the Jesuits." America, vol. 211, no. 3, 4 Aug. 2014, p. 14. Gale In Context: Biography, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A380526806/GPS?u=modestojc_main&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=6a3a2d7d.

The Fate of Ludwig II: Part Two - The Mad King (A Royal Blood Mystery)

On June 7th, 1886, Prince Luitpold, son of Ludwig I, brother of the late king Maximilian II, and uncle to the current King Ludwig II, attended a secret meeting of the Bavarian government convened by Prime Minister Johann von Lutz. This emergency session was the culmination of the machinations that Lutz and Luitpold had devised to seize power. The outcome was certain; Lutz had made sure, through previous consultations with all involved, that there would be no dissenters. The king was to be declared insane and deposed. The next morning, a delegation of ministers and aristocrats who had been named guardians of the mentally ill king was dispatched to Hohenschwangau Castle, the palace where it was believed the king was currently residing. Among them was Dr. Berhard von Gudden, who would later successfully take the king into custody and then be found dead with him in Lake Starnberg. When the delegation arrived at Hohenschwangau, they discovered that the king had departed for his new palace, Neuschwanstein, and had left behind a great feast that had been prepared for him. So the delegation gorged themselves on the king’s food and drink and afterward commanded the king’s head coachman to prepare conveyance for them to Neuschwanstein. The coachman refused and instead rushed away to Neuschwanstein himself to warn the king of the coup that was afoot. The king did not believe him, and perhaps this was one sign of his estrangement from reality. Even as the delegation stood outside his gate, kept at bay by palace guards, and eventually driven away by angry peasants who had heard the news that a plot was underway to dethrone the king they loved, still Ludwig looked down from his palace windows and refused to believe it was happening. Eventually, he had this delegation arrested, but they would not be jailed long, and the coup would not be stopped so easily. King Ludwig II may have had peasants on his side, but the aristocracy and the officials of his government were set against him. They saw his reckless borrowing and spending on theatrical productions and the construction of extravagant castles as indicative of the king’s break from reality as well as his negligence of duty as their sovereign. And this shirking of his responsibilities too could be viewed as symptomatic of his crumbling sanity. In fact, if he had not stayed in Neuschwanstein for so long, refusing to take the coup seriously, or even to believe it was happening, he might have successfully fought his deposition by returning to Munich and demonstrating his mental stability. Instead, he stayed in his hermitage until even his own palace staff could not justify keeping the delegation at bay. Shortly after being taken into their custody, he was discovered dead in Lake Starnberg, having murdered Dr. Gudden, the psychiatrist who had declared him insane and taken him into custody, before drowning himself. At least, that is what government officials told the press. Was Ludwig mad? Reports of his final days at Neuschwanstein, when the reality of his situation was settling in, describe his efforts to obtain poison and his numerous threats to throw himself from a nearby bridge or from the castle’s towers. Is this evidence of madness, though, or simply of despair? If he was not mentally ill, did Ludwig’s deposers actually believe him insane, or were they simply lying in order to seize his power? And if that were the case, might they have killed the king in order to protect the power they’d seized and then falsely portrayed his death just as they’d falsely portrayed his mental health?

To seriously investigate the fate of Ludwig II, we must entertain the idea that his government may have had good reason to depose him. That means taking seriously the proposition that he may actually have been unfit to rule for reasons of mental instability. In order to investigate this, we should first look to his background, as we know today that mental illness is often hereditary. So if we look to Ludwig II’s family, do we see a family history of madness? The answer is a resounding yes, and the government’s report on Ludwig’s sanity cited examples in order to demonstrate that Ludwig was not just insane but incurably so.  His aunts on his father’s side both appear to have been troubled. Princess Marie appears to have exhibited symptoms of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, insisting on always wearing white so that she could more easily spot any dirt soiling her garments and immediately change clothes if she found any such filth. One might argue that perhaps she was only fastidious, but Maximilian’s other sister, Princess Alexandra, suffered delusions that cannot so easily be dismissed. She believed that she had swallowed a glass grand piano. Rather than lock her away in an asylum, she had been shut up in a nunnery. The madness rampant in the Wittelsbach line has been attributed by some to incest, as the sexual contact of cousins which so often occurs within royal families in order to preserve the bloodline can result in neurodegenerative disorders. On his mother’s side, his great uncle, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, was long thought to have suffered from madness as well, though historians now suspect he was actually afflicted with cerebral arteriosclerosis. Then there was Ludwig’s own little brother, Prince Otto. At first, Ludwig and others hoped the prince’s erratic behavior was a result of nervous exhaustion, but eventually it became clear that he was suffering from the madness that ran in the family. Numerous doctors all agreed on Otto’s condition, including Dr. Gudden who would one day declare Ludwig insane without even examining him in person. Otto would be confined not in Dr. Gudden’s asylum, but rather at Nymphenburg Palace, and later at the more remote castle Furstenreid. Despite his palatial surroundings, Otto’s life became wretched, a fact that Ludwig II saw on his occasional visits. His doctors padded his room to keep him from striking his head against the walls, and his screams echoed throughout the castle day and night. Ludwig surely imagined his own confinement at Castle Berg being similar, which may help to explain his nearly immediate recourse to suicide to escape such an existence.

King Otto I of Bavaria, who succeeded his brother Ludwig II but never actively ruled due to his mental illness. Public Domain.

His deposers did more than just cite examples of madness in the family, though. They also pointed to Ludwig’s own behavior. Long had Ludwig been deemed troubled, ever since his sullen youth, when it was thought he was a bit too melancholy and disaffected. Much was made of his self-imposed isolation and the fact that he kept strange hours, only rising at nightfall and staying up all night, taking sleigh rides through the dark countryside, like he was Count Dracula. Some said he would stop in the middle of a blizzard to dine. But more than this was alleged. Servants swore that he spoke to people who were not there, insisting that places at his table be prepared for Louis XIV and XV, whom they said he conversed with at mealtime even though their chairs remained, of course, empty. In his rooms at night, they said he was heard to speak as though to another person when no one was with him, and he sometimes asked servants about people he believed were in adjacent rooms when the rooms were empty. One less skeptical than I might attempt to explain this behavior by suggesting his castles were haunted, but there is a more mundane explanation. Perhaps the servants who witnessed against him were lying. Among the claims of servants were many accounts of Ludwig’s cruelty toward them, which if true meant they might have had axes to grind. And many of the witnesses, it seems, were paid off by Prime Minister Lutz in exchange for their testimony. We know that Lutz took no chances with the other members of his government, ensuring that everyone was on his side before he commenced his coup, so it stands to reason that he screened witnesses ahead of time, and that his payments were essentially bribes for telling tales that would make Ludwig seem crazy. In fact, there are records of reports from other staff who insist Ludwig never behaved strangely at all, and those testimonies remained suspiciously absent from the government’s report.

Modern psychological evaluations tend to suggest that, while his brother Otto showed definite signs of schizophrenia, Ludwig himself appeared to be displaying the symptoms of a personality disorder, at most. Besides the supposed hallucinations, most of what was alleged amounted to eccentric behavior—slovenly table manners, outrageous rudeness, giving shocking commands that he likely did not intend to be taken seriously just to see people’s reactions, and once even inviting his favorite horse to dine at his table with him. As I will speak more about shortly, much of this behavior could be attributable to having an odd sense of humor. And if not, some further circumstances offer still other alternative explanations besides hereditary madness. Due to the king’s indulgence in sweets, he had lost his youthful good looks and become heavier, but he had also lost teeth and suffered from terrible and frequent toothaches. These tooth infections may have caused him to behave in uncharacteristic ways. For example, it was said that he only agreed so readily to offer the imperial title to his cousin Wilhelm in Prussia because he was suffering from one of these toothaches and simply couldn’t deal with the situation. Then there is the fact that he relied on drugs to ease the pain of his toothaches. His chloral hydrate habit, as well as the possibility that he may have relied on laudanum or opium to find further relief, may help to explain much of his eccentric behavior, as use of these narcotics can result in the very episodes his servants described, such as sudden fits of rage and hallucinations. Then there is the fact that some brain disease may have contributed to his changes in behavior late in life. The postmortem revealed that Ludwig’s brain was abnormally small, with unusual thickening in the frontal region, though some historians have suggested that these findings were falsified to support the government’s claims of insanity. If the results can be believed, some have attributed the brain abnormality to a youthful bout with meningitis, while others have suggested that it is evidence of syphilis. The latter theory does much to explain any degeneration of his mental state, and if it was contracted in youth from his father or his wet nurse, as has been speculated, it may also account for Otto’s mental illness. If, however, it was contracted later in life, it may have been through homosexual affairs, which itself may account for the government’s veil of secrecy surrounding his illness.

Photo of Ludwig II toward the end of his life, showing his weight gain. Public Domain.

When the government undertook to investigate and create a report on the king’s mental illness, a curious proviso was given that the investigation should not extend to his sexual affairs. Certainly there were rumors of the king’s homosexual relationships with certain figures in his orbit, as well as with the occasional servant, so for the government to exclude this element from their investigation seems to indicate that the king’s sexual orientation was something of an open secret. Of course, there had been many whisperings about Ludwig and his favorite, Wagner, but that appears to have been a different sort of relationship. Ludwig’s first and perhaps only true love was likely the young Prince Paul von Thurn und Taxis, who was married to Ludwig’s second cousin. Ludwig and Paul appear to have had a passionate affair when Ludwig was just 18 years old, a romance that would last years, only fading when Ludwig began to hear rumors about Paul’s dalliances with a variety of women. Over the course of his life, he would seek “friendship,” which in his estimation meant a very intimate same sex relationship that at least meant dressing in theatrical costumes and reciting love poetry to each other if not sexual contact. Sometimes his attentions were not met with enthusiasm, as in the case of the handsome young officer Baron von Varicourt, who felt he had to clarify to the king that his affections were “of a purely spiritual nature,” to which Ludwig took exception, demanding some explanation for why the baron felt disposed to emphasize this, for as he said, “it is a matter of course that they were of a purely spiritual nature.” Another relationship, with a young theater performer, was likewise doomed for its one-sidedness. Ludwig plucked Josef Kainz from the stage and was at first disappointed when the actor seemed stiff and nervous at their first private meeting. Afterward, Josef’s friend advised him to act in order to win the king’s favor, which he did, delighting Ludwig with a new, more confident and bold personality, like the one Ludwig had seen on stage. In return, Ludwig showered Kainz with gifts and took him traveling. Still, Josef Kainz does not appear to have felt for Ludwig what Ludwig felt for him. He was performing a part, simply trying to please the king, and the king’s night owl schedule kept him up all night, exhausted. Eventually, Ludwig tired of Kainz because he kept falling asleep and snoring. Still, it seems that King Ludwig II found many young men who did respond to his affections. Numerous were the stories of stableboys chosen by Ludwig to accompany him on sleigh rides and on trips to his hunting lodges, afterwards finding themselves assigned to some elevated duty and seen wearing pieces of extravagant jewelry the king had given them.

The king’s romantic entanglements did cause the royal family and his government some embarrassment and difficulties. Bavaria was a predominantly Catholic country, but Catholic or Protestant, conservative or liberal, few would have openly approved of his same sex relationships if they had not been cloaked as “friendships.” What was perhaps more damaging was the fact that Ludwig displayed no desire to marry, which meant there would be no heir to the throne, especially with Ludwig’s brother unmarried and confined to a padded cell. There are some reports of Ludwig’s seemingly trying to engage in heterosexual affairs, which tended to end in disaster. In 1866, he became enamored of a Hungarian actress named Lila von Bulyowsky, whom he had seen portray Mary, Queen of Scots, that other doomed monarch whom I discussed in another Royal Blood Mystery. He wrote her long letters, and Lila began to tell friends she was in love with the still handsome and dashing king. One night, Ludwig invited Lila to Hohenschwangau, and they ended up in his royal chambers, on his bed, where Lila read poetry to him. He confessed to her that he sometimes thought of her at night, in bed, and kissed his pillow. Understandably, she responded by leaning in for a kiss, but Ludwig shrieked in horror and cowered away from her in a corner. Lila tried assuring the king that she loved him, but Ludwig merely fled the room, and Lila left the castle in anger, declaring the king “as cold-blooded as a fish!” The next year, Ludwig settled on a marriage with his cousin, Princess Sophie, not because he was entranced with her, but because she shared his love of Wagner’s operas. He kept up appearances for most of a year before canceling the wedding, stating that he did not truly love her and she deserved love. The king appears to have felt great guilt and terrible self-loathing because of his sexual orientation. A few years after his failed engagement, he began to keep a journal, which for years after his death was hidden by family members but eventually came to light in the 1920s. In it, he made cryptic, almost coded entries that were actually records of every sexual fantasy he had, every time he touched or kissed or embraced another man. He wrote them as reminders of his failure to resist temptation, and at the conclusion of each he would swear that it would be the last time. The result is a record of the king’s sex life as well as of his tortured psyche. It stands as clear evidence, not of the king’s madness, but of his depression and the further contributing factors that may have driven him to suicide that night on Lake Starnberg.

Ludwig II and his fiancée Duchess Sophie in Bavaria in 1867. Public Domain.

But can we even accept as true the claims that Ludwig II was suicidal? We certainly have the statements of some close to him in those final days who said he asked that poison be obtained for him, that he spoke philosophically of the immortality of the soul, that he was giving away money as a kind of parting gesture, that he asked for the keys to the tower or threatened to throw himself from a nearby bridge into the waterfall below. But how many of these reports can be taken at face value? We have already discussed the bribery that government officials used to get the stories they wanted from servants, and others were eager to maintain their positions in the forthcoming regime. Perhaps in answer to this question, we should ask whether or not Ludwig was violent and capable of murder, since this version of events has him killing Gudden before killing himself. In fact, there were numerous incidents in Ludwig’s life that do indicate his propensity toward violence. As a boy, he was no stranger to death, having once watched in horror as his military instructor suffered a seizure and fell from a mountainside to his bloody demise. And he seems to have been fascinated from an early age with the notion of ordering an execution. He was once caught threatening to behead his brother Otto, whom he had tied up. Once king, he seems to have relished ordering violent punishments for minor infractions. For such small offenses as looking at him, or leaving a room with their heads raised, he had ordered servants to be whipped, or skinned alive, or even killed, though such punishments were never actually carried out, and it is unclear how serious the king might have been in ordering them. Once, he pulled a gun on an official who was briefing him and calmly told him to continue while he waved the firearm at him. He seemed to think it was funny, and it’s unclear how many of these incidents represent a morbid sense of humor, or his autocratic attitude toward governing revealing itself in an exaggerated pronouncement meant only to frighten someone who had displeased him. He was, however, known to lash out at some of the servants who angered him, striking them with a fist or kicking them. In fact, once, an outrider in his guard did something equally trivial to upset him, and Ludwig beat him quite badly, so badly, in fact, that within a year he had died, it was believed, because of internal injuries the king had inflicted on him in his fit of rage. If this is any indication, it does seem that Ludwig was capable of killing Dr. Gudden, who had enraged him far more than any servant ever had, that rainy night on the lake.

When King Ludwig II and Dr. Gudden were discovered dead in Lake Starnberg, some at first believed it had been an accidental drowning, occasioned by the king attempting to escape by wading out into the lake. However, the scene did not support this presumption. The water was only deep enough to reach the king’s knees. While this theory maintained that he had been drunk, and his feet becoming caught in the stones on the bottom may have caused him to trip and drown, this simply doesn’t account for Dr. Gudden, who surely would have saved the drowning king. Alternatively, some have suggested that Dr. Gudden had chloroformed the king to stop him from escaping, which then resulted in the king drowning, and these theorists suggest Dr. Gudden, in his panic over accidentally killing the king, then dropped dead of a heart attack. But Dr. Gudden’s feet were still on the shore, and his face, covered in scratches, cuts, and bruises, was in the water. The best explanation appears to be that the king overpowered Gudden and thrust his face violently into the water to drown him, in the process wounding the doctor’s face on the shoreline rocks. Then the king would have been free to wade out into the lake and lay down to purposely drown himself. Despite some officials attempting to strengthen this version of events by claiming there were strangulation marks on Gudden’s neck, the evidence from the scene was strong enough and needed no embellishment. Nevertheless, those who believe Ludwig was murdered would point out that all of this evidence comes to us from the very government that wanted Ludwig out of the way. Ludwig remained a clear threat to the Lutz regime. Before being taken into custody, Ludwig II had released a statement to his subjects, the people of Bavaria generally, many of whom still adored him, especially the peasants, which ended with a clear call to arms: “…let this appeal be a reason to My People to help Me defeat the plans of the traitors in arms against Me.” As long as Ludwig lived, there was the possibility he could prove his sanity or escape and be restored by force. It is clear that his uncle Luitpold and Prime Minister Lutz had no intention of reevaluating the king’s sanity after a year, as would be customary. Instead, in their secret meetings, they spoke of the king’s incurable illness and made their plans to confine him for the remainder of his life, just like his brother. Thus Lutz’s decision to keep the king at Castle Berg instead of a more remote and secure castle, and Gudden’s choice to allow him to walk beside the lake without guards to accompany him, reeks to many like Ludwig’s captors were purposely making him vulnerable to assassination.

Portrait of Johann von Lutz, the man who dethroned Ludwig II. Public Domain.

Supporters of the murder theory suggest it is suspicious that the postmortem makes no mention of water in Ludwig’s lungs, and speculate that the fact he was found floating proves that his lungs were not full of water. Beyond this speculation, they point to evidence that appeared years later. A physician, Rudolph Magg, who supposedly examined the king’s body before it was sent to Munich is said to have made a deathbed confession that he had falsified his report at the government’s insistence, and that he’d actually seen a bullet wound in the king’s back. The king’s fisherman, Jakob Lidl, left behind a diary that claimed he had been waiting to rescue the king in a boat and had watched as the king was shot while trying to escape. In 1967, art historian Siegfried Wichmann encountered a canvas on which were sketched the portraits three men, the king’s personal physician, Dr. Schleiss von Löwenstein, on the left, an intimate companion of the king, Richard Hornig, depicted weeping on the right, and in the center, what appeared to be Ludwig II’s corpse. Wichmann authenticated the sketch as the work of the painter Hermann Kaulbach, presumably rendered at the scene of Ludwig’s death. Wichmann believed the sketch depicted blood coming from the corners of Ludwig’s mouth, which he says proves he did not drown. Wichmann then went on to purchase some books from the estate of Dr. von Löwenstein, and astoundingly, he claimed to find a handwritten note in one book revealing that Löwenstein, Hornig, and Kaulbach had gone to Castle Berg to check on the king and discovered Dr. Gudden stanching the blood from the king’s bullet wounds. According to the note, Gudden had rushed at them with a syringe, and Hornig had strangled him. Knowing that the truth of the murder would be covered up, Löwenstein asked Kaulbach to sketch the bleeding king. And finally, in 2007, a Munich banker named Detlev Untermöhle signed an affidavit asserting that fifty years earlier, he and his mother had visited Countess Josephine von Wrba-Kaunitz, and that during coffee and cake, the Wittelsbach Countess had produced her favorite conversation piece, a gray Loden coat. In a conspiratorial undervoice, she told them that this was the coat Ludwig II had worn the night he died, and then she showed them the two bullet holes in its fabric.

Now what are we to make of all this? Let us take each claim individually. First, it is not exactly true to claim that drowned bodies do not float. This depends on the qualities of the water, as well as on whether or not putrefaction has begun to release gasses. Of course, putrefaction would not have already set in to this degree when Ludwig was discovered, but it also must be remembered that he died in extraordinarily shallow waters. So perhaps he was not floating so much as still visible above the surface when he was found. The deathbed confession of Rudolph Magg sounds damning, until one discovers that it was supposedly a written confession, and was only rumored to have been seen and has never actually been confirmed to exist. Likewise, Jakob Lidl’s diary page has since disappeared. While it is true that photos of it still exist and handwriting experts have confirmed its authenticity, the fact that the original can no longer be examined causes some doubt. Then there’s the coat that Countess Wrba-Kaunitz liked to show her guests, which, if it existed, was destroyed in a 1973 house fire. But even if it did exist, it might have simply been a coat with holes in it that the Countess had spun tales around. As for the discoveries of Siegfried Wichmann, it is rather hard to believe that Wichmann stumbled onto not only the amazing portrait but also the secret note, both of which he conveniently authenticated himself. But even if the portrait were authentic, the supposed blood from the corners of Ludwig’s mouth might be intended as shadows, or may represent some artistic embellishment, or may even have been added after the sketch’s discovery, perhaps even by Wichmann himself. In the end, all the evidence for murder fails to stand up under scrutiny, but so too do the witness statements and reports that comprise the evidence for Ludwig’s suicide. It may be that we shall never know what happened on Lake Starnberg with any certainty, unless the Wittelsbach dynasty submits to having Ludwig’s body exhumed for a modern inquest. As of now, though, this request has consistently been refused, which is enough to keep the conspiracy theory fires burning in perpetuity.

Sketch depicting Ludwig’s doctor and friend seeing his corpse, discovered by Siegfried Wichmann and claimed to have been sketched in the presence of Ludwig’s body. Reprinted from The Epoch Times, image may be subject to copyright.

Further Reading

Blunt, Wilfrid. The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria. Viking, 1970.

King, Greg. The Mad King: A Biography of Ludwig II of Bavaria. Birch Lane Press, 1996.

Förstl, H., et al. “Ludwig II, King of Bavaria: A Royal Medical History.” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, vol. 118, no. 6, Dec. 2008, pp. 499–502. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.1600-0447.2008.01269.x.

Freckelton, Ian. “The Deaths of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and of His Psychiatrist, Professor von Gudden: Warnings from the Nineteenth Century.” Psychiatry, Psychology & Law, vol. 19, no. 1, Feb. 2012, pp. 1–10. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/13218719.2012.658741.

McIntosh, Christopher. Ludwig II of Bavaria: The Swan King. I.B. Tauris, 1982.

Neumann, Conny. “Was ‘Mad’ King Ludwig Murdered?” Der Spiegel, 11 July 2007, www.spiegel.de/international/germany/fresh-doubt-about-suicide-theory-was-mad-king-ludwig-murdered-a-515924.html.

The Fate of Ludwig II: Part One - The Fairytale King

Neuschwanstein castle, a grand magical-looking castle of white spires jutting above the benighted Bavarian forests, was brightly illuminated at midnight, June 11th, 1886, when the psychiatrist Bernard von Gudden arrived along with some others, commissioned to take Ludwig II, the young Fairytale King, into custody. Just the day before, it had been declared in Munich that the king was insane and unfit to govern, and the regency of Ludwig’s uncle Luitpold was proclaimed. Some officials had previously tried to take the king into custody, and they had been driven away and jailed. Now, however, the king was trapped within the walls of Neuschwanstein; what had once been his fantastical refuge from the real world had been transformed into his prison. Gudden and his men confronted and surrounded Ludwig in a corridor as he passed on his way to a tower, perhaps intending to leap to his death. The once dashing young king, now turned corpulent and misanthropic, looked darkly from one man to another. “Majesty, this is the saddest task that has ever fallen to my lot,” Gudden said, as they conducted the king to his chambers to pack some things. “How can you certify me insane without seeing me and examining me beforehand?” Ludwig demanded. “…as an experienced neurologist, how can you be so devoid of scruple as to make out a certificate that is decisive for a human life? You have not seen me for the last twelve years!” The evidence, Gudden assured him, was overwhelming. Ushering him into a carriage from which the interior handles had been removed, the commission drove through the night, eight hours, to Castle Berg, on Lake Starnberg, a residence at which the king often lodged when business called him to Munich rather than staying in the city proper. In his bedroom, holes had been drilled in the doors to listen to any conversation Ludwig might have with servants, in order to discourage the planning of escapes, and bars were installed in his window. King Ludwig was nervous and paranoid, asking constantly about the nurses and orderlies assigned to him, suspecting that they may be Prussians or Jesuits that wished to assassinate him. He did indeed have many enemies. On a walk with Ludwig along the shores of Lake Starnberg soon after the king’s installation there, Dr. Gudden assured him the staff meant him no harm and bade the men to follow at a farther distance to ease the king’s mind. As the walk seemed to calm the king, Gudden promised to take another walk with him that evening, and Ludwig stubbornly held him to that promise despite a torrential rain. Gudden directed the orderlies to stay behind, so as not to disturb the king further. When the two men did not return, the lake was searched, and the dead bodies of both Dr. Gudden and King Ludwig II were discovered. What exactly befell the men remains an enduring historical mystery. Did Ludwig II murder Gudden and drown himself? Or were his fears of assassination warranted and even prophetic?

To understand the tragic figure of Ludwig II and his fate, we must look first to his youth, when already we can see the seeds of his downfall. He was born a Wittelsbach, of a royal line that had ruled in Bavaria ever since Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa had installed his ancestor as duke there in 1180. He was the latest in a series of Ludwigs, from Ludwig the Bavarian, who’d assumed the title of Holy Roman Emperor in 1328, to his grandfather, King Ludwig I of Bavaria. In fact, as a newborn, he’d been given the name Otto, but as he’d been born on his grandfather Ludwig’s birthday, which also happened to be the feast day of St. Ludwig, the king requested his grandson’s name be changed, and thus he became Ludwig II, a child on whom hinged the future of Bavaria. But regardless of the high hopes for him, young Ludwig was denied the affection that he yearned for as a child, as was common among Victorian-era royalty. He was raised in isolation, with strict rules that led to beatings if he did not meet very high expectations. It is not surprising, then, that even at an early age, Ludwig was given to brooding and a melancholy disposition. This temperament, and his preference for solitude, can be seen as one of the factors that would eventually lead to his government declaring him insane. And another, his obsession with theater and fantasy, can also be traced back to his youth. Alienated from the cold court life surrounding him, Ludwig took refuge in a world of romantic legend, of Teutonic knights and ancient gods, whose legends were connected with the grand castles in which he lived. In Hohenschangau Castle, a palace on a hill overlooking Lake Alpsee, young Ludwig gazed at paintings depicting some of the medieval German romances he loved, such as Lohengrin, the Swan Knight, and Parzival on his Grail Quest. This preoccupation with German legend—which prefigured in many ways the obsessions of Heinrich Himmler and other Nazis in the next century, although seemingly far more innocent—would eventually lead Ludwig to financial ruin and the loss of his throne because of reckless spending in his effort to build ever grander and more fantastical castles in which to escape his kingly duties. His fixation on these romantic fantasies would also cause him to devote himself too entirely to patronage of the theater and opera, and specifically the composer Richard Wagner, who had already brought to life Lohengrin, the Swan Knight, and with Ludwig’s patronage would later bring Parzival and other epic German legends that Ludwig loved, such as the Ring of the Nibelungen saga, to the stage. His adoration of Wagner, and the privilege that the composer enjoyed as the king’s favorite, would be the very first scandal that weakened the young king’s position among the Munich aristocracy who would eventually topple him from the throne.

Hohenschwangau Castle, where a young Ludwig II developed his obsession with medieval romance. Image credit: José Luiz, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

After a brief illness early in 1864, King Maximilian II passed away, and Ludwig II, a tall, strikingly beautiful youth of 18 years old, with dark hair and intense dark blue eyes, took the throne. Among his very first acts as King of Bavaria was to dispatch an agent to find the composer Richard Wagner and extend him an invitation to compose his operas in Bavaria, where he would be awarded a generous stipend and be installed in lavish lodgings. Wagner at the time was deeply in debt and hiding from his creditors, despairing for his career and his life. It is no exaggeration to suggest that, if not for the young king’s intervention, many of Wagner’s most famous works would never have been written or performed. The two men met, and Ludwig expressed to the composer his undying love for his works and his intention to subsidize the writing of his works and make possible the lavish productions of all his operas. They established a correspondence that read more like love letters than anything else, and given young Ludwig’s latent homosexuality, about which I will have more to say later, it is not out of the realm of possibility that Ludwig entertained some romantic notions about the composer before coming to know him. However, despite the rumors that afterward developed, it seems clear that Ludwig was more enamored with the artist than with the aging man himself, and it seems quite apparent that Wagner was purely interested in the king as a patron and a devotee. Indeed, during their decades-long friendship, Wagner’s heterosexual exploits would lead to a scandal that would cause no small amount of trouble for the king. During the summer of 1864, only a few months after establishing himself as the new king’s favorite, Wagner asked some friends to come and visit him. A Prussian conductor, Hans von Bülow, and his wife Cosima, accepted his invitation, and before long, Wagner was living with them in a ménage-a-trois arrangement, with von Bülow, having been promised the job of conducting Wagner’s planned works, looking the other way as Wagner took his wife as a mistress. The scandal of Wagner’s personal affairs became ever more newsworthy when they coincided with massive grants from the royal treasury, which happened in 1865 when Wagner finagled 40,000 gulden out of Ludwig and sent his mistress to fetch it for him. Munich newspapers had something of a field day over it, reporting more and more on Wagner’s unseemly relationship with von Bülow’s wife and his seeming power over the king, to the point that Wagner even challenged one newspaper editor to a duel if he did not print an apology. To many in Munich, a predominantly Catholic city, Ludwig lavishing money and gifts on a foreign entertainer who flouted their traditional social norms recalled another scandal, still recent in the memory of many, that had led to the downfall of Ludwig’s grandfather and namesake.

Ludwig I had been a devoted patron of the arts as well. He transformed Munich into a German cultural showcase, with paved squares, grand marble gates, triumphal arches, elaborate statues, and massive architectural monuments. Ludwig I, however, had paid for this by being frugal with his stipend and only sparingly drawing on the royal treasury. His downfall came not from his building projects, as some would argue his grandson’s would, but rather from a woman whose beauty he could not resist. He was a connoisseur of beauty, commissioning portraits of every beautiful woman he met and keeping them in a hall to gaze upon at his leisure. One of these beauties was Lola Montez, an Irish woman claiming to be descended from Spanish nobility who had performed across Europe as a flamenco dancer. She came to Bavaria at a time when the Jesuits had entered the political realm and taken control of the government against the liberal king’s preferences. King Ludwig took Lola Montez as his mistress and lavished her with gifts such as an extravagant annual income and a mansion, and he even demanded that she be awarded a noble title, despite being foreign-born. The Jesuit government pushed back, demanding that the king banish Lola Montez, and King Ludwig I responded by firing the entire government, first by sacking the Prime Minister, then by dismissing everyone in his Cabinet, and finally by shutting down the current session of his parliament. This put the nobility on the Jesuits’ side, and while the king was setting up a new government, they raged over Lola Montez’s continued presence. Catholics threw stones at her when they saw her in the street. Once, during this scandal, a group of drunk students gathered outside her mansion to shout at her, and Lola trolled them by appearing on her balcony and toasting them with champagne. In retaliation, the king closed down the university for a time, fired all its Jesuit professors, and kicked the offending students out of school. When even his new government once more insisted Lola Montez be expelled from Bavaria, Ludwig I dissolved parliament entirely and ordered his army into the streets to maintain control. Only when a civil war or a coup seemed unavoidable did Ludwig I relent, sending Lola Montez away. Shortly thereafter, amid the revolutions of 1848, he abdicated his throne. Some 20 years later, many in Munich grumbled that his grandson Ludwig II was heading in the same direction.  Opposition to Wagner’s position as the king’s favorite heated up and grew ever more political and public, through anonymous articles in newspapers. To Ludwig II’s credit, he didn’t let it go so far before he exiled Wagner to put an end to the scandal. Nevertheless, the king continued to correspond with and give money to Wagner even while his favorite lived in Switzerland, dutifully writing the operas that Ludwig II had commissioned from him. Nevertheless, scandals persisted, as Wagner fathered a child with the still married Cosima von Bülow, and as he published a series of articles in a Bavarian newspaper that, while praising Ludwig II, heaped scorn on the Catholics and Jesuits in government. Finally done with Wagner’s antics, Ludwig terminated the publication of his articles. Wagner would remain in exile, their relationship pared down to more of a business arrangement, as Wagner’s forthcoming works would, by their contract, belong to the king. While they remained effusive in their correspondence, the true character of their relationship had suffered its final blow. The press and the public might further criticize Ludwig for continuing to pour funds into lavish productions of Wagner’s works, which he felt he could not live without, and later for subsidizing the building of an opera house in Bayreuth for the purpose of staging Wagner’s finally complete Nibelung cycle, but he would no longer give his critics fodder by keeping Wagner as his favorite—a wise and, one might say, sane decision.

Portrait of Ludwig II and his favorite, opera composer Richard Wagner. Public Domain.

Among Ludwig’s costly pet architectural projects, the rather plain wooden Bayreuth Festival Theater was by far the least ostentatious, and by design, for Wagner did not want ornate décor distracting from the stage production. To complete the illusion, Wagner also invented the first sunken orchestra pit, an innovation that would become standard by the end of the century. But Ludwig was rather more given to grandiosity in the projects he oversaw. Neuschwanstein Castle, built on the ruins of two medieval castles, was constructed to give Ludwig a private retreat into the Teutonic Middle Ages of Wagner’s operas. After that, he undertook twice to build his own version of Versailles Palace, once in miniature at Linderhof Palace, and next according to Versailles’s own plans on an island in the Chiemsee lake, even going so far as to reproduce and even outdo Varsailles’s famous Hall of Mirrors. This last fairytale castle, Herrenchiemsee, as well as his beloved residence Neuschwanstein, remained incomplete by the time of his death. Certainly the fact King Ludwig found himself 14 million marks in debt and subject to lawsuits by his creditors had much to do with his government’s vote of no confidence in him, but it wasn’t only his personal finances. To those in Munich, Ludwig’s fairytale castles represented the culmination of Ludwig’s lifelong flight from his kingly responsibilities. He had always preferred his hunting lodges and rural castles to life in Munich, such that, when it was absolutely required of him to be in Munich on royal business, he would only come so far as Castle Berg, on Lake Starnberg, where one day he would be found dead. At about 25 kilometers from Munich, he felt this was close enough that his officials could come to him. So loath was he to attend public functions, at which the aristocracy would stare at him and want to speak with him, that he despised going to public productions of even his favorite Wagnerian operas, preferring to attend their dress rehearsals or even to spend extravagantly on private productions staged only for him. Wagner’s critics of course blamed the king’s isolation on Wagner’s pernicious influence, but their letters show that Wagner often pleaded with Ludwig to make the appearances that the public expected of him. In fact, Ludwig’s alienation appears to have developed rather organically from his youth, when he grew used to his seclusion and came to prefer remaining aloof. His indifference to the performance of his royal duties went so far he established a means of indirectly communicating to all of his officials through a “Cabinet Secretary,” a post which some argued was unconstitutional. This self-imposed separation of the king from the mechanism of government would later enable his government to turn against him, but before that, it would test his ability to govern during a series of diplomatic and military crises that would result in a disastrous loss of autonomy for Bavaria and a humiliating loss of clout for Ludwig II and the Wittelsbach dynasty.

It seemed all the crises that Ludwig II faced were the result of the actions of the ambitious Otto von Bismarck, the Minister President of Prussia, who famously declared that the political concerns of the day must be resolved with “iron and blood.” First, the troubles centered around the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which had been a matter of some conflict between Denmark and the German Confederation, especially Prussia. When Ludwig took the throne, inheriting a policy of moderation and independence for Schleswig-Holstein, Prussia and Austria were waging war, and defeating Danish forces. During the following peace conference in London, Ludwig had ordered his emissaries to demand Schleswig-Holstein independence and was so roundly ignored that he lost what little fire for the Schleswig-Holstein question that he could summon. Within a couple years, the question of who controlled the two duchies became a conflict between Prussia and Austria. King Ludwig II was, quite literally, caught in the middle, as Bavaria lay between Prussia and Austria. While he wanted to remain neutral in the conflict, that proved impossible, so he pledged support to Austria. But when the time came to mobilize Bavarian forces against Prussia, Ludwig refused, saying he’d rather abdicate. Only Wagner was able to talk him out of this decision with a pleading letter. As the Seven Weeks’ War commenced, Ludwig sulked at his castle on Lake Starnberg, refusing even to visit his troops. The final humiliation came when Prussia defeated Austria, forcing Ludwig to cede territory and funds to Prussia and sign a treaty pledging military support to future Prussian campaigns. Four years later, Bismarck held him to it, forcing Ludwig to honor the treaty and commit troops to Prussia’s war with France. Prussia’s success in the Franco-Prussian War then paved the way to German unification and the Second Reich. German unification was something Ludwig wanted, but not under Bismarck and the Hohenzollern King Wilhelm I, his own cousin. To illustrate how this turn of events humiliated Ludwig, Wilhelm at first decided he would keep the title of king, which meant Ludwig II would have been reduced to a duke. Eventually, Wilhelm settled on Emperor, leaving Ludwig his title, but not much left of his dignity. This political situation helps us to further understand why Ludwig seemed so fearful, when taken to Castle Berg, that Prussians were out to get him.

A depiction of Bismarck at The Battle of Königgrätz during the Seven Weeks’ War between Prussia and Austria. Public Domain.

Once Ludwig II had been committed into Dr. Gudden’s care, or given into his custody, if you prefer, and once Gudden had hauled the deposed king out of his fairytale castle and back to Castle Berg, Ludwig expressed fear not only that Prussians might be enacting an assassination plot against him, but also Catholics, or more precisely, Jesuits. As we have seen, there was a long history of Jesuits and Catholics opposing and undermining Wittelsbach rule in Bavaria, going all the way back to Ludwig’s grandfather during the Lola Montez affair. Moreover, around the Jesuits had formed for centuries an elaborate conspiracy myth comparable to that surrounding the Templars, the Freemasons, and even the Jews. While on the right, many saw Enlightenment philosophes and revolutionary societies as the bogeymen, on the left, it was the Jesuits. But Ludwig had real, and not just paranoid, reasons to suspect that Catholics bore him ill will. In 1870, the power-hungry Pope Pius IX declared a doctrine of papal infallibility. This doctrine threatened to give Rome absolute political power in any Catholic kingdom, for if the Pope were infallible, then how could any king disagree with or disobey his pronouncements? Meanwhile, a conservative Catholic and principally Jesuit political faction, called the Patriots’ Party, had managed to take control of the Bavarian legislature. Johann von Lutz, Ludwig’s minister of justice and culture, fought the declaration of papal infallibility in Bavarian churches, and the Jesuits retaliated by working to dethrone Ludwig. Ludwig, who was already helpless to stop the weakening of his position as a result of the larger German political reality, did not take kindly to this further affront against his authority. He had been raised to believe that he was a ruler by divine right, which had led him to develop an autocratic view of power and an imperious attitude. Once when he was a child, his brother Otto made a snowball and showed it to him, and Ludwig snatched it from him. When his attendant chided him for it, Ludwig responded, “Why can’t I take the snowball? What am I Crown Prince for?” Now, with Jesuits just the latest to encroach on his power, he lashed out like a despot, expelling all Jesuits from Bavaria. While he was sometimes known to threaten abdication when he didn’t get his way, his response to the Jesuit threat to his power shows just how quick Ludwig was to retaliate against those who sought to take the throne from him. Considering this, during his final walk in the pouring rain along the shore of Lake Starnberg, it would perhaps have been no surprise to find Jesuit assassins lurking in the reeds, but neither would it have been any great surprise for Ludwig to have taken this opportunity to lash out violently against Dr. Gudden, whom he saw as his traitorous captor.

After dealing with the Jesuit menace, Ludwig II seems to have lost whatever remaining interest he had in governing. He made Johann von Lutz, the minister who had helped him fend off the Jesuit threat, his prime minister, and he further arranged for the government to function autonomously, so that he could forget affairs in Munich entirely, spending all his time on his architectural projects and enjoying Wagner’s operas at Beyreuth or in the privacy of his own grand country castles. He no longer even bothered to stay at Berg during sessions of the legislature, and it was this further estrangement from the seat of his power that would eventually allow Prime Minister Lutz, himself a ruthless power schemer, to turn the aristocracy and the legislature entirely against him in the end, effecting what can only be called a coup. Ludwig’s disaffection with Munich and his government should not be construed as disinterest in being a king. Far from it, Ludwig’s entire sense of himself, his identity, was inextricable from his belief that he was a divinely ordained ruler of men. More accurately, his disdain should be seen more as a disillusionment with the reality of modern kingship. He would have much preferred to rule as the kings of his fairytale legends did, from afar, amidst wealth and splendor, occupying himself not with the interminably boring matters of statecraft but rather spending his time appreciating art and literature, for he saw himself as above such practical business. This was why he so loved living in the country at his remote castles. During his regular carriage and sled rides, he was greeted by peasants who loved him and worshipped him in passing as he felt he ought to be worshipped. So greatly had the reduction of his influence in Germany affected this sense of himself that he even tried to set in motion a plan to found some new kingdom in a foreign land, which he could rule as the benevolent and aloof autocrat he imagined a king should be. This endeavor, however, came to nothing. This sense of his own importance and superiority certainly lends weight to the reports that, after the reality of his situation set in during the coup, he was considering suicide. He simply could not bear the idea of falling from the great heights of power to such low depths. “I am going to be precipitated from the highest position a man can occupy in the world to the lowest depths,” he told his valet. “I shall not bear it; life would be worthless afterwards. . . .”

A photo of Ludwig II’s beloved architectural project, Neuschwanstein, as it was under construction during the year in which he died. Public Domain.

We must take care not to presume, however, that Ludwig II’s suicidal comments prove that his death was a suicide. The king was well known to make dramatic statements that he did not mean and even to give shocking commands that it appears he never intended to be carried out, as I will discuss in Part 2 of this series. Instead, we must look to the evidence at the scene, when his body was recovered. We must consider the alternative, that he was actually assassinated, and that Castle Berg, which had been chosen last minute over some more secure locations as the place to hold Ludwig, had been selected precisely because the king would be vulnerable there. The corpses of King Ludwig and Dr. Gudden were found in the waters of Lake Starnberg, their feet embedded in the stones of some shallows. Dr. Gudden’s body showed signs of a struggle, with scratches and cuts all over his face, and his fingernails torn. However, Ludwig was without a mark on him, though there was a “tyrannical expression” frozen on his face, according to the doctor who tried to resuscitate him, an expression later described as an “insane smile.” Despite rumors that he’d been assassinated or that he’d drowned in an escape attempt, the new Bavarian government declared he had murdered Gudden and then killed himself, and this has remained the most popularly believed scenario, supported by the available eyewitness reports. However, exaggerated reports of strangulation marks have falsely perpetuated the idea that this version of events was proven beyond doubt. Since then, other claims have surfaced, so to speak, suggesting that a portrait painted of his corpse can prove he was not drowned, that shots were heard on Lake Starnberg that night, and that the king’s coat, long missing after his death, eventually turned up with two bullet holes in the back of it. As we may ask of Ludwig’s lungs, do these stories hold any water? Can they be believed? And what can we determine today of Ludwig’s mental health? Might those who deposed him actually have been justified in their actions? We will go deeper into the mystery of the Fate of Ludwig II in part two of this series.

Further Reading

Blunt, Wilfrid. The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria. Viking, 1970.

King, Greg. The Mad King: A Biography of Ludwig II of Bavaria. Birch Lane Press, 1996.

McIntosh, Christopher. Ludwig II of Bavaria: The Swan King. I.B. Tauris, 1982.

UFO Disinfo: Part Three - The Bennewitz Deception

In the early 1970s, ranchers across numerous states began to report their concern over a rash of cattle deaths that they believed to be unusual. This wave of mutilation, as it has been called, to use a phrase immortalized in song by the Pixies more than a decade later, came to develop specific indicators. These were not typical cattle deaths due to illness or predation. The cows were often said to have been the most healthy specimens of a herd, found dead overnight, their carcasses drained of blood, soft tissue organs like ears, eyes, udders, genitals and anuses cored from their bodies, with incisions uniformly described as surgically precise, and little sign of the typical scavenging these seasoned ranchers would typically expect to occur. Many believed these mutilations were the work of cultists, sneaking onto their properties at night to make ritual sacrifices and collect blood for their Luciferian ceremonies. Stirrings of the Satanic Panic had already begun to grip the country, and these ranchers had taken to patrolling their properties in armed posses. Blame soon shifted, however, when it was noted that no tracks, from animals, shoes, or tires, tended to ever be present around mutilation sites, and when sightings of strange lights in the sky, sometimes specifically identified as helicopters but described as eerily quiet, began to be associated with mutilation waves. Rather than witches and devil worshipers, the ranchers and local law enforcement investigating the mutilations began to whisper about aliens, or clandestine government experiments. With ranchers now arming themselves against the government and UFOs, and in some cases firing potshots at aircraft that flew over their properties, the story broke across the country through the Associated Press newswire and in pieces printed in major national magazines like Newsweek. No longer able to dismiss the phenomenon, and seeing in it something of the mass hysteria the Robertson Panel had predicted back in the 50s, more than one major investigation was conducted, by various state authorities, Fish and Wildlife, the ATF, and the FBI. These relied on expert analysis by academics of carcasses in necropsies performed at institutes of higher learning, and the consensus emerged that these cattle mutilations were indeed natural and explainable. These animals had died from any number of reasons, such as disease or animal attack, and only appeared to be drained of blood because blood had settled in their carcasses, or pooled on the ground and been consumed by scavengers and insects, as well as dried by the sun. The cored soft organs had been the work of blowflies and vultures, which pecked at the softest parts in order to get at the interior of a carcass. And what appeared to be surgical cuts were simply the splitting that occurs when carcasses stretch as they bloat. But some other investigators believed these official investigations were not examining true cases of cattle mutilation, which they said tended to cease whenever a large-scale investigation began. The findings of private investigations, on the other hand, still tend not to indicate E.T. but rather earthly culprits. Earlier state-level investigations claimed to have found evidence of the cattle having been tranquilized and treated with anti-coagulants. One newspaper reported that a Colorado sheriff had discovered a military style bag containing a scalpel, surgical gloves, and a bull’s penis at one mutilation scene. A New Mexico highway patrolman and a retired scientist claimed to have identified markings on cattle that could only be seen under ultra-violet lights, as well as rope marks and broken bones, indicating they had been marked and airlifted somewhere for experimentation before being dropped back onto their range—using decidedly human technology. One theory that has since been put forth is that these cattle were being covertly studied to determine the spread of radiation from local nuclear test sites, a theory that recalls the Villas Boas incident shared in the last installment, with silent helicopters posing as UFOs and abducting test subjects—remember Villas Boas’s vomiting and lesions, which sound an awful lot like radiation poisoning. Another theory developed by biochemist and paranormal researcher Colm Kelleher suggests that the mutilations may have represented a secret effort to discover how far the unusual pathogens that cause Mad Cow disease might have spread through the country’s beef supply. But still, when one hears cattle mutilation, one tends to think aliens, and perhaps that’s by design. One of the most well-known investigators into the topic is journalist Linda Moulton Howe, whose 1980 documentary on the subject, A Strange Harvest, won her a regional Emmy. She has since made a career out of insisting that extra-terrestrials are behind not just the cattle mutilation phenomenon, but crop circles, and of course, UFO sightings and abduction claims. Howe’s success earned her a deal with HBO for a UFO documentary, and it also brought her the attention of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. An agent of the AFOSI, Richard Doty, invited her to Kirtland Air Force Base, where he confirmed that, indeed, aliens do exist and that the U.S. government had been in contact with them. He showed her official looking documents that outlined mankind’s contact with aliens at Roswell, the existence of a living extra-terrestrial survivor of the crash there, and the mind-bending revelation that these aliens had genetically engineered humanity and sent spiritual leaders like Jesus Christ to guide us in our evolution. Doty promised her footage of UFO crashes and landings, of aliens both deceased and living, and he suggested he might be able to arrange a meeting between Howe and this extra-terrestrial guest of the government. However, as the government seems to have done in the past to other filmmakers—as detailed in my recent patron exclusive—they never made good on their promises, and HBO canceled Howe’s project. Richard Doty denies that this meeting ever occurred, but if you know anything about Richard Doty, you know not to believe much of what he says. He certainly was an agent of the AFOSI, though, and we know that, at the Air Force’s behest, he had shared the very same falsified documents described by Howe with other UFOlogists, encouraging them to believe the same outlandish and fanciful tales, even if it broke their grip on reality.

Linda Moulton Howe documenting the cattle mutilation phenomenon. Photo by Mark O’Kane. Accessed via IMDb. Image may be subject to copyright.

*

In Part One of this series, I spoke about the Roswell incident, and how it did not become a mythical episode in UFO lore until far later. There was some flap about the original Army Air Force intelligence office’s press release stating they had recovered a “flying disk.” It was, after all, the height of the Summer of Saucers, but the retraction that followed hot on the heels of this press release, which included photos of the less-than-impressive debris and identified it as a weather balloon really did settle the matter for more than thirty years. It wasn’t until 1979, when a high school teacher named William Moore made it into the myth it is today. Bill Moore taught French and Russian for more than a decade in Pennsylvania before moving to Minnesota to teach English at a Twin Cities high school. In his spare time, he pursued writing, with a special interest in UFOs. Some initial investigative pieces for the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) led to Moore’s co-authoring of The Philadelphia Experiment in 1978, a poorly supported account of the supposed disappearance of a U.S. Navy destroyer escort. Moore’s book relied entirely on rumor rather than direct eyewitness reports, and came to the dubious conclusion that the ship’s disappearance was the result of experimentation with a top secret cloaking technology, but despite its faults, it earned him a reputation as a spinner of credible-seeming paranormal accounts. Thereafter, while on the book promotion circuit, he met Stanton Friedman, a former nuclear physicist turned professional UFOlogist who over the course of his long career would be both praised for his scientific approach to the investigation of UFOs and criticized for his credulity and his fallacious arguments from ignorance. Moore and Friedman forged the Roswell myth together, and Bill Moore’s reputation as an investigator in the UFOlogist community was established. During his promotional tour for his second book, The Roswell Incident, Moore received a phone call from someone who claimed to be a government intelligence agent who had chosen Moore to receive classified UFO information and disseminate it to the public. Moore would take the bait, meeting with none other than AFOSI agent Rick Doty in Albuquerque, NM. Throughout the 1980s, Doty would offer astounding revelations to Moore and his associates, including earth-shattering evidence in the form of top secret memos, much as he did with Linda Moulton Howe during the same period. While Doty asked Howe only that she include these materials in her film, though, he had a further stipulation for Moore. In order to get his glimpse behind the curtain, Moore would be asked to spy on the investigations of fellow UFOlogists, and even to feed them false information. Moore accepted the arrangement, and during the following years, he collected supposedly genuine evidence of alien contact and government cover-up from Doty while leading his first target, one Paul Bennewitz, down a rabbit hole of disinformation and madness. In the end, when his efforts did real psychological harm to Bennewitz, and the documents Doty had been feeding him began to be uncovered as fakes, Moore came clean in a dramatic keynote speech at the Mutual UFO Network conference in Las Vegas in 1989, confessing to his disinformation activities. “I would play the disinformation game,” he said, despite the interruptions of boos and hisses from the audience, “get my hands dirty just often enough to lead those directing the process into believing that I was doing exactly what they wanted me to do, and all the while continuing to burrow my way into the matrix so as to learn as much as possible about who was directing it and why.” This would be the end of Bill Moore’s UFOlogy career, as his declaration, rather than being seen as an important revelation of the government’s campaign of disinformation against UFOlogists, was instead taken as confession of his betrayal, making him a pariah. Still, for years afterward, Bill Moore would attempt to justify his cooperation with the AFOSI’s disinformation efforts.

The eventual target of Rick Doty’s and Bill Moore’s disinformation campaign, Paul Bennewitz, should not be dismissed as a mere nutcase. In 1969, while pursuing his PhD in Physics, he started a successful tech company in New Mexico, Thunder Scientific, manufacturing instruments for gauging humidity and temperature for the Air Force and NASA. So frequent was his business with the military that he settled down and established his lab right near the borders of Kirtland Air Force Base. As a pilot with a history of service in the Coast Guard, Bennewitz admired the servicemen and officials he dealt with at Kirtland. He was a happy family man, interested mostly in playing his guitar and reading Western novels whenever he found any spare time. But he also had long been interested in UFOs. He was a member of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, or APRO, and sometimes consulted for them as a scientific expert. In 1979, this interest would begin to consume him. That April, a former astronaut turned Senator Harrison Schmitt held a news conference in Albuquerque about a spate of cattle mutilations across New Mexico. In the audience was Paul Bennewitz, who became convinced cattle mutilations were the work of extra-terrestrials and made the acquaintance of some of the phenomenon’s principal investigators. Also present were numerous representatives of interested government groups, like the FBI, and also the AFOSI. In retrospect, this may have been the first time that Bennewitz showed up on their radar, so to speak. Later that year, when Bennewitz was out watching the stars on the second-story deck of his rather posh home, he noticed what appeared to be lights of various colors hovering and swooping around the Manzano mountains within Kirtland Air Force Base. Throughout the rest of the year, Bennewitz went onto his deck nightly, setting up a surveillance platform with telephoto cameras aimed at the military installation in an effort to capture this aerial activity on film. In his mind, he was not spying on secret Air Force activity. These lights appeared to travel great distances almost instantaneously, and he was convinced that they were extra-terrestrial craft. As his investigation developed over the next year, he began aiming other instruments at the base and started detecting electro-magnetic pulses that he believed were signals emitted by the UFOs he was filming. Since in this area was the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, the nation’s largest underground stockpile of nuclear weapons components at the time, Bennewitz felt that he might have uncovered an alien campaign to spy on or even attack a strategic military site, and he had every intention of sharing his evidence with the Air Force.

Paul Bennewitz. Photo accessed at UFO-Alien Database. Image may be subject to copyright.

As his investigation went on, however, he began to show signs of credulity and paranoia that may have served as a warning sign to those who would afterward manipulate and deceive him, suggesting that perhaps his mental stability was not strong enough to withstand the psychological operation that would eventually be conducted on him. In mid-1980, while he was still collecting evidence on the aliens over Manzano from this deck, one of his contacts in the cattle mutilation investigation referred to him a woman named Myrna Hansen, who claimed to have had a close encounter of the fourth kind, otherwise known as an abduction experience. Bennewitz welcomed Hansen and her son into his home, but dissatisfied with her recollection of the event, he called in psychologist and alien contactee researcher Leo Sprinkle to perform a hypnotic regression. The reputation of Sprinkle himself and the problems inherent in the entire practice of hypnotic memory recovery need not be explored in depth here for me to make the point that the man and the memories he supposedly recovered from his patients’ unconscious minds are extremely suspect. In this case, Hansen “recovered” memory of being taken to an underground alien base where she saw human body parts in vats and where she was implanted with a device that would allow the aliens to monitor her thoughts. While Sprinkle probably contributed to the development of this delusion during his hypnosis sessions, even he was disconcerted by Paul Bennewitz’s mental state later that summer, on his second visit to hypnotically regress Hansen. He found Bennewitz toting a gun, agitated by the idea that aliens were monitoring his home and might attack at any moment. Needless to say, it sounds very much like Bennewitz was already descending into mental illness, as though the presence of Myrna Hansen in his home had driven him over the edge into a shared delusional disorder, or folie à deux. That October, 1980, he finally informed Kirtland head of security about his investigation and its supposed findings, prompting the AFOSI to dispatch Rick Doty to his home to interview him. Thereafter, and somewhat curiously considering the nature of his claims, Bennewitz was granted an audience with the heads of every department at Kirtland AFB, to whom he detailed his evidence and his theory. One would think that everyone at this briefing recognized his instability as well as his eagerness to please the U.S. government. It seems officials at Kirtland might have quite handily put an end to the affair simply by discouraging Bennewitz’s surveillance of the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, telling him he was filming classified activities, and suggesting he seek psychiatric help. But instead, Air Force intelligence stationed at Kirtland, and perhaps National Security Agency personnel as well, encouraged him to continue his investigations and continue reporting back to them. It appears the NSA believed Bennewitz had somehow picked up new experimental signals they had been testing in the area and wanted to learn more about how he had managed to do it. As for the interest of the AFOSI, perhaps they believed that he had captured footage of experimental aircraft in filming the moving lights around the base, or perhaps they simply saw in poor Paul Bennewitz an opportunity to launch a broad disinformation campaign, not just against the unstable physicist himself, but against the broader UFOlogical community.

By the time Bennewitz gave his briefing at Kirtland, AFOSI Special Agent Rick Doty, who had been stationed at Kirtland for a year, had already begun an ambitious disinformation campaign. Earlier that summer, he met with Bill Moore. The first piece of documentary evidence given to Moore, not by Doty but by Moore’s anonymous contact, known only as Falcon, had been a document detailing a “Project Silver Sky,” which mentioned the recovery of a UFO. Further investigation had revealed this to be a forgery, and at Moore’s first meeting with Doty in Albuquerque, he confronted his AFOSI contacts about the deception. Stupidly enough, Doty assured him that had only been a test, which Moore had passed. This was when Moore struck his Faustian bargain, agreeing to inform on and feed false information to his fellow UFOlogists in exchange for the real intel on UFOs. In November, just 7 days after Bennewit’z fateful presentation, Moore too was summoned to Kirtland, shown a document marked “Secret” with analysis of Bennewitz’s footage and mention of a “Project Aquarius.” Moore was subsequently tasked with befriending Bennewitz, which with Bill Moore’s UFOlogist clout was a simple task, and early the next year, Doty gave Moore a document similar to the one he had seen months before, instructing him to show it to Bennewitz. There had been, however, some curious additions to the document. It now mentioned an organization or group called “MJ Twelve” that received exclusive access to the results of Project Aquarius. These documents encouraged Bennewitz to fall ever further down his rabbit hole, as they indicated that the Air Force, NASA, and even higher, more secretive authorities were very interested in his findings and took them very seriously. Therefore, Bennewitz went public, informing UFO organizations and UFOlogists of his investigation’s conclusions, and thereby playing right into his manipulators’ plans and spreading misinformation throughout all of UFOlogy generally. But Bennewitz was only one prong of this operation. The other, Bill Moore, proved to be far more discerning and mistrustful, for obvious reasons. Yet he too proved to be a handy tool for the dissemination of the UFO myth in the long run.

Author Bill Moore. Accessed through UFO-Alien Database. Image may be subject to copyright.

Bill Moore first learned about Project Aquarius and the shadowy organization known as MJ-12, later to be revealed as Majestic 12, from the documents that Rick Doty had shown him. The mythos developed by these documents became the subject for a fiction book that Moore had worked on for a number of years. Essentially, Aquarius was thought to be the real UFO program, buried under layers of secrecy so that it could deal with genuine alien contact, unlike the sham public-facing program Blue Book, and the Majestic 12 were the high-level panel of powerful individuals who oversaw the project. This story certainly made for compelling fiction, and in it we see many of the crazier beliefs still cherished by the UFO fringe: UFO crashes at Roswell and Aztec were real, the government had recovered alien corpses but also a living Extra-terrestrial Biological Entity or EBE, with whom we had communicated and learned a great deal. There were three ET species visiting earth, one benevolent, one bent on exploiting our resources, and a third, the greys, who were responsible for mutilating cattle and abducting people as part of a program for the harvesting of genetic material. Mankind’s presence on Earth was a result of such genetic manipulation, and human history had been guided by one or more of these alien species through figures such as Christ, Muhammad, and even Hitler. This is the same mythos, using the same official looking documents, that Doty would present to Linda Moulton-Howe. Indeed, it may be that Doty was encouraging Moore to publish a book with these claims as non-fiction. Moore certainly must have known better than to believe the contents of the Aquarius documents, which Doty openly admitted were disinformation, but Moore reportedly had wanted to present the material as non-fiction before his writing partner insisted it would have to be fictionalized since they had no evidence of the outrageous claims. Thereafter, though, Moore served as the conduit for the dissemination of documents that seemingly confirmed Majestic 12’s existence. I have spoken about this before, in my episode The Great Los Angeles Air Raid and the Secret Memos of Majestic 12. These documents were slipped through the door of Bill Moore’s TV producer, and afterward, corroborating evidence for the documents was turned up by Moore in the National Archives. The papers have since been roundly debunked as forgeries, based on factual errors in their content, typeface inconsistencies, and indications that the corroborative memo, which lacked an archival register number, may have simply been planted in the National Archives by Moore or someone else. Whether or not Moore was an active participant in every level of this hoax in his role as an AFOSI stooge is difficult to determine. He may have disbelieved most of the contents of the mythos established by the Aquarius documents, and yet believed that some element of truth may have been present in them. Thus, when the Majestic 12 documents appeared, still believing that he would be given the genuine documents promised him, he may have been played for a fool by Doty. Whatever the case, the fact that the MJ-12 hoax as well as most major elements of modern UFO mythology can be traced back to one Air Force intelligence agent tasked with feeding false info to the public should be enough to make a staunch skeptic of any true believer.

To Paul Bennewitz, already teetering on the edge of a paranoid mental break, the slow disclosure of the Aquarius mythos served to reinforce his most nightmarish delusions. They confirmed his assumptions about the malevolent nature of the aliens whom he believed had abducted and tagged his friend Myrna Hansen. These were the same aliens he had been filming from his deck, whose EM pulse transmissions he believed he had been decoding. When they saw their disinformation driving him toward a mental break, Doty and the AFOSI, as well as perhaps the NSA, which had apparently taken an interest in the program he had devised to decipher the signals he was picking up, kicked their PsyOp into high gear, sending him a new computer, reportedly delivered by former Blue Book consulting scientist turned UFOlogist darling J. Allen Hynek, convincing him that the program in this new computer would aid in his decoding of the alien signals. In fact, his torturers had set up in a vacant house across the street to beam signals right into his reception arrays, and suddenly the transmissions of the ETs were crystal clear, confirming all his fears with statements like, “Our race is dying on the home planet,” “women of Earth are needed,” and “military of US delivered embryos.” Bennewitz was in such a state that he doesn’t even seem to have suspected that this mysterious new computer dropped off at his house might be feeding him lies, nor does he seem to have questioned the nature of these decoded messages. He does not seem to have wondered why these aliens would be broadcasting their plans and motives into the aether like some monologuing villain in a bad movie. Instead, he focused on figuring out where their base was, and based on UFO sightings and cattle mutilation activity, he came to the conclusion that the underground base Hansen had described in her hypnotic regressions was beneath Archuleta Mesa near Dulce, New Mexico, a few hours north of Albuquerque.

Whether his AFOSI handlers led Bennewitz to focus on Archuleta Mesa, wanting his attention turned away from the activities around the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, is uncertain, but Rick Doty has admitted to encouraging his belief in what would come to be known as Dulce Base. The Air Force actually began hauling old equipment out to Archuleta Mesa—derelict vehicles and structures, and even standing vents connected to nothing that made it appear as if some complex had been built into the mountain. Kirtland dispatched Special Forces to stand around like they were guarding something, and the local Army base was incentivized to use the mountain for their training exercises. These military forces cleared brush for helicopter landings, and even set up powerful lights to sweep across the clouds, simulating the strange lights Bennewitz filmed over Manzano. All this, according to Doty, to encourage Bennewitz, who had taken to piloting his own plane over Archuleta Mesa searching for evidence of his theory. It seems a big expenditure of money and manpower just to encourage a nosy UFO theorist, and unsurprisingly, it worked. By the late 1980s, when both Moore and Doty claim their PsyOp against Bennewitz had ceased, Bennewitz spiraled. He couldn’t sleep, believing aliens were creeping into his bedroom and drugging him. He described waking in his car in the middle of nowhere with no memory of how he had gotten there. Eventually, he began accusing his own wife of being under alien control, and after barricading himself into his house, his family finally had him committed. Both Moore and Doty have told interviewers that they considered Bennewitz a friend and had tried to caution him against pursuing his obsessions any further, seeing how it was affecting his mental health, but this sounds an awful lot like someone trying to save face. The fact is that Bill Moore and Rick Doty and whatever other AFOSI officials were involved, as well as any NSA agents who according to Doty had mounted their own PsyOp against him, were all directly responsible for destroying Paul Bennewitz’s life.

AFOSI Special Agent Richard Doty. Photo accessed at UFO-Alien Database. Image may be subject to copyright.

It remains unclear whether the NSA really was involved in the operation against Bennewitz. This may have been another obfuscation from Rick Doty. Some have cast doubt on whether Doty even worked for the AFOSI, but his service records are clear: he joined the Air Force in 1968, basic training in Texas at Lackland AFB, then service as security at Sheppard AFB before shipping out to Vietnam. After the war, Doty ended up at McChord air base in Washington state, followed by a stint in West Germany, and then back to the states, to Ellsworth base in South Dakota, during which time a hoax report about a UFO encounter at this base was sent to the National Enquirer, prompting some to suspect Doty got into the AFOSI disinformation game around this time. Then in 1979, at the height of the cattle mutilation wave in the area, Doty was stationed at Kirtland in New Mexico. Any doubt about Doty’s agency affiliation, raised by some who suggest Doty may have been an independent meddler or the agent of some other, unknown group, should have been laid to rest by the 2013 release of AFOSI documents under the Freedom of Information Act that clearly confirm Doty’s role as special agent in charge of investigating Paul Bennewitz. The questions that remain all boil down to one question. Why? The simplest explanation seems to be that Bennewitz had been monitoring classified activities at Kirtland. Certainly we know that the electromagnetic pulses he was detecting came from the nearby Sandia National Laboratories, where they were generating EMPs such as occur in nuclear explosions in order to test how effectively their radiation hardening processes had protected electronic systems in aircraft. As for the strange lights in the sky over Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, FOIA documents indicate that numerous UFO sightings over Kirtland may have been attributable to helicopter activity. Indeed, the cattle mutilation incidents in the area were also sometimes accompanies by reports of silent helicopters. One might think back to Bosco Nedelcovic’s claims about Operation Mirage, in which helicopters were specially equipped with strange lights in order to appear as UFOs, and how his claims accorded well with the account of abductee Villas Boas. The silent chopper has long been a fixture of government conspiracy theory, and as such is dismissed by some as nonsense, but the fact is that the Pentagon began developing stealth helicopters with noise reduction technology back in the late 1960s, and rotor acoustics research has developed steadily ever since. We now know that a quiet helicopter has been flying since as early as 1972. The Hughes500P, which used contra-rotating coaxial rotors as well as an exhaust muffler, was able to reduce noise substantially. And as recently as last year, Army Research Laboratory Public Affairs announced research into electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft, utilizing the kind of technology commonly seen in commercial drones to develop silent and absolutely maneuverable aircraft. If the Army is openly publishing press releases about this research, and the technology itself has been so widely available that civilian hobbyists have been using it for years, it takes no great stretch of the imagination to believe the U.S. government has been using it in secret for far longer.

However, Paul Bennewitz and many other UFO eyewitnesses claim that the lights they have seen in the skies display speed and maneuverability unlike anything a helicopter could possibly match. What other kind of aircraft might the Air Force and the CIA want to obscure with tales of flying saucers? The rather obvious answer would be spy planes, of course. It has been estimated by historians of the CIA like Gerald Haines that most UFO sightings as far back as the 1950s were actually sightings of Top Secret spy planes out on maneuvers, aircraft such as the U-2, the A-12 Oxcart, an the SR-71 Blackbird. And speaking of flying saucers, the government was flying some of those at different points as well! Since before the modern UFO phenomenon erupted in 1947, disc-shaped or “circular wing” aircraft have been developed numerous times. The first, the XF5U-1, warmly referred to as the “Flying Flapjack,” was developed by the US Navy for its short-takeoff-and-landing capabilities. Rumors persist of a more advanced model of the Flying Flapjack, called the Skimmer, which was said to have hovering capabilities, but if the Navy did achieve this technology, they kept it well under wraps. In 1953, the Toronto Star reported that Canadian Aircraft Manufacturer Avro Canada was developing a flying saucer aircraft capable of reaching speeds of 1,500 miles per hour and vertical takeoff and landing, which meant hovering capability. This was indeed a real undertaking, Project Y, the Avro Ace. History tells us the project never got off the ground, so to speak, as the Canadian government didn’t have the budget it would require, but the US Air Force stepped in with all the money the developer would need, resulting in Project Y2, proposing 2 saucer craft, the Silverbug and the Ladybird, interceptors capable of reaching Mach 3.5. These designs further developed into the Avro MX-1794 turbojet flying disc, which underwent wind-tunnel testing at Wright-Patterson and then promptly disappeared after Avro announced a forthcoming prototype in 1957. Of course, it is tempting to believe that this craft went Top Secret once it proved functional, but the fact is that Avro afterward developed a disc-shaped hovercar, the VZ-9AV or Avrocar, for the Army, which turned out to be a rather shaky and unbalanced disappointment. So perhaps all of Avro’s flying saucers were likewise failures, explaining why no one heard much more about them since the early stages of their development. This seems to be a pattern with disc-shaped craft, such as the Convair Lenticular Defense Missile, codenamed the Pye Wacket, which was a radio-controlled missile in the shape of a disc about 5 feet across, that if it hadn’t been officially canceled after wind-tunnel testing was hoped to be capable of achieving Mach 7. Of course, rumors persist about these flying disc programs going dark, funded by black money, and being further tested at the highest security testing grounds like White Sands. Given what we know about the secrecy surrounding the development of other spy planes and even more recently with stealth airstrike drones, it does seem far more rational, if equally speculative, to believe that most UFO eyewitnesses, when they weren’t mistaking natural phenomena for an aircraft, were actually seeing experimental aircraft like these. Perhaps even the strange TicTacs, Gimbals, and Spheres seen in the latest UAP videos may actually represent the next generation of stealth aircraft or drone technology, projects that the US government would prefer the public believe are alien spacecraft in order to preserve for some further years the secrecy of a game changing technology.

Army Avrocars depicted as "flying jeeps" in company literature. Public Domain image.

When one considers the Bennewitz affair in its entirety, one begins to realize that it could not possibly have been about just discrediting Paul Bennewitz. There would have been no need to discredit him, since he came first to the Kirtland head of security and confided everything Only after the AFOSI encouraged his delusions for years did he go public with his evidence and theories. If the AFOSI or the NSA or whoever had wanted to silence him, they could have warned him, or they could have arrested him and seized everything he had collected and all his equipment under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Communications Act of 1934. Instead, they fed him a myth, and it seems clear they hoped he would spread that myth to the larger UFOlogical community, which he eventually did. Bill Moore, too, served this end, as he was instrumental in the dissemination of the Majestic 12 papers and the larger myth of alien contact and government coverup that developed from them. It is all too easy to dismiss UFO sightings with as little evidence as the UFO witnesses themselves present, as we have seen, and likewise, it is a simple matter to suggest that there are no silent choppers or unknown experimental aircraft in the skies being kept secret by our government. It’s even an easy matter to argue that the PsyOp against Paul Bennewitz never took place. Bill Moore is a liar, you might say, and perhaps he anticipated some other result from his confession rather than the ruin of his reputation with his audience and therefore the self-destruction his writing career. Rick Doty too is a liar, even according to his own version of events, which changes from telling to retelling. If documents prove he worked for the AFOSI, they do not prove that he took point in this psychologic operation against Bennewitz, and the Air Force, of course, denies any knowledge of such disinformation campaigns. Furthermore, we know that, even after his retirement, Doty appears to be up to his same old tricks. In 2005, an anonymous source calling himself “Request Anonymous” revealed to UFOlogists via email a UFO myth much like the one Doty is said to have previously passed off on Linda Moulton Howe, Bill Moore, and Paul Bennewitz. After a saucer crash in New Mexico in ’47, an EBE survivor commenced communication between aliens and the US government. In this story, 12 US astronauts left on a spacecraft in 1965, bound for the alien world of Serpo in Zeta Reticuli, much like the iconic ending of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, the physics of the story didn’t add up, and on further investigation into the IP address of “Request Anonymous,” the informant turned out to be none other than Richard Doty, who was active under his own name on the same web forum.

Does his responsibility for the Serpo hoax prove that Doty had always acted alone in his disinformation campaign? Or does it reveal that he never truly retired from the intelligence and disinformation game? Or does it just show that old habits die hard? Doty has since made some money from his involvement in the UFO world through books and interviews. Is he peddling his lies now just to make a buck? We may never know. In the late ‘80s, the FBI conducted an investigation into the doctored MJ-12 documents to determine whether they were indeed the leak of Top Secret documents, and who had leaked them. Curiously, the AFOSI asked the FBI to investigate, but during the course of their investigation, the FBI came to suspect the AFOSI themselves, or at least the local Kirtland office. In the end, though, they could determine only that the documents were bogus, not who was responsible for them. Once again, it is easy to say there is nothing here, that if there was a conspiracy against Bennewitz or the larger UFOlogical community, that it was localized, unofficial. However, I saved the story of the Bennewitz Deception for last because, just like my principal source Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs by Mark Pilkington, I wanted to show the context of the entire history of the modern UFO phenomenon and other indications that the government encourages belief in extra-terrestrial visitation because I have come to believe it provides a coherent and rational explanation for the entire mystery. And if we accept this, then a further conclusion can be deduced. If the government really were covering up alien contact, they would not encourage the belief that they were covering up alien contact. If UFOs were not of this world and the government didn’t want the public to know this, wouldn’t they instead encourage the belief that these craft are our own? That’s my reasoning anyway, and I’m sure some will think me an agent of disinformation for encouraging this conclusion.

Further Reading

Bishop, Greg. Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth. Gallery Books, 2005.

Goleman, Michael J. “Wave of mutilation: the cattle mutilation phenomenon of the 1970s.” Agricultural History, vol. 85, no. 3, 2011, pp. 398-417. National Library of Medicine, doi: 10.3098/ah.2011.85.3.398.

Klass, Philip J. “The MJ-12 Crashed-Saucer Documents.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 12, no. 2, Winer 1987/1988. Skeptical Inquirer, skepticalinquirer.org/1988/01/the-mj-12-crashed-saucer-documents/.

Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. Skyhorse, 2010.

UFO Disinfo: Part Two - The Washington Flyovers and the CIA

In April 1952, the most popular magazine in America, LIFE, in a very popular issue featuring Marilyn Monroe on the cover, published an article called “Have We Visitors from Space?” In it, the authors asserted that, having spoken to senior Air Force officials, they could confidently declare that the flying saucers frequently witnessed since 1947 were neither a visionary phenomenon nor a natural phenomenon, nor were they balloons or manmade aircraft designed by Americans or Russians, leaving extra-terrestrial visitors as the only reasonable conclusion. This article surprised Captain Edward Ruppelt, who had been tasked to run the Air Force’s follow-up UFO investigation after the dissolution of Project Grudge, Project Blue Book. The Air Force had directed Ruppelt to keep something of a lid on UFO theories by identifying mundane explanations for as many reports as possible and not advertising those that proved more difficult to explain away. Therefore, it did not make much sense that the Air Force would then encourage the biggest magazine in America to fuel a resurgence in flying saucer mania, as the Life article certainly did, precipitating an inundation of UFO reports with which Ruppelt and Blue Book had to contend. But perhaps it wasn’t the Air Force at all, for it was well known that Henry Luce, the magazine magnate who pulled the strings at LIFE, was a close friend of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, the first director of the CIA. So maybe there was some inter-office chicanery underway about which Ruppelt was uninformed. Suspicions of being out of the loop were confirmed in July that year when, amid the deluge of UFO sightings he was dealing with, Ruppelt, in Washington, DC, on business, picked up the newspaper and discovered that, a couple days earlier, there had been a dramatic UFO incident over the nation’s capital! According to the papers, on July 19th and 20th, numerous objects appeared on air traffic controller radar , none of which were following established flight paths, and some of which appeared to be capable of making radical maneuvers unlike normal aircraft. Some of these radar pips even coincided with visual sightings of what appeared to be fireballs with trailing tails, some of which were taken to be meteors, but which were described by others to hover and change direction. By the time jets had been scrambled to defend the capital from what appeared to be an incursion into our sovereign airspace, the objects were nowhere to be found. Ruppelt writes that he was flabbergasted that no one had bothered to inform him, the head of the Air Force’s UFO investigation project, and as reporters contacted him for comment, he had nothing to offer, prompting further headlines like “Air Force Won’t Talk.” Determined to do his job, Ruppelt requisitioned a staff car to head out and interview radarmen and witnesses, but he was given the runaround, told a car wasn’t available and further informed that he could not expense a rental. Instead, he was directed to take the bus, but Ruppelt was unfamiliar with DC public transit and was left with the option of paying for a cab out of his per diem, which after lodging and meals had run dry. So, foiled in his efforts to investigate further, he ended up departing for Ohio and Blue Book’s headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A few days later, the UFO flyovers began again, with commercial airline pilots and flight attendants, control tower personnel and U.S. Airmen witnessing lights in the sky that corresponded with strange radar blips. Interestingly, witness reports were accompanied by contradictory reports from others on the same aircraft or in the same towers who hadn’t seen a thing. The official Air Force explanation was twofold. The radar blips were simply misidentifications caused by strange weather, as there had been temperature inversions over DC that July. As for the visual sightings, like the Foo fighters before them, they had been stars and city lights that had been misidentified due to aviator’s vertigo. And the sighting from the ground? Well, those were just shooting stars, of course. Many scorned this explanation, which relied on a confluence of numerous errors and was buttressed by the idea that the situation had snowballed due to mass hysteria. Captain Ruppelt, however, disbelieved the Air Force explanation for another reason. According to his memoirs, a few days prior to the Washington flyovers, he had spoken to a scientist from an agency that he refused to identify. This contact supposedly warned him of the forthcoming incident, predicting, “you're going to have the granddaddy of all UFO sightings. The sighting will occur in Washington or New York…probably Washington.”

*

Shortly before I released part one of this series, the unclassified version of the Pentagon’s UFO report finally dropped, and it was very much what was expected. In fact, it was strikingly similar to General Nathan Twining’s memo of September 1947, when Twining conceded the existence of UFOs, suggested some may actually be natural phenomena like meteors but that others appear to display maneuvering capabilities and to be evasive, and suggested they may be a high security American aircraft, or that an adversary like the Soviet Union had developed an extraordinarily advanced propulsion technology. Here we are 74 years later, and not much has changed, except the fact that we’re getting it released to the public directly from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In this preliminary report, which it should be noted is only the unclassified version of a report with presumably far more granular detail presented to Congress, five “explanatory categories” are given: “airborne clutter,” such as the “large deflated balloon” that is cited multiple times as an explanation for a certain sighting; “natural atmospheric phenomena,” like the old meteor explanation; “US…developmental programs”; “foreign adversary systems”; and to really stoke the ET hypothesis, an “other” category that might attribute UFO sightings to anything, including aliens. And there appears to be no shortage of these sightings; focusing only on reports from military aviators between 2004 and 2021, they number them 144, stating that 80 of these “registered across multiple sensors”, including radar, infrared, and weapon seekers. 18 of these appeared to display “unusual movement patterns or flight characteristics,” though they caution that “[t]hese observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception.” The headlines regarding this report have been somewhat misleading, focusing on the fact that it doesn’t rule out an alien origin for the objects, which is technically true but only in that the report did not even explicitly address the possibility, and stating that it asserts they are not American craft, which is not true at all. US government or domestic private industry development programs is one of their explanatory categories, and expanding on this, it states they were unable to confirm this but still explicitly says “UAP observations could be attributable” to such American programs (emphasis added). So what’s happening here? Is the government really so helpless to audit its own programs that in almost 75 years it’s been unable to find out whether one of its own agencies or aerospace companies is secretly flying super-advanced craft? Or is it withholding, or more than that, making deceptive statements by claiming ignorance and inability to confirm the existence of such projects? There does seem to be at least one confirmable lie in the report. In September 1951, a sighting by both radar operators and pilots of an unidentified object over Fort Monmouth Army Base led to the creation of Project Blue Book… and to an Air Force directive, JANAP 146(B), ordering all members of the armed forces to report UFO sightings to the nearest military base, to the Air Defense Command, and to the Secretary of Defense, and further making the leak of these sightings to the press punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to a decade in prison. Yet the recent report claims, “No standardized reporting mechanism existed until the Navy established one in March 2019” and that the “Air Force subsequently adopted that mechanism in November 2020.” Maybe I’m misreading, and the former reporting protocol had fallen out of use or was never as structured and official as what they recently established, but this sure does seem disingenuous, as if the US government only recently heard about UFOs and didn’t start really looking into them until a couple years ago, when history shows us they have been looking closely at sightings since the very beginning.

The Pentagon UFO report, which can be read here.

Just as this new UFO report suggests, whether sincerely or not, that China or Russia may have developed the unusual craft that have been sighted over the last 16 years, so too in 1952, after the Washington UFO flyovers, Cold War fears led suspicions to naturally fall on the Soviets. The idea that enemy aircraft may have just managed to penetrate air defenses and approach within striking range of the White House immediately led to the CIA launching its own UFO investigation the month after the Washington sightings. Available records of their secret meetings at Wright Patterson Air Force Base with Air Technical Intelligence Center officials indicate they first looked into the possibility that the objects over Washington had been a secret American project, but being themselves privy to some of the most advanced spy planes being developed, like the U-2, they believed the craft were not American. If the Air Force had been developing this above top-secret tech, why would they have taken the risk of flying them over the capital, knowing their own jets would be scrambled to confront them and possibly shoot them out of the sky? The problem was, it didn’t make a lot of sense for Russians to fly such valuable toys right over our capital either. It would have been a risky move, and even if the intelligence such an operation might provide was worth the possibility of losing advanced technology to an adversary who would immediately reverse engineer it, the flight paths of the objects over Washington that July didn’t make any sense as a reconnaissance mission. One suggestion was they had been Russian balloons sent simply to gather info on what kind of Air Force response enemy aircraft could expect, but balloons could not explain the speed and evasive maneuvers reported by some witnesses and radar men. Finally, the CIA’s investigation came to the conclusion that a driving purpose for risking such a flyover with experimental advanced aircraft was to wage psychological warfare. They pointed out how curious it was that Russian media had never once mentioned UFO sightings, not even to mock the American saucer flaps, and suggested that the entire phenomenon might be engineered simply to foster a general panic and mass hysteria, such that, in the case of a genuine attack, air response would be slowed and confused, wary of false alarms.

For this theory to be true, that the Russians had sent UFOs in order to gauge our defenses and/or stoke UFO mania for their own purposes, then they would have needed advanced aerospace technology capable of great speed and maneuverability… or would they? One theory that emerged several years later suggested that the Washington flap was caused by electronic countermeasures, not actual craft. Electronic countermeasures, or ECM, had been used since 1945, in the form of reflective aluminum chaff released to confuse enemy radar with false readings, and progressed from there to actual radar jamming technology. The notion that ECM had resulted in false readings over Washington in July 1952 was spearheaded by Leon Davidson, a figure whose background strengthens his credibility. While completing his doctorate in engineering at Columbia University, he’d been hand-picked to work on the Manhattan Project, and afterward he’d served as a supervising engineer at Los Alamos labs. As Davidson explained in his 1959 essay on the topic, the US Air Force had had the capability of altering enemy radar returns since 1950, through the use of a device that captured, modified, and amplified radar impulses, sending them back to show inaccurate heading, range, and speed. He describes widespread military use of technology that manufactures so-called “galloping ghosts,” or radar blips that don’t correspond with actual aircraft. Just a couple years before Davidson wrote his essay, Aviation Research and Development magazine published a story about just this sort of ECM technology entering the public aviation industry, being sold and used for the training of radar operators. And it has since been declassified that in the early 1960s, under Project Palladium, American pilots purposely penetrated the perimeters of Russian airspace to gather data, much as some believed the Russians had done over the capital in 1952, and they made strategic use of this radar-manipulating ECM technology in the process. Interestingly, the newly released UFO report drops some hints that this may remain a viable explanation for UAP when it concedes that some of the unusual flight characteristics of UAP might be attributable to “spoofing” or “signature management.” But unlike the CIA, Leon Davidson did not attribute these galloping ghosts to Russia. Rather, Davidson concluded, “Since 1951, the CIA has caused or sponsored saucer sightings for its own purposes… [through the] military use of ECM on a classified basis unknown to the radar observers who were involved” (emphasis added).

But why? Why would the CIA want to create UFO sightings? Even if they were withholding information about such operations during their 1952 meetings with ATIC and wanted to deflect suspicion for such a psychological operation onto the Russians, their reasoning seems sound. What purpose would it serve to create a mass hysteria that might weaken our capability to respond to an actual threat? Interestingly, after their investigation, the CIA organized a secret panel of scientists to further weigh in on the topic. This meeting, called the “Robertson Panel” after its presiding expert, the Pentagon’s director of the Weapons Systems Evaluations Group, Dr. Howard Percy Robertson, was composed of astronomers, radar experts, rocket scientists, and nuclear physicists. While they concluded that UFOs were nothing but visual misperceptions and sensor anomalies, they recognized the threat of a UFO panic and recommended training military personnel to recognize phenomena often mistaken for UFOs. Furthermore, they recommended a campaign to debunk as many sightings as possible, a task that fell to Ruppelt’s Project Blue Book. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for our study, they advised that civilian organizations of UFO enthusiasts be closely monitored, as they had the potential to irresponsibly influence public thought on UFOs and could be used “for subversive purposes.” This final recommendation, however, seems to have been anticipated, and a suggestion had been made that perhaps one way to monitor UFO groups was to fake UFO sightings and scrutinize the resulting eyewitness accounts and public reactions. Days before the Robertson Panel, Captain Ruppelt received a memo from a Dr. Howard Cross, a scientist working at a private research institute that had been tasked with analyzing UFO data, under the codename Project Stork. Cook proposed a “controlled experiment” in which “different types of aerial activity should be secretly and purposely scheduled” in order to monitor the “steady flow of reports from ordinary civilian observers, in addition to those by military and other official observers,” who would likewise be kept in the dark about the operation. This sounds an awful lot like what Leon Davidson would years later accuse the CIA of perpetrating, and it seems to hint at a motive for doing so, a psychological operation, or PSYOP, with American citizen, both civilian and enlisted, as its subjects.

Captain Edward Ruppelt. Public domain.

This leads to the inevitable question of whether the CIA actually would engage in a psychological experiments on U.S. citizens. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the history of CIA exploits must be aware that not only are they quite capable of such operations, they’ve been caught conducting them! On the same day that President Truman had made the Air Force a separate branch of the armed forces—the day that Kenneth Arnold’s Army Air Force Intelligence contacts Brown and Davidson had died in a fiery plane crash carrying material supposedly ejected from a UFO—he also turned the wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, into the Central Intelligence Agency, thereby consolidating all military intelligence arms into one organization. After that, this powerful government agency operated with carte blanche and no meaningful oversight. Some indication of its strange and illegal practices became public knowledge in the 1970s, when during an investigation of their practices, Congress demanded information on their Project MK-ULTRA. This topic is itself a rabbit hole deserving of its own episode or series, but in short, after the agency attempted to destroy documentation of the project, Congress nevertheless learned that under MK-ULTRA, the CIA conducted extensive mind control experiments using hypnosis and psychoactive narcotics. With what we know the CIA was capable of in MK-ULTRA, faking some UFO flights and encouraging UFOlogists to believe outrageous stories, perhaps in order to gauge how utterly public opinion can be manipulated, certainly no longer seems beyond the pale. And once spoofing radar and using balloons or experimental aircraft to prompt UFO reports became boring, who’s to say they wouldn’t have taken this further and engaged in truly invasive psychological operations on UFO witnesses?

Take UFO nut George Adamski as a possible subject for such an operation. In 1952, Adamski, a Californian restaurant proprietor who used to hold forth on mysticism and UFOs in informal lectures at his café, claimed to have been taken aboard a spacecraft in the desert, learning that UFOs were piloted by peace-loving ETs from Venus. In retrospect, Adamski appears to be a hoaxer with a penchant for incorporating the politics of his associates into his contact stories. For example, he was involved with treasonous Nazi sympathizer William Pelley, and in a curious coincidence, his Venusians are described as blond Nordic-looking fellows whose shoes leave the swastika symbol in their footprints. But as my principal source Mirage Men by Mark Pilkinton points out, Adamski’s contact story appeared and was widely circulated only months after the Washington flyovers, just when records show the CIA was thinking about how to defuse UFO panic. Suddenly Adamski comes along saying don’t worry, the ETs are friendly and neutral, and his story becomes so widely known that he was fielding meetings with royalty and the Pope. Leon Davidson believed that Adamski was a CIA tool, and Adamski’s later stories seem to betray what might have really happened to him in the desert. As Adamski described his subsequent encounters, his Venusian friends picked him up and drove him out to the desert in black Pontiacs, where they served him mysterious beverages and showed him images on a screen. These descriptions sound an awful lot like Adamski, the impressionable friend of a convicted seditionist, may have been an early subject of CIA drugging and brainwashing a year before MK-ULTRA’s official sanctioning.

George Adamski with a famous photo he took of a UFO…which turned out to be a lamp.

One further possible example may serve to illustrate the feasibility that the CIA could have gone much further than just faking UFO sightings in their creation of the UFO myth. In 1958, a few years before the first widely publicized alien abduction story told by Betty and Barney Hill in the U.S., a Brazilian farmer named Villas Boas disclosed to a UFO investigator that in October the previous year, he had been abducted by a UFO. He and his brother had seen a mysterious flying red light over their fields, and later, when he was working the soil alone at night to avoid the heat, it had returned, shaped like an egg, with something spinning at great speed atop it, fluorescent red light emitting from all over the craft. He tried to flee, but men in unusual clothing that sound suspiciously like protective suits, complete with fabric head coverings and stiff gloves, sprang out and seized him, carrying him within, where they stripped him, wiped some kind of fluid over him with sponges, gassed him with some kind of fog, and then forced him to have sex with a beautiful woman. After being deposited back on the field, Boas returned home, where his sister noticed severe bruising around his chin. He vomited a yellow fluid and afterward suffered a days-long illness consisting of lesions, body aches, and eye irritation. It would be very easy to dismiss this as a tall tale told to a UFOlogist, perhaps even with some coaxing, but 20 years later, in 1978, a former CIA operative, Bosco Nedelcovic, who had served the agency in Latin America from 1956 to 1963, revealed to another UFOlogist that he had been a part of a Project Mirage that had purposely faked UFO encounters all over the world. Nedelcovic confirms the Villas Boas abduction from the abductors’ point of view, explaining that they had made Boas the subject of a hallucinogenic drug test as part of an experiment in psychological warfare. By Nedelcovic’s telling, the craft was a helicopter fitted with unusual lights and other equipment, which accords well with Boas’s description. Detecting Boas alone in his field with heat-sensors, they sprayed him with an aerosol drug and descended, accidentally striking his chin against the helicopter deck as they hauled him aboard to conduct some other, undisclosed experiments on him. This story, while entirely uncorroborated and unconfirmed, does cause one to wonder how widespread the CIA’s MK-ULTRA operations ranged, and how entangled they might have been in UFO disinformation.

On further consideration of all this, of course, it’s rather easy to discount everything. The Washington flyovers were a combination of weather causing radar errors and meteors being mistaken for aircraft. There is no irrefutable evidence that the CIA ever used ECM to manufacture UFO sightings, or that their MK-ULTRA operations were ever applied toward convincing people they had been abducted by aliens. Adamski was a loony, or a liar, or both. Villas Boas had been terribly ill and hallucinated his entire ordeal. Nedelcovic had given a UFOlogist exactly what he wanted, a humdinger of a government cover-up story for which there is no proof. At the same time, though, these don’t seem impossible. Might the US government or an adversary undertake to purposely create UFO reports? Yes. One example of this strategy was a proposed approach to toppling the Gaddafi regime in Libya in the 1980s, when the US considered manipulating radar to create aircraft sightings in order to sow paranoia and plant the idea that US forces were commencing an invasion. Would the CIA really go so far as to drug and brainwash people into believing they’d been abducted by UFOs just as an experiment in psychological warfare, or for some other purpose? MK-ULTRA shows us they were absolutely capable of the drugging and brainwashing. And other American military PSYOPs cement the willingness of the US government to leverage superstition and fantasy to achieve their ends. In the early 1950s, the Air Force projected a recording from a plane hidden in the clouds above the Philippines, convincing villagers that the voice of god was threatening to curse them if they aided communist insurgents. In a further operation against these same insurgents, they made them believe that their territories were haunted by an aswang, a kind of vampire legend, by planting corpses that they’d left puncture marks on and drained of blood. So, this UFO conspiracy theory, when one analyzes it closely, starts to seem plausible, and far easier to believe than the theory that extra-terrestrials have regularly visited our world for decades, having somehow still not learned whatever it was they were trying to learn, and that it is this the government is hiding from us. But for the theory that the UFO myth is actually the product of longstanding PSYOPs and disinformation operations to be believable, what it needs is some kind of evidence, perhaps in the form of a confession by a former government disinformation agent. Well… as you’ll hear in the conclusion of this series, such confessions exist. It only remains to be decided whether they can be trusted.

Images of Villas Boas and the story he told. Note the protective suits of his abductors, and the resemblance of the vehicle to a helicopter (with the revolving “cupola” atop it).

Further Reading

Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. Skyhorse, 2010.

UFO Disinfo: Part One - Roswell, Maury Island, and Beyond.

Something fell from the skies into onto the desert in June of 1947. Roswell, New Mexico, rancher Mac Brazel and his son Vernon discovered its debris field, which according to them included “rubber strips, tinfoil, [and] a rather tough paper and sticks.” Later that month, Mac read about the “flying saucer” sighting by Kenneth Arnold above Washington state, the incident that really kicked off the modern UFO era. Thinking this debris might possibly be the remains of such a saucer, Mac stored it and contacted the sheriff, who in turn contacted the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office at Roswell Army Air Field. In early June, the story hit the press when an official release from the Roswell Army Air Field stated that the “many rumors of flying discs became a reality” because the Bomb Group’s intelligence office had been “fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc.” Flying saucer mania went wild again for a brief time, but before long, higher authorities retracted the “flying disc” press release and asserted that the debris had only been the remains of a fallen weather balloon equipped with a radar reflector. The conspiracy theories and grand myth about the Roswell Incident did not spring up immediately. Far from it, in fact, it seems that most accepted the retraction and thought little more of it for more than thirty years. In the 1980s, of course, UFOlogists, eagerly seeking evidence of government cover-ups, latched on to the Roswell report and made of it a grand affair, with not only recovered alien spacecraft but also recovered aliens. In the 1990s, the official US Air Force explanation emerged, and it did indeed indicate some cover-up, clarifying that the radar-reflecting weather balloon recovered was actually part of the secret and sensitive Project Mogul, an attempt to gather data on Soviet nuclear bomb tests with equipment carried aloft by weather balloons, a kind of early form of reconnaissance drone. This version of events seems to explain much: Mac Brazel’s description accords well with the debris a Project Mogul balloon would leave behind, and any secrecy surrounding the debris can easily be understood. In fact, there appears to be corroboration from records showing a Mogul balloon had been launched on June 4th from Alamogordo and subsequently lost. But even if this itself was a cover story, there is no shortage of other, terrestrial candidates for what might have crashed that the government would have wanted hushed up. It was near enough to the White Sands test range that any Top Secret experimental rocket or aircraft may have crashed in the Roswell desert. If that were the case, though, why would the government still be keeping it a secret today? An even more curious question is why on earth the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group, an elite squadron that was no stranger to keeping classified information secure, having dropped the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan in 1945, would issue a press release declaring that this was a downed flying saucer, thereby attracting attention to the crash rather than covering it up. Is it possible that the story had been purposely planted for some other reason besides the concealment of what crashed in the desert? There were significant fears among some in the military that Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers were some kind of advanced Soviet aircraft. Could the story have been intended to convince Soviets that we had captured one of their strange craft or that we had developed one of our own, or might it simply have been a lure for spies? One thing is for certain, this has become a definite pattern for the U.S. government: discouraging belief in UFOs with one wagging finger while they encourage UFOlogists to believe with another beckoning hand.

As I write this, I am still awaiting the release of the Pentagon UFO report that inspired me to tackle this topic. For some time, I have been curious about whether some other purpose is being served by the recent release of classified information about UFOs. In December of 2017, back when the New York Times reported on the existence of the Pentagon’s black-money funded Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and spread leaked video of Naval UFO encounters all over the media, I could buy that the story was a genuine piece of investigative journalism, prompted by a whistleblower, revealing information the government had not wanted revealed. Yet last year, when the Pentagon officially acknowledged the authenticity of the leaked videos, and when the existence of their active UAP Task Force was revealed by being openly mentioned in a Senate committee report, I began to wonder if something else might not be going on. Now, after the Coronavirus relief package included a requirement that the Pentagon disclose what it knows about UFOs, I find myself even more suspicious. The Pentagon has already briefed the House Intelligence Committee, and we may never know if what they told Congress was significantly more than what they end up revealing publicly in the report due before the end of June. However, simple logic and familiarity with the government’s handling of the UFO topic in the past tells us that we should not take what they have to say at face value. Early in June, the Times published a leak of the forthcoming UAP report’s contents, indicating that it will offer no evidence that UFOs encountered in the last couple decades are extra-terrestrial or that they are not, but that it will disavow the notion that they represent classified American technology, suggesting that Russia or China may have outpaced us scientifically when it comes to hypersonic technology, developing aircraft or drones capable of greater acceleration and maneuverability, and even trans-medium capabilities, flying and then submerging into the ocean, all without any discernible exhaust plumes. The problem with this is that the U.S. government does not typically want to show its hand so blatantly to the rest of the world. How does it help our standing on the world’s stage, our image of military primacy, to announce to the world that we’ve fallen behind? How does it help us to learn more about a rival’s technology to indicate that we are actively investigating it? The Times article states that some elements of their report will remain classified, which they acknowledge will continue to fuel UFO conspiracy theories, but this begs the question, why is our utter befuddlement at this technology being declassified? Unless we are not so clueless when it comes to this technology as the Pentagon is making out. Unless, as we have seen time and time again in the history of the intelligence world’s disinformation games surrounding the topic of UFOs, they are merely manipulating public perceptions to sow doubt and confusion. I know some of you may be thinking, this sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense… how unlike this podcast! But my principal source is an excellent book that I highly recommend, Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs by Mark Pilkington, which views the UFO phenomenon and the US government’s disinformation related to it through a critical and rationalist lens. I hope you’ll see by the end of this series that, when it comes to government disinformation for espionage and national security purposes, conspiracy is the name of the game, and despite some reliance on conspiracy theory, this serves as a far more rational explanation for UFOs than visitation by Little Grey Men.

Maj. Jesse A. Marcel holding pieces of foil lined material related to the Roswell incident. Courtesy, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Photograph Collection, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Library, Arlington, Texas. - https://library.uta.edu/roswell/images

Certainly U.S. military intelligence did not invent the core elements of the UFO myth. Even before Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, science-fiction was planting those seeds. In one 1946 issue, for example, the sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories featured a piece on mysterious “circle-winged” aircraft appearing over San Francisco along with a horror story depicting alien abduction long before the first recorded claims of such experiences. And the editor of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer, would himself be drawn into the flying saucer excitement of 1947. Just days after Kenneth Arnold’s much publicized saucer sighting, Palmer received a letter from one Harold Dahl, a harbor patrolman in Washington State’s Puget Sound, which described his boat being buzzed by balloonish, doughnut-like UFOs near Maury Island. The account described how five of these craft were circling a sixth that appeared to be failing and about to crash before it ejected some molten rock material, some of which struck Dahl’s son, burning his arm, and killed his dog. According to his account, after Dahl told his harbor patrol superior about the incident, a mysterious man in a black suit came to see him and warned him against spreading the story, an early example of the “Men in Black” stories about government men or eerie human-like entities mimicking men that would often accompany UFO accounts in later years. Dahl disregarded this figure’s warning, though, and wrote to Palmer, enclosing a piece of the slag-like material released by his UFO. Palmer then contacted pilot Kenneth Arnold, the original saucer-sighter, who was familiar with Washington state, and offered him $200 to investigate the Maury Island Incident. Arnold himself was visited by some government types after his first sighting, although these identified themselves by name as Brown and Davidson, representatives of Army Air Force Intelligence, questioning Arnold about the aircraft he had seen over Mt. Rainier, as well as about the Maury Island Incident Ray Palmer had asked him to investigate. His interest piqued, Arnold flew out to Tacoma to begin his investigation, but he found Dahl rather dim-witted, and thought the material Dahl showed him, which supposedly had been dropped from a UFO, was regular old lava rock. But when Arnold met Dahl’s supposed “superior,” Fred Crisman, things began to get stranger.

Crisman was an altogether more suave and convincing figure, to whom Dahl deferred even though it wasn’t Crisman who had witnessed the flying doughnuts. Crisman spoke confidently to Arnold, asserting that these aircraft could not possibly have been American, and suggesting they might represent the development of captured Nazi technology. Kenneth Arnold began to get paranoid. He already thought it strange that his lodgings had been arranged for him anonymously, and after a journalist called him saying there had been a tip about his saucer investigation, he began to think his hotel room was bugged. He then called his Air Force Intelligence contact, Brown, who strangely refused to take his first call and called him back from a pay phone. Brown said he and Davidson would fly right out, and thereafter, Arnold received another phone call from a journalist saying he’d received another tip about an Air Force investigation. Arnold searched his room for listening devices but found none, leading him to suspect that perhaps, inexplicably, Brown and Davidson had been leaking info about the Maury Island investigation to the press. Counterintuitively, though, if these Air Force Intelligence agents wanted a saucer flap in the news, they arrived and insisted the whole thing was a hoax cooked up by Dahl and Crisman. Taking the samples of UFO-discharged rocks, Brown and Davidson boarded a military plane bound for California, but the plane crashed, killing both Air Force Intelligence agents on August 1st, 1947, the very day that the Air Force became a separate branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Thereafter, as a disturbed Kenneth Arnold wrestled with the notion that Brown and Davidson had been killed for their involvement with the Maury Island investigation, another Air Force representative arrived, one Major George Sander, who took Arnold out to an industrial smelting site near Maury Island, where piles of rocks identical to those Dahl had shown him could be found, making an effort to assure Arnold, once again, that the whole thing had been a hoax. But Arnold remained leery. According to him, he went back to Dahl’s house, but to his astonishment, he found it completely deserted: “there wasn’t a stick of furniture inside.” Deeply troubled, Arnold flew home, making only a brief a stop to refuel. Upon taking off again, though, his engine failed, necessitating an emergency landing that damaged his landing gear. Investigating after the fact, he said he discovered his fuel valve had been cut, leading him to suspect that he, perhaps like Brown and Davidson, had been a target of government assassination.

Newspaper headline reporting the plane crash that killed Brown and Davidson. Public Domain.

Certainly it can be argued that Arnold might have been imagining things. Was it so strange that a hotel room had been arranged for him? And is it such a mystery that the press had gotten wind of his UFO investigation? He was, after all, a very public figure since his own rather famous UFO encounter. And isn’t it possible that some elements of this story were exaggerated when Arnold wrote about them after the fact. For example, Kenneth Arnold claims to have had yet another UFO sighting during his flight to Tacoma to investigate Dahl’s claims, which during the Summer of Saucers in 1947 probably seemed reasonable, as it was suspected these mystery aircraft might become more and more commonplace, but in retrospect seems a bit hard to believe and smacks of embellishment. If Arnold took liberties with his story, perhaps we can disregard his claims of Dahl’s house being vacated, or of his own plane being sabotaged. What we cannot dismiss is the plane crash that killed Air Force Intelligence men and UFO investigators Brown and Davidson, as that is a matter of record. However, the engine fire that caused their B-25 to crash may indeed have been an accident. Conspiracy theorists refuse to believe in coincidence, though, so it is all too easy to presume that the crash was intentional and related to their investigation. Had Brown and Davidson gone rogue, leaking info to the press? And if so, would that have represented such a national security threat that the two had to be killed? Why not simply arrest them for treason if they were releasing classified information? One possible explanation is that these Air Force Intelligence men were believed to be Soviet moles. Less than a year earlier, the top secret Venona counter-intelligence project had uncovered through the decryption of some 3,000 messages the existence of Soviet moles embedded at every level of the U.S. government, even among presidential administrators and on the staff of the Manhattan Project, as well as in the Army Air Force. Considering this context, it’s feasible that Brown and Davidson’s seemingly odd insistence on communicating with Arnold via pay phone can be explained by their being spies looking for intel on America’s secret atomic aircraft. It may then also be suggested that the entire Maury Island sighting had been a honeypot, a false story planted as a lure meant to draw out Soviet moles intent on sniffing out secret U.S. technology, and that it worked. Supporting this notion is the surprising background of Fred Crisman, who formerly flew with the Army Air Force in the Pacific Theater and who didn’t actually seem to be Harold Dahl’s “superior” at all. Further rumor had it that Crisman had also worked for the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, before popping up at Maury Island, and his connections to the intelligence world would years later lead to his being named by District Attorney Jim Garrison as possibly being involved in JFK’s assassination. But of course, this is speculation. By the cold light of skepticism, Crisman was just a hoaxer, and Kenneth Arnold a storyteller with a taste for fame, and Brown and Davidson’s fiery death a tragic accident that had nothing to do with their investigation of the Maury Island Incident.

A month after the tragic plane crash that claimed the lives of Air Force Intelligence agents Brown and Davidson, General Nathan Twining penned an internal Air Force memo indicating that the flying saucer phenomenon was “real and not visionary,” but undermining the Roswell myth, he lamented a “lack of physical evidence in the shape of crashed recovered exhibits.” Twining suggested two possibilities: that the saucers were a top-secret American project about which the newly formed Air Force was kept ignorant, or that they represented some advanced technology developed by a foreign nation. The fears that Soviets had reverse-engineered secret Nazi technology were palpable, prompting the launch of Project Sign, whose remit was to investigate the nature and origin of flying saucers. Based in Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the hope of the project was clearly to obtain some of this supposed flight technology for the U.S., for right there on base was the Air Technical Intelligence Center, America’s own apparatus for reverse-engineering captured German aircraft. The next year, Project Sign issued its report, Estimate of the Situation. Legend has it this report declared that saucer sightings did not match anything in the German blueprints they had, and that all evidence pointed to some non-human technology. But we don’t actually know what Project Sign’s report concluded, because its contents upset the Air Force Chief of Staff so much that he ordered all copies destroyed. In the early days of the summer of 1947, as the Air Force came to be an independent service branch of the armed forces, saucer panic may have seemed a boon, ensuring ample budget apportionment to the branch of the military tasked with protecting our skies. But after a year of being constantly bombarded by mistaken sightings, along with, we might assume, sightings of some of our own aircraft that we didn’t want people talking about, the U.S. Air Force had had enough of flying saucers and seemed to want to extricate themselves from the whole phenomenon. To this end, and perhaps partly as a backlash against the supposed Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis in Project Sign’s report, the Air Force launched a new UFO investigation, Project Grudge, this one operating under the assumption that flying saucers could not possibly be real, seeking to debunk all saucer sightings, and generating a public relations campaign intended to convince the world that flying saucers are nonsense. The fruit of their campaign, an article in the Saturday Evening Post, convincingly attributes all saucer sightings to Aviator’s Vertigo, balloons, and the reflection of light on clouds and aircraft canopies. The article went a long way toward laying the flying saucer excitement to bed.

Project Grudge's report of August 1949. Public Domain.

In December 1949, though, flying saucer mania returned. True, a popular magazine for men, featured an article by one Donald Keyhoe entitled “Flying Saucers Are Real,” in which it was alleged that flying saucers were indeed genuine aircraft, were alien in origin, and were being actively hushed up by the government. It is true that Keyhoe was a writer of pulp fiction, but his authority on this topic derived from his background as a Marine aviator, and he claimed to have reached his conclusions after interviewing numerous officials who had stonewalled his investigation. Thereafter, Commander Robert McLaughlin, Officer-in-charge of the Naval Unit at White Sands Proving Ground in Alamogordo wrote a follow-up for True magazine detailing a saucer sighting by five Navy scientists while observing a weather balloon. These articles served to refute the Saturday Evening Post article and paint it as part of the cover-up. But might there be more to these competing articles than meets the eye? Mark Pilkington, author of my principal source Mirage Men, points out that in 1949, the Navy and the Air Force were locked in a bitter rivalry. Supporters of the newly formed Air Force had begun to spread the idea that the Navy was obsolete, as future wars would be won exclusively through strategic intercontinental bombing. When the new Secretary of State, himself a proponent of this idea of Air Force supremacy, cancelled a Navy supercarrier project in favor of an Air Force bomber project, it meant war. Officials in the Navy command structure struck back by leaking evidence that Air Force generals had dealt fraudulently with certain military contractors in building their bombers. The entire affair got so out of hand that House Armed Services Committee hearing had to be convened to squash their beef. Thus, later that year, when two Navy men stoked the flying saucer fires after the Air Force had expended so much energy to dampen them, it is perhaps not so great a leap to suggest that it was just another barrage in their internecine conflict rather than a genuine disclosure of UFO activity. But this remains, as with almost all aspects of this topic, conjecture.

We begin to see a pattern here. As at Roswell, we see different people or different forces, within the military pushing and pulling, denying the existence of flying saucers while simultaneously insisting on it. One further story illustrates this yet again, if it can be believed. In March 1950, the same month that True magazine ran its second piece on flying saucers, a mystery lecturer presented to science students at University of Denver about flying saucers landing near Aztec, New Mexico, not far from Roswell, and that the military found several dead extra-terrestrials within, which they had since been studying, along with their recovered craft. The Denver Post later outed the lecturer as an oil man named Silas Newton, and further investigation showed that Newton had gotten his information from a nutty Nazi sympathizer, Leo Gebauer, who despite his eccentricities had at one time worked for Air Research Company in Pheonix, Arizona. But rather than some state secrets to which Gebauer had become privy, the Aztec story turned out to have been taken from a hoax published in the Aztec Independent Review a couple years earlier. Nothing to see here… except that Silas Newton, in his personal journals, wrote about two men from a “highly secret US government entity” approaching him, informing him that they knew his story was a hoax but encouraging him to continue telling it nonetheless, promising to provide protection to both him and Gebauer if they did so. It’s easy to dismiss this as BS from a BS artist, but interestingly, two years after this, when Newton and Gebauer were convicted of fraud for selling people mining gear they claimed was reverse-engineered from extra-terrestrial tech, their sentences were suspended. Had they finally called in a favor from the government men whose purposes their outrageous tales somehow served? And why were these shadowy figures, if they existed, so interested in the spreading of a flying saucer hoax among university students? Interestingly, Newton’s lecture concluded with a questionnaire to determine how believable these educated young people found the story. And there were further reports of follow-up surveys among the students conducted by none other than Air Force Intelligence. Having been foiled in their attempts to suppress flying saucer excitement, had the Air Force then decided to conduct some market research to see how they might use flying saucer tales to their own advantage?

Front page Denver Post story about fraudsters Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer. Public Domain.

Interestingly, major elements of this story about the recovery of alien spacecraft and corpses in the desert at Aztec, although a known hoax, would decades later show up as part of the resurgent myth of the Roswell UFO crash. And promised proof of this story would be used as a carrot by Air Force Intelligence on numerous occasions, coaxing UFO investigators to inform on their fellow UFOlogists and convincing them to seed disinformation into the growing community of UFO investigators. Things were going to get a whole lot crazier from there, and people were going to be driven a whole lot crazier, as you will see in the continuation of this series on UFO Disinfo. In the meanwhile, I await the release of the Pentagon UFO report with bated breath, certain that nothing of real interest will be contained therein and at the same time hopeful there may be something of interest to our topic. However, as I further unravel the Gordian knot of US counter-intelligence and perception management that has been all bound up with UFO sightings from the very beginning, I begin to doubt that this is anything more than stagecraft. Some in the upper echelons of the American intelligence and security apparatus seem to have concluded that it may benefit us to acknowledge recent sightings (and only the recent ones) and to admit or feign ignorance about them. And come to think of it in those terms, this is nothing we haven’t seen before. The only real difference seems to be that, because of advances in technology, it’s no longer possible to blame these sightings on vertigo and optical illusion.

Further Reading

Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. Skyhorse, 2010.

The Beautiful Corpse of Helen Jewett

The New York City police force did not come to be until 1844, after a surge in population and poverty resulted in a significant increase in vice and crime. Before that, the city had employed a corps of 80 civilian patrolmen, the Nightwatch, who stood sentry on street corners every evening. One early Sunday morning in April, 1836, two of these watchmen, Dennis Brink and George Noble, had the final few quiet hours of their shift in lower Manhattan shattered by a sudden alarm being raised from a nearby brothel on Thomas Street. “Fire!” cried a woman from its doorway, prompting Brink and Noble to investigate. The woman, one Rosina Townsend, madam of the establishment, led the watchmen to the room of one resident, a prostitute named Helen Jewett, who was found murdered in her bed, three deep and bloody wounds on her head, and her bedclothes still smoldering from a fire that had presumably been set to conceal the crime. Brink and Noble questioned the madam and the other ladies in residence at the brothel. They discovered that the last visitor Helen Jewett had seen was a young regular of Jewett’s who went by the name Frank Rivers at the brothel. The madam indicated that she had seen Rivers in Jewett’s room late Saturday evening and did not believe he had left, and that shortly before discovering the fire in Jewett’s room, she had been awakened when someone left the house by its back door. Investigating the yard, the watchmen discovered a hatchet, and in an adjacent yard, they found a discarded cloak with a fringe that witnesses insisted belonged to the young man Frank Rivers. After some further investigation, the watchmen learned that Rivers’s real name was Richard Robinson, the 19-year-old son of a landed Connecticut state legislator. Robinson had been living in a boardinghouse and clerking for a local mercantile establishment. When it was suggested that the hatchet the watchmen had discovered belonged to the store where Robinson clerked, the watchmen determined to track down their young suspect and haul him back to the scene of the crime. The watchmen found Robinson still asleep; Robinson’s roommate, James Tew, answered and confirmed that he and Robinson had visited the brothel the night before, though Tew had departed earlier than his roommate. Rousing Robinson from his sleep, the watchmen accompanied the young men back to the Thomas Street brothel and confronted them with the crime. In their estimation, Richard Robinson was all too composed when receiving the news, denying his guilt in the murder but also not appearing surprised or upset. As was the custom at the time, a coroner’s jury was convened, composed of numerous random people who who happened to be present to weigh the facts as they were known and determine on the spot whether anyone should be accused. The jury declared that the deceased had come to her end by the hand of Richard Robinson, and the youth was immediately taken to jail to await a trial that would turn out to be one of the most notorious and sensational in American history.

In my last post, I mentioned in passing that James Gordon Bennett, the enterprising editor of the New York Herald penny paper, made something of a name for himself with his sensational coverage of the infamous Robinson-Jewett murder trial, actually pioneering the printing of extra editions in his zeal to publish more and more material about this scandalous crime. While this crime might not be so well known today, it was the most notorious criminal case of its time, perhaps only rivaled by the trial of Levi Weeks for the murder of Elma Sands, which I focused an episode on some years ago. In my discussion of Levi Weeks’s murder trial, I presented the notion of that trial and the many popular narrative accounts of its court proceedings representing the dawn of the popular true crime genre in America. If that is so, then this case, less than 40 years later, which was even more heavily written and read about, not just in published court records as in the Weeks trial but also in the cheap penny papers that were then becoming more and more popular, represents the full realization of the public’s thirst for salacious tales of sex and murder. This case has been written about in much detail in intersectional studies of gender and class in early 19th century America, and it has been picked apart as a seminal moment in the history of American journalism. But in these academic analyses, the tragic narratives of the victim and the accused and the newspaperman for whom the case became an obsession tend to get lost. Therefore, in retelling this legendary historical true crime tale, I hope to better emphasize the real human stories at its center as I further explore the mystery of this unsolved crime. And at the core of this mystery is a forgotten woman, remembered to posterity by an alias, which newspapers at the time didn’t even print correctly. The Helen Jewett of public imagination was the creation of an infatuated newspaperman, a fictional character constructed more to sell newspapers than to provide any real insight into the life taken that spring night.

James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, who turned the Helen Jewett murder into a sensational press phenomenon. Public Domain image.

The sensational news coverage of the Helen Jewett murder began the very next morning, when James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the penny paper the New York Herald gained entrance to Jewett’s room and viewed her body. With him was an artist who would create lithographs of the scene for his newspaper, but the first-person account Bennett afterward wrote and published describing what he saw in her room gave a rather more vivid impression than could any illustration. It should be said that Bennett was something of an odd character, rather a joke to many in New York City. He had formerly been the editor of a partisan newspaper but had broken away to start a penny paper because he chafed under the editorial constraints of political subsidization and wanted independence. However, in order to break into the penny paper field, he found he could not focus on the kind of credible banking and political news on which he wanted to report, for the readers of the new penny papers wanted reports on robberies and murders. Nevertheless, he tried to have it both ways, reporting on crime as well as on Wall Street and printing political attacks on the editors of rival newspapers. These takedown pieces, criticizing the political affiliations and views of competitors, led to a series of physical assaults, when newspaper editors he had criticized actually beat him with their canes in the middle of Wall Street. It got to the point that one rival penny paper declared Bennett to be “[c]ommon flogging property.” It was at this low point in his career and life that Bennett entered Helen Jewett’s room and seemed to see in her some reflection of himself. He saw her expensive clothing and jewelry, so out of place in her brothel room, and he understood she was a high-priced prostitute who made a successful living. He saw that she was literate, with editions of several periodicals and volumes of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron on her shelves, and even a portrait of Byron upon her wall. To Bennett, she may have seemed like someone who was struggling for upward mobility in the rigid class structure of New York, much like himself, and also like him, she had been struck down for her audacity in trying to make something of herself. One volume among her books especially seemed to confirm this characterization: Flowers of Loveliness by Lady Blessington, about the author’s rise from a poor background and promiscuous lifestyle to become a countess through marriage to a nobleman. When the watchman at the scene removed the covering and showed her body to Bennett, he became oddly smitten. In his editorial, he made of it a strange Gothic scene, like a scene from a story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which he found her “beautiful female corpse” strikingly attractive. “’My God!’” he claims to have cried out. “’How like a statue! I can scarcely conceive that form to be a corpse.’” Three times in the article he compares her body to a polished marble statue, claiming he was “lost in admiration of this extraordinary sight.” The description seems less than forthright. It makes no mention of the blood from her wounds and describes the damage by the fire as providing only a bronzing effect to one side of this otherwise white marble sculpture. Whether or not his description was accurate or his reaction to the sight genuine, Bennett’s coverage of the murder resulted in a great increase in sales for his newspaper. Bennett’s tasteless exhibition of Jewett’s beautiful corpse turned out to be his path to success, and he had no intention of letting it go.

During the ensuing months before the trial began in June, Bennett published article after article about Jewett’s murder, and other papers, seeing his success, followed suit, although sometimes taking an alternative view of the crime. While Bennett would go on to raise a variety of alternative suspects to Robinson, even endorsing a widespread conspiracy theory that Robinson had been framed in order to protect the real killer, a more wealthy and powerful client of Jewett, other papers tended to favor Robinson’s guilt. While Bennett portrayed Jewett as a glamorous figure of great beauty who had often been seen on New York streets in her silk green dress and fine jewelry, others suggested she was actually rather ugly and overweight. Bennett portrayed her as a confident and intelligent young woman who had rejected a domestic life in favor of freedom both financial and sexual, but others described her as a depraved and manipulative harlot who had rejected morality and paid the price. One thing that most coverage agreed upon, though, was that Helen Jewett, whom many newspapers called Ellen through some error, had previously been on a more traditional path in life, with more socially acceptable opportunities, but had been seduced away into a life of vice, making the story of her murder a powerful cautionary tale. Among the numerous versions of her life appearing in newspapers and afterward in pamphlets sold on the streets, some sense of her true biography can be discerned. One version had it that her real name was Maria Benson, an orphan of Boston with a kind guardian who had sent her away to a boarding school where a lustful merchant’s son had taken her innocence. Rather than bring shame to her guardian, she left for New York, hoping to find work, but was taken advantage of again by a man who ended up installing her in a brothel. This story, though, turns out to have been a lie that Helen herself invented a couple years before her murder and told in court to elicit sympathy when pressing charges against a young man who had assaulted her. Nevertheless, there appear to have been some element of truth in it. Alternative accounts also tell us she was orphaned and raised in the family of a guardian before her unfortunate seduction while away at boarding school, but rather than being from Boston, she was from Maine, and her guardian was a Judge named Western. One of these accounts suggest her seducer had actually drugged her to take her innocence, and that she ran away to Boston thinking herself too befouled to remain a part of Judge Western’s family, though the good judge was said to have searched for her. Another claims she was engaged to be married, but when her betrothed left town, a young rake forged letters claiming her fiancée had died and, under the pretense of accompanying her to some distant family, abducted her, took her innocence, and left her in a brothel. In yet another version, she was not trafficked as a prostitute but rather sought out the vocation herself with enthusiasm and succeeded in establishing herself among a clientele of young men from wealthy families who became enamored of not only her beauty but also her wit and intelligence.

A salacious depiction of Jewett’s exposed body in her burned bed. Public Domain image.

So obsessed with her was Bennett that it was he who ended up discovering the closest thing to the truth about Helen Jewett. Through one of her confidants, he learned that she was named Dorcas Dorrance, and she was from Augusta, Maine, where her parents had died when she was a baby. She had indeed been raised by a Judge Western like a sister to his daughters, and was thus well-educated. When she was sixteen, while on a trip to visit some distant family, she fell in love with a young bank cashier and gave up her innocence in a moment of passion. After the Judge’s family learned she had lost her virginity, she left in shame and became a prostitute, first in Portland, then Boston, and finally in New York. Bennett’s account was widely reprinted, and as it spread, so too did a rumor that the young man who took Helen’s, or rather Dorcas’s, virginity was actually one of Judge Western’s sons. This finally caused the true judge, Chief Justice Nathan Weston of the Maine State Supreme Court, to issue a statement, declaring he was the Judge Western of newspaper reports, and that his family had been slandered. Helen Jewett’s true name was Dorcas Doyen, he said, and after her mother died, he had not adopted her but rather taken her on as a servant, for her own father was a drunk. She had not been seduced, said Chief Justice Weston, but had chosen herself at age 17 to pursue a life of vice. But even this revelation does not make for a certain understanding of Jewett’s character, for others have suggested the judge chose to impugn her character in order to save face for his own family. It turns out that in 1830, the same year that the judge said Dorcas left them, one of his daughters discovered that her husband had been having an affair, a discovery that would later be used as grounds for their divorce. Was it possible that young Jewett’s seducer had been a son of the judge after all, a son-in-law? Had she been forced out of the household and driven into a life of prostitution at the insistence of the judge’s daughter, or by the judge himself, holding her to blame for the son-in-law’s infidelity? Or had she in fact seduced the husband of her employer’s daughter? What we find is that Helen Jewett, sometimes called Ellen Jewett, formerly alias Maria Benson, once an orphan named Dorcas Dorrance, or rather Dorcas Doyen, could be made into whatever the public wanted her to be: a hapless victim of male depravity, an intelligent woman who liberated herself from society’s expectations, or a wanton seductress who met an unsurprisingly grisly end as a result of the vicious life she had chosen. In this way, Helen Jewett became more legend than woman, and as typically happens with legends, she was scorned by many and revered by some.

The attention of the penny press to the Robinson-Jewett case and the crafting of a legendary Helen Jewett resulted in an early form of street demonstration and a kind of protest movement. Every day, crowds gathered at Bellevue jail, where Robinson was held, and at the Thomas Street brothel where Helen had been murdered and where, according to one of Bennett’s reports, her ghost could sometimes be glimpsed in a window. These crowds were divided into two groups, which could be discerned by their attire. Those who revered Jewett and wanted to see justice for her murder began wearing white fur hats with ribbons of black crepe, a style of headwear that came to be called a “Helen Jewett mourner.” Meanwhile, the young working-class men who believed Robinson was innocent and that, as Bennett’s Herald was known to suggest, the authorities were engaged in covering up for some more privileged and wealthy murderer, wore another style of hat called Robinson caps, as well as cloaks with a fringe like that which was being used as evidence against the young man they believed was innocent. Both of these were largely gangs of young men, just the sort that were blamed by moral reform societies, many of them female societies, for the kind of vice and violence that was corrupting the city and had led to the crime. In those years, many teen boys were sent to live without supervision in cities while they learned the ins and outs of some business as a clerk, just as young Richard Robinson had been. These numerous young men were often blamed for the vice and disorder in the city, whereas young women, who typically lived under supervision, were not. However, it was not just young men who were influenced by the story of Helen Jewett. Her story had been so sensationalized, her lifestyle so glorified as an alternative to domestic pursuits and factory work, that there were reports of girls running away from home at 15 years old and attempting to enter brothels, believing it was their ticket to a “fancy life.” In fact, so venerated had Helen Jewett become among some women that when her partially burned bedstead was finally hauled out of the Thomas Street brothel and left at the curb for junk, a mob of young women fell upon it, prizing away pieces of it to carry with them as if it were the True Cross.

A depiction of a guilty Robinson fleeing the scene of the murder. Public Domain image.

The wearers of Robinson caps and cloaks showed themselves to be a true menace, proving the moral reform societies right about the dangers of lawless young men running amok in the city. While some ministers in the city preaching about the evils of prostitution suggested that Robinson had performed a public service by ridding the world of Jewett, the young Robinson-supporters on the street took that awful sentiment further and acted on it. During the months before the trial, violent assaults by young clerks on prostitutes and other young women increased sharply, and afterward, numerous copycat crimes were perpetrated, perhaps by young men who wanted to be like Robinson or who hoped to convince the public that he had been innocent all along, since the real killer was still out there murdering. To that end, an anonymous letter taking credit for the crime was sent to Bennett, who promptly published it in the Herald. According to this letter, the murderer was another young clerk who had been rejected by Jewett and made an enemy of Robinson, giving him motive both to murder her and frame him. Rival newspapers accused Bennett of forging the letter, which may have been the case, but Robinson supporters were writing letters a lot those days. They sent letters, for example, to Rosina Townsend, the brothel madam, threatening harm to her if she testified, for they believed she had been paid off by the conspiracy to frame Robinson. And they certainly weren’t all talk, either. They broke up a meeting of the New York Moral Reform Society that was convened to discuss the Robinson-Jewett case by throwing stones at the women who had gathered there. And on May 24th, a mob of several hundred young Robinson supporters attacked a group of prostitutes as they left the courthouse in an attempt to intimidate them so that they would not testify at trial. Even during the trial itself, young clerks wearing Robinson cloaks and caps filled the courtroom, making lewd comments about prostitutes who approached the bar to testify, booing and hissing any witnesses against Robinson, and cheering for any testimony that helped to exonerate him. It seems altogether to have been a circus of a trial, resulting in Richard Robinson’s acquittal. However, this disturbance by his rowdy young supporters was not the only reason that Robinson would be acquitted.

The case against Robinson was circumstantial. The madam, Rosina Townsend, testified that Robinson had arrived at the brothel before 9pm, and the roommate, James Tew, testified that he had returned home before 1am. To my mind, there is a problem with this timeline, though, since the fire was discovered by Townsend around 3am, and it had not consumed much of Jewett’s bed or done much damage to her corpse, suggesting it had only recently been set. If Robinson had indeed set the fire before returning home at 1am, it would have had to be a very slow smoldering one not to be detected for two whole hours. However, this does not seem to have been Robinson’s line of defense. Rather, his attorney concentrated on establishing a more ironclad but apparently bogus alibi. They were able to get a respected store owner, one Mr. Furlong, to swear that Robinson had been at his store downtown at around 10:30pm, which if true would disprove the testimony of the brothel madam that he was in Helen Jewett’s room at that time. In truth, Mr. Furlong’s testimony not only contradicted Rosina Townsend’s testimony but also the statements of James Tew to the nightwatchmen the morning after the murder, when he said they had indeed visited the brothel together the night before. However, the judge instructed the jury to base their decision on the fact that either Mr. Furlong or Ms. Townsend were lying and implored them to consider the reputation of each witness in their decision. As a result, the jury predictably chose to believe the upstanding store owner over the brothel madam and took only 15 minutes to acquit Robinson. After the trial, though, one Mr. Wilson published a letter swearing that he had been present in Furlong’s store that Saturday night when Robinson was present, and it had not been any later than 8pm, which made it no alibi at all since the timing would no longer contradict Madame Townsend’s testimony. So Robinson was acquitted on what appears to have been dubious testimony, and thus was believed by many to have gotten away with the murder.

A depiction of Robinson looming over Jewett with the murder weapon. Public Domain image.

The fact is, though, that even without this false alibi on which Robinson’s lawyer had staked his fate, the case against Robinson was weak. The motive attributed to him was borne out of nothing but public rumor that Robinson was engaged to marry and had murdered Jewett because she had threatened to expose their relationship to embarrass him. Other, better corroborated rumors of how Robinson explained the entire scenario to close friends casts the entire affair in a different light. Robinson supposedly told confidants that he had resolved to stop visiting her, but Jewett, who had become enamored of him, begged him to visit her at least once more, on that Saturday, to which he agreed. A couple of days before their final assignation, Robinson had been working at the store where he clerked, opening boxes with the hatchet in question, which he remarked to a porter at the time was too dull to cut. He took the blunted hatchet with him, keeping it inside his cloak, meaning to have it sharpened that Saturday night, and on the way, he stopped at the brothel to keep his date with Helen Jewett. According to this story attributed to Robinson, he stayed with Helen until it was too late to get the hatchet sharpened. Helen begged him to come back for one more visit, pointing out a tear in his cloak that she said she could mend for him. Eventually, he acquiesced, leaving the cloak with her and the hatchet as well so that he would not have to carry it home and back again. Of course, this elaborate story, which his lawyer never had him tell in court and which appeared in a letter of uncertain authorship, could merely be a complex lie to allay the suspicions of those closest to him, if it were written by him at all, but according to a later New York Times article about the case, the porter at his store confirmed that he had indeed taken the hatchet to have it sharpened. Still, this may have been Robinson’s cover story for getting his hands on a weapon with which he could do away with Helen Jewett, but Robinson’s character and demeanor were a constant testament to his innocence. According to the nightwatchmen, he was emotionless upon seeing her body, yes, but also according to them, he appeared entirely unworried and when they came to his apartment that morning, appeared to have been sleeping soundly, coming with them without any apparent anxiety, seemingly entirely ignorant of the crime for which later that morning he would be arrested. Moreover, for the rest of his life, he consistently contended his innocence, even coming back to New York some twenty years after the trial and visiting the lawyer who had gotten him acquitted in order to reaffirm to his former counsel that he had indeed been innocent, though he said he did not expect to change the attorney’s opinion of him, whatever it might be. I’m no abnormal psychologist, but this doesn’t strike me as the behavior of a killer who narrowly escaped justice but rather as the behavior of an innocent man whose name had been permanently and unfairly maligned.

So the question must inevitably be addressed: if not Robinson, who had killed Helen Jewett and why? I won’t entertain the conspiracy theories that James Gordon Bennett printed about police coverups and witnesses being paid off to pin the crime on Robinson in order to protect another patron of Jewett’s, but I will consider the notion that Jewett received another visitor after Robinson had departed, a visitor of whose arrival Madame Townsend was perhaps not aware. As it turns out, another young clerk had also been investigated in the early morning hours after Jewett’s corpse had been discovered. This young man, whose false name at the brothel was Bill Easy, was the son of a Massachusetts judge. His name was George Marston, and he had a standing appointment with Helen Jewett on Saturday nights. However, it appears that Jewett had spurned him that Saturday night in favor of receiving Richard Robinson, whom she had begged to come see her on a night when perhaps they did not usually rendezvous, if his story was to be believed. Learning that Robinson had been the last to see her, the investigators Brink and Noble had focused on him, but what of Bill Easy? Is it not possible he had been angered by Jewett’s refusal to keep their appointment, that he may have come to see her later that evening, found in her room a cloak and hatchet belonging to a rival for her affections, and then committed the crime in a fit of jealous rage? It certainly seems feasible, and perhaps if more time had been spent looking into George Marston, aka Bill Easy, as a suspect, we would know better how believable it is. But the evidence at the scene led the watchmen to Robinson, perhaps purposely.

Another depiction of the murderer leaving Jewett’s bed ablaze. Public Domain image.

If we are to consider the possibility of a frame job, the suspect Rosina Townsend, madam of the brothel, comes better into focus. Bennett sometimes cast suspicion on Townsend in the New York Herald, suggesting Jewett owed her money. Putting aside the logic of murdering someone who owes you money and therefore never getting your money, and ignoring the lack of motive for framing Robinson beyond simply throwing suspicion away from herself, there is some reason to suspect Madame Townsend. According to her testimony, she woke around 3am and noticed light emanating from her back parlor, where she found a lamp near the back door, which was open. Recognizing the lamp as one of a pair kept in the adjoining rooms of Helen Jewett and another prostitute, Maria Stevens, she closed the door and went upstairs to return the lamp. Maria’s door was locked, so she tried Helen’s and found the room full of smoke, whereupon she shut the door, pounded on Maria’s door to rouse her, and went to the street door to call for help, her cries summoning the nightwatchmen Brink and Noble. However, according to the New-York Daily Times, she told the first watchman to arrive that there was “a girl murdered up stairs,” even though later her story was that she had only opened the door and seen the smoke inside. It was also she who led the watchmen to the back yard, she who pointed out the hatchet to investigators, and she who first looked over the fence and spied the discarded cloak. If there was any person on the scene trying to make sure Robinson was framed for the crime, the brothel madam certainly fits the bill.

Lastly, there is the other prostitute whose room adjoined Helen Jewett’s, Maria Stevens. It must be remembered that, according to Townsend, a lamp belonging either to Helen or Maria was found by the open back door, prompting Townsend to go up to their rooms. It is unclear whether Maria’s lamp was still in her room, or whether Helen’s was missing from hers, or whether this was ever investigated. It is somewhat suspicious, perhaps, that upon seeing the smoke in Helen’s room, when Madame Townsend knocked on Maria Stevens’s door, she apparently emerged immediately, as if she were not actually sleeping at all. According to the New York Times, Maria Stevens even had something of a motive. Richard Robinson had been a regular visitor of Maria’s before the enchanting Helen Jewett had arrived. According to this narrative, Richard Robinson was just an all-around heartbreaker, causing Maria Stevens to fall in love with him before he spurned her for Jewett and captured her heart as well. By this telling, Maria Stevens crept into Helen’s room late at night, butchered her where she lay with Robinson’s blunt hatchet, set her bed on fire, and then crept by lamplight downstairs to discard Robinson’s things in the back yard. Granted, it seems odd to then return back upstairs in the dark without the lamp and lie in wait next door to the fire she had set, hoping someone would notice the blaze and wake her. Then again, perhaps she did not start the fire until after she had gone downstairs to toss the hatchet and cloak. Either way, though, the end of Maria’s story does indeed make her a strong suspect. While Richard Robinson moved to Texas and became a successful business owner, and Rosina Townsend closed the brothel and retired to a small village near Albany for a quiet life with a carpenter husband and an active role in her local church, Maria Stevens committed suicide two weeks before the Robinson-Jewett murder trial began.

A depiction of Helen Jewett’s beauty published after she had become a legend in the public imagination. Public Domain image.

Among all these twisting intrigues and competing theories floats the apparition of Helen Jewett, looking down on all the ruckus in the New York City streets just as her ghost was said to peer from the brothel windows on the crowds below. And she remains to us today no less spectral than to the rowdy crowds that gathered in the summer of 1836 in their Jewett mourners and Robinson caps. She was variously idolized as a heroine, scorned as a Jezebel, and mourned as a martyr, but who was she really? The newspapers that mythologized her weren’t writing about the real her. They competed with each other to uncover her birth name, but they couldn’t even be bothered to get her chosen name right, calling her Ellen instead of what records show she called herself, Helen. We do know she was young, around 23 at the time of her murder. We know she had gone from living in the home of a Supreme Court Judge in Augusta, Maine, to living in a brothel in New York City. And we know that she had not only inspired desire in numerous young clerks working in the city, but also that she aroused a violent anger, for during the trial, the prosecution revealed the existence of some letters to Helen Jewett that explicitly threatened to murder her. The prosecutor failed to prove the handwriting was Robinson’s, and so was forbidden to read the letters aloud to the jury, but this fact paints a further picture of Helen Jewett’s life. Of modest birth, she had had a taste of comfort and wealth. Thereafter finding herself on the street, and whether forced into it or seeking it out, she saw a path up from the gutter through the sex trade. She navigated the class structures of New York City society by leveraging her body and exploiting the lust of unsupervised young men with money in their pockets, but along the way, she made enemies, perhaps because she inspired jealousy in those who wanted to keep her from rising above their level, or in those who resented her freedom and wanted her all to themselves. But now I am speculating, much as Bennet and other newspaper editors did in 1836. The beautiful corpse of Helen Jewett still seems to stir the imagination 185 years later. 

Further Reading

Anthony, David. “The Helen Jewett Panic: Tabloids, Men, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum New York.” American Literature, vol. 69, no. 3, 1997, pp. 487–514. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2928212.

Cohen, Patricia Cline. “The Helen Jewett Murder: Violence, Gender, and Sexual Licentiousness in Antebellum America.” NWSA Journal, vol. 2, no. 3, 1990, pp. 374–389. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4316044.

“The Ellen Jewett Tragedy: Death of Richard P. Robinson—Reminiscences of the Ellen Jewett Murder.” The New-York Daily Times, vol. 4, no. 1231, 29 Aug. 1855, p. 1. The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/1855/08/29/archives/the-ellen-jewett-tragedy-death-of-richard-p-robinsonromints-the.html.

Unfit to Print; or A History of Bad News: the Party Press, Penny Papers, and Yellow Journalism

The epithet “fake news” is a curious thing. In its truest sense, it refers to media hoaxes, false stories formatted to look like they originated from legitimate news sources that are then widely spread online. These media hoaxes can best be compared to the hoaxes of 19th century- newspapers that I have previously spoken about in great detail. Many of these online news hoaxes, like the Great Moon Hoax and the Balloon Hoax and the New York Zoo Hoax, are perpetrated in order to earn the hoaxer money. In the 19th-century press, this was achieved through increased circulation, but online news hoaxes earn money through clicks and ad revenue. They are also comparable to the many fake news stories by Joseph Mulhatton which I have written about in that they may be small in scale and anonymous and could be perpetrated just for a laugh. But the online news hoaxes of today may also be used as disinformation and propaganda by a foreign power or political campaigns. Still, this too may not be so very different from newspaper practices in the past. The thing is that this term, “fake news,” has often been lobbed at reputable, legacy news organizations simply because their news coverage is inconvenient or unflattering. It is a mark of the post-truth era that politicians can have their corruption exposed by investigative journalists but can save face simply by calling the news reports “fake.” Meanwhile, some of the most outrageously false and dangerous news reporting doesn’t typically get called “fake news.” I am thinking here of the various platforms of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire. Murdoch’s sensational publications in the UK are not called “fake news,” but rather tabloids, and here in America, they masquerade as a “fair and balanced” alternative to the “mainstream media” that they try to undermine by calling fake. Their stock in trade is projection and gaslighting. They are pissing on their viewer’s mouths and telling them it’s drinking water, while screaming that they cannot trust what comes out of their tap. As I write this, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been actively discouraging COVID vaccination with blatantly false claims about widespread deaths being attributed to them. Fox News pundits Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and Lou Dobbs were instrumental in spreading baseless election fraud conspiracy claims that incited insurrection and murder on January 6th. And it’s not limited to the sensational cable news channel. During the election, the Murdoch-owned New York Post was instrumental in promoting the false October Surprise story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, citing only Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani as their sources. While conservative personalities decry “biased journalism” as “fake news,” they prop up the most biased and fake journalistic outlets active today. Ironically, though, all complaints about bias and fake news, whether in the mainstream media or in alternative media, seems implicitly nostalgic, looking back mournfully on some vague former time when the press is supposed to have been a paragon of fairness and objectivity. But did that lost golden age of journalistic integrity exist? And can the history of American journalism put the exploits of Murdoch’s News Corp in context?

In order to trace the evolution of the news industry, we must first understand its beginnings. The origins of newspapers can be found in England, in the 17th century, when wealthy country gentlemen who wished to stay informed as to the goings-on at the royal court were obliged to hire correspondents who would write them letters with the latest gossip. These were correspondents in the oldest sense of the term, in that they corresponded with their employers through the Royal Mail service, sending “news-letters.” Here in America, our first news service evolved from this tradition in the very early 18th century, with the Boston News-Letter. These gossip publications were typically published by a postmaster and consumed right there in the post office, the hub of each village’s communication with the world. By the time that newsletters began to be circulated here in the U.S., though, they began to evolve back in England. The news that people wanted was political, coming out of parliament, which convened secretly, so that only certain invited visitors could observe the proceedings in the “Stranger’s Gallery.” Some visitors saw an opportunity and would write reports from memory of what was said and done, or would even furtively try to take down notes while in attendance. Gradually, these political news-letters moved from simply reporting parliamentary gossip and began publishing opinions. Formerly, political opinions were printed and disseminated as broadsides and pamphlets, but that role was taken over by newspaper editors in the early 18th century, and from there, it did not take long for newspapers to become the mouth-pieces of certain political parties. This is the dawn of the “party press” age of journalism, both in England and America, when newspapers reported facts and opinions with a view toward benefiting the image of a certain political party and winning readers to that party’s side. And which party a newspaper supported was not dependent on the editor’s view. Rather, politicians and parties subsidized newspapers, making them official organs. One misconception about news publications today and a principal criticism of the “mainstream media,” is that it is a cardinal sin for a journalist to express an opinion or take a side, but opinion has been a major element journalism going all the way back to its beginnings. In later years, it’s true, ideas of journalistic integrity demanded that editorial opinion be clearly labeled and separated from “news,” but even so, some leaning toward and favoring of a certain viewpoint even in reportage has always been acceptable and even encouraged. It’s what is called “editorial direction,” and it is a major draw for a paper. If one doesn’t like a paper’s views, one can find another paper that better suits them. In fact, when we talk about “freedom of the press,” it is precisely the freedom to express opinions that is protected, not the freedom to report facts.

First issue of the Boston News-Letter, regarded as the first continuously published newspaper in British North America. Published April 24, 1704. Public Domain.

Perhaps Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp represent a return to the age of the party press. Interestingly, his newspaper, The New York Post, started out as an organ of the Federalist Party, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton after the election of Thomas Jefferson, about which I spoke a great deal in more than one episode last autumn. Hamilton wanted a mouth-piece to compete with Thomas Jefferson’s National Intelligencer, which had begun publication the year before. And it should be said that the party press era was not entirely negative. Indeed, partisan journalism has been credited by James Baughman of the Center for Journalism Ethics with greatly increasing democratic participation and voter turnout, and with 2020’s spike in voter participation, we may be seeing the same effect today. But let me qualify. In the party press era, as today, newspapers colored the facts, gave one-sided versions of events, and ignored or chose not to emphasize stories that made political rivals look good. This is certainly something that we observe today, on both sides, even if more so on one side than the other. That kind of bias is one thing, but making up the news, misrepresenting or inventing events, or purposely misreporting in order to make one party look good or another party look bad is something else entirely. One egregious example of such manufacturing of the news during the party press era occurred when Samuel Johnson, reporting on parliamentary proceedings for Cave’s magazine, apparently made up an entire speech that he wasn’t present in the Stranger’s Gallery to hear, basing his remarks on a second-hand description of the speech. This is certainly deceptive, but the fact that Johnson was widely praised for his seeming neutrality, despite Johnson himself confessing that he always did what he could to make the Whigs look bad in his reporting, demonstrates that the kind of brazenly false news leveraged as propaganda that we see today may not have shown up until later. Here in America, in the 19th century, the party press gave us lurid personal scandals, like the competing newspaper coverage of Andrew Jackson’s marriage—some characterizing him as having seduced a wife away from her husband and marrying her before her divorce was final, and others depicting him as an innocent victim of character assassination, asserting her marriage had been abusive and that Jackson did not know the divorce was not yet final—but these are instances of gossip that are hard to characterize as purposeful disinformation. I struggle to find instances of outright deception in the party press era, so let us move on.

In 1833, a new age of journalism commenced with the so-called Penny Press era, when Benjamin Day founded the New York Sun. What made the Sun and other penny papers different was its price, first of all—one cent compared to the 6 cents that most other papers cost—but also its intended audience. Using the steam press, they were able to mass produce the paper cheaply, which meant, in order to make money, they needed the masses to take up reading the news, many of whom were not interested in the politics peddled by partisan papers. So they changed their approach, writing shorter, more easily digestible pieces using simpler language, and focusing on practical and relevant news over politics, as well as on more human stories. In this way, penny papers appealed to the common folk and immigrants, or as Day put it, “mechanics and the masses generally.” With this wider readership also came better advertising revenue, and thus the business model of newspapers would be changed forever, relying more on wide circulation than on political subsidization for profit. And of course, the Penny Press era gave us the first dramatic examples of really fake news, the Great Moon Hoax and the Balloon-Hoax, which I have previously discussed in some detail. It is tempting to suggest, then, that whenever there is a sea change in the accessibility of news and the medium by which it is delivered, fake news flourishes. It began with the Penny Press, and continued with the advent of radio broadcast and Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, and then reached its height with the Internet, the ultimate democratization of information access.

Samuel Johnson, an early manufacturer of partisan news. Public Domain.

But that would be an oversimplification. First of all, as I recently discussed, the fake news related to the War of the Worlds broadcast was not on the radio but rather in the papers, which exaggerated the panic it had caused. And furthermore, the era of the penny press also led us to the highest ideals of journalistic integrity. This was the era in which the independent press emerged. Benjamin Day’s rival, James Gordon Bennett, expressed these ideals clearly when he founded his competing penny paper, the New York Herald: “We shall support no party—be the agent of no faction or coterie, and we care nothing for any election, or any candidate from president down to constable.” It was a declaration of the press as an autonomous and objective force that could act as a check on political power. The Herald itself may not have lived up to the ideals Bennett espoused. It would go on to engage in the very kind of hoaxing it criticized the Sun for perpetrating, like their New York Zoo hoax about escaped animals, and it would by no means remain carefully neutral in politics, in fact favoring the nativist, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party. And as a penny paper, their coverage tended to the sensational, especially in the scandalous Robinson-Jewett case, a notorious sex and murder scandal, during which Bennett was the first to issue extra editions. But Bennett pioneered journalistic practices like reportage based on the observations of correspondents and interviews. His paper was one of the first to uncover local corruption, as well, a practice of investigative journalism that would go on to inspire some of the greatest work of the independent press in the 19th century, when the New York Times’ coverage of Boss Tweed became instrumental in taking down the Tammany Hall political machine in the 1870s. The development of the penny press is therefore clearly related to the development of both news hoaxes and to our highest journalistic standards. Still, the kind of hoaxes and sensationalism that came out of the penny press was not the kind of disinformation and propaganda we see from partisan news outlets today. Perhaps, then, we can find a forerunner of this kind of fake news in the so-called “yellow press.”

In many ways, the era of Yellow Journalism also evolved from the practices of the Penny Press and independent journalism. What Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the two eventual magnates of the yellow press, had learned from their predecessors was that news was best told as a “story.” They took to heart what James Gordon Bennett once asserted, that the purpose of news “is not to instruct but to startle and amuse.” For Pulitzer, in his St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and later in his New York paper, the World, this meant investigative watchdog journalism such as what the independent press had pioneered in the 19th century. Pulitzer likewise crusaded against corruption, but often as a way of courting poor immigrant readers, for example focusing on exposing conditions in the tenements where these prospective readers lived. Since his crusading was in some cases a matter of business, Pulitzer has been credited with inventing muckraking, the kind of journalism that seeks to cause outrage and scandal even when it may not be warranted. On the other hand, William Randolph Hearst, who got his start in San Francisco with his paper the Examiner, courted female readers with human interest stories and a certain brand of muckraking story that came to be known as a “sob story.” It began with rumors of a poorly managed hospital. The paper chose a female cub reporter to investigate, which she did by pretending to faint on the street in order to be admitted. This reporter, Winifred Black, wrote a story about women’s treatment in the hospital that was said to have made women sob with every line, earning her the nickname “sob sister,” and launching her career as a muckraker with a dedicated audience of women readers. Other newspapers even tried to recreate this success, building whole teams, or “sob squads,” to churn out similar stories. These two newspaper empires, that of Pulitzer and that of Hearst, with their comparable approaches to muckraking and sensational reporting may have come closest to the kind of political engineering that we see from Rupert Murdoch and News Corp today, for they are widely credited with having led the U.S. into war with Spain. But how accurate is that characterization?

Hearst’s self-congratulatory newspaper coverage of his own jailbreak exploit in Cuba. Public Domain.

Since the mid-19th century, there had been more than one armed rebellion in Cuba against their Spanish colonial rulers. In 1895, rumblings of revolution began again, organized by Cuban exiles in the U.S. and Latin America and commenced as a series of simultaneous uprisings against colonial authority. In the U.S., Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s newspapers favored the cause of the rebels and vilified the Spanish. Hearst especially seems to have put the entire weight of his editorial influence into convincing the American public that they should cheer on the rebels, and eventually, that the U.S. must itself become involved. Hearst’s motivations are a matter of some dispute. Humanitarian concern and democratic ideals may indeed have played a substantial role, making the yellow press’s focus on the rebellion less selfish and unsavory than it is typically portrayed. But it is clear that Hearst, even then, had political ambitions, and to be seen as bolstering the cause of democracy would certainly burnish his reputation. Then there is the distinct possibility that he believed war with Spain would be good for business. Indeed, it would turn out to be a massive boon to his newspapers’ circulation, so perhaps, as has been his usual characterization, Hearst did after all have his eye on the bottom line, though it was more likely a combination of these motivations. But Hearst’s desire for the U.S. to go to war with Spain and his willingness to foment it by manipulating public opinion has certainly been exaggerated, to the point that it has become a myth. The favorite anecdote of those who promote this view is that Hearst sent an illustrator to Cuba in January 1897, and when the illustrator wrote him saying, “There is no trouble here. There will be no war,” Hearst replied, “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.” However, media historian W. Joseph Campbell has proven through meticulous research that this exchange never took place. First of all, there is no evidence for the existence of these telegrams, and the anecdote first appeared in a memoir by a correspondent of Hearst’s who was not involved at all and was actually in Europe at the time, who used the anecdote not to disparage the yellow press, but to praise their foresight. Second, in 1897, there was already war in Cuba, and that was Hearst’s whole reason for sending the illustrator there. Moreover, Hearst’s editorial position in January of 1897 was that the rebels would succeed in throwing off the colonial yoke; his campaign for U.S. military intervention would not begin for some time. While this exchange is certainly a myth, though, it should not be thought that Hearst did not overstep in his newspaper coverage of the situation in Cuba.

Since the “sob story” had served him so well, Hearst cast about searching for the story of a mistreated woman. Such a story would appeal emotionally to both female readers who imagined what they would do if they ever found themselves in such distress and to male readers who fancied themselves chivalrous. He found just the story he needed in Evangelina Cosío Y Cisneros. This 18-year-old woman had visited the Isle of Pines in Cuba with some companions in 1896, intending to visit with her father, a rebel who was confined to the island. According to later accounts, a Spanish colonel one night came to her room and made unwanted sexual advances on her, but her companions came to her aid upon hearing her cries. Pulling the rapist off of her, they tied him to a chair, but a patrol of other Spanish officers happened upon the scene and arrested them. Evangelina Cisneros was charged with luring the colonel into a trap and thrown into a jail for prostitutes. Hearst’s flagship paper, the New York Journal-American, turned Cisneros into a paragon of feminine purity who was being brutalized, kept among fallen women, and regularly subjected to abuse. She became in his newspaper columns a symbol of all the innocent Cuban women that the Spanish were ravishing and debasing, making of the rebels who fought to protect these damsels in distress heroes firmly planted on the moral high ground. In fact, there is evidence that Cisneros was more of a pants-wearing, cigar-chomping rebel herself, and that she may in fact have been enacting some rebel plan at the time of her arrest, but otherwise, much of Hearst’s portrayal of her situation seems accurate. This “Flower of Cuba,” as the Hearst papers called her, was to be shipped overseas to a Spanish penal colony in North Africa. But Hearst had other plans. In one of the most astonishing instances of manufacturing the news in American history, he sent a rough-and-tumble correspondent, Karl Decker, to Havana to break her out of jail, and they succeeded. Exactly how this daring escape was effected remains unclear—there are stories of a file being smuggled in to her, or drugged bonbons that she used to put her cellmates to sleep. Regardless of how it was accomplished, we know that she was successfully sprung from the jail, hidden, and then put secretly aboard a ship back to America, where Hearst had her paraded around the country to tell Americans about the cruelties of the Spanish in Cuba. Rather than causing a scandal over the legality of such an unsanctioned action overseas or the role of the press in making news, Hearst’s exploit was widely praised, of course in Hearst’s papers but in others as well. Pulitzer, though, was quick to suggest that the jailbreak was a hoax, insisting that the Spanish authorities must have allowed it to happen, and this has been an enduring characterization of the affair. However, W. Joseph Campbell has uncovered through an examination of contemporary diplomatic correspondence that certain U.S. diplomats were involved with the jailbreak, and that they faced considerable risks in being involved. Moreover, the Spanish authorities ordered a search for Cisneros after her disappearance, showing that they had not winked at her escape. So while some myths certainly surround the level of involvement of the yellow press in Cuba in 1897, this was not one of them. William Randolph Hearst did indeed orchestrate the liberation of a Cuban prisoner of war.  

While the “Cisneros Affair” certainly galvanized the American public to espouse the cause of the Cuban rebels, it was another dramatic event that is usually identified as the tipping point for American military intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. This event is not disputed as a myth, but it has turned out to be an enduring mystery. In January of 1898, U.S. President William McKinley had the battleship USS Maine anchored in Havana Harbor as a demonstration of US power and determination to protect U.S. citizens in the war-torn country. On February 15th, while the crew slept in their quarters on the forward end of the vessel, an explosion occurred. There had been 354 men aboard the ship, and 266 of them perished in the explosion and the resulting fires as the ship sank into the harbor. Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World both put this tragedy on the front page every day afterward, of course, asserting that the explosion had been an attack, an act of war. Hearst even offered a $50,000 reward for evidence of who was responsible. The U.S. Navy wasted no time in launching an inquiry, which determined within a month that an underwater mine had detonated, in turn igniting the ship’s forward magazine. However, some of the experts consulted in the inquiry came to a different conclusion, suggesting instead that coal in the bunker adjacent to the magazine had spontaneously combusted. This scenario would have been more consistent with the findings of a Spanish inquiry, which argued that it is unusual for a ship’s munitions to explode when it is sunk by an underwater mine. Moreover, a spout of water would typically be seen when a mine detonates, and dead fish would afterward be found, neither of which was the case in Havana Harbor that evening. Numerous investigations have failed to resolve this mystery. Perhaps the Spanish inquiry’s conclusions are less than trustworthy because they surely were seeking to absolve themselves. And there is just as little evidence for an internal explosion as there is for an external one. In fact, the spontaneous combustion of coal appears to be just as uncommon as a ship’s magazine detonating after being struck by a mine. But none of this mattered to the yellow press, which ignored the Spanish inquiry and the dissenting expert opinions and declared to the world that the Spanish had murdered U.S. navy men in a brazen act of war. In less than a month, Congress declared war, and many an American sailor was heard to repeat the headlines of the yellow press in their war cries: “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!”

Hearst’s inflammatory newspaper coverage of the USS Maine explosion. Public Domain.

In considering the yellow press as a possible precursor of today’s disinformation outlets, we must reconsider what we presume to be true about yellow journalism. Historians have shown the “I’ll furnish the war” quote to have been a myth, so the truth about the complex myriad of factors that led to U.S. involvement in the Cuban War of Independence has likely been obscured by this appealing fiction. It is not as though the American public would not have learned of the events without the yellow press or would not otherwise have come to favor U.S. involvement. There were other, more respectable newspapers also reporting on the Cuban rebellion then, just as today there are many more scrupulous news outlets that consumers of Rupert Murdoch’s brand of news could seek out instead. And yellow journalism and public opinion alone did not sway President McKinley to pursue war. There had been jingoists in Congress pushing the same war agenda every step of the way. In the same way, today, Fox News and conservative media generally may not be inventing the talking points and leading this disinformation war so much as following the lead of the GOP, recognizing their niche market and continually pursuing their audience down whatever fringe path they’ve been led. Notwithstanding these parallels, though, I still find no examples from the history of American journalism that match the brazen manipulation, the invention of false narratives, the shameless promotion of disinformation regardless of potential public harms that we see in the media produced by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, especially Fox News Channel. They seem to represent the worst of every era, seemingly beholden to a political party as in the party press era, trading in oversimplified sensationalism in order to appeal to the everyman as in the penny paper era, and willing to manufacture news as in the age of yellow journalism. But Hearst and his empire were not really anything like Murdoch and News Corp. First of all, Hearst was driven by political ambitions, trying to parlay his newspaper platform into a Democratic presidential nomination. Murdoch appears to be motivated by the pursuit of wealth and a sinister ideology. Hearst envisioned a kind of “journalism of action” that would engage in democratic and humanitarian activism, certainly for the purposes of self-promotion but never seeking to do harm. But just this year, Fox News has been promoting conspiracy theories that encouraged the overturning of a free and fair election and engaging in anti-vaxxer science denial that will result in lost lives; they are attacking democracy and public health. To me, this seems like a new and unprecedented form of flawed journalism. We find ourselves in the era of the propaganda press. And what’s truly scary is that Fox News and the other outlets within Murdoch’s News Corp are no longer even the worst offenders, having shown clear signs of tempering their rhetoric in at least some of their programs—typically the ones that they would have a hard time claiming are for entertainment purposes only. Disinformation purveyors have grown in the last couple decades, with NewsMax, Breitbart, and One America News Network becoming the worst offenders. But credible news reporting and reliable outlets remain, the most impartial and conscientious being Associated Press and Reuters reportage. As for major legacy newspapers and other big cable news channels, yes, bias and the favoring of viewpoints is present, as it always has been. American consumers of news need to stop expecting anything different, learn to read laterally across platforms for a wider variety of editorial slants, and concentrate, most importantly, on rooting out barefaced propaganda.

Further Reading

Borch, Fred L., and Robert F. Dorr. "Maine's sinking still a mystery, 110 years later." Navy Times, sec. Transitions, 21 Jan. 2008, p. 36. NewsBank: Access World News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=WORLDNEWS&docref=news/11E7C6BBE345B960.

Campbell, W. Joseph. “‘I’ll Furnish the War: The Making of a Media Myth.” Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, University of California Press, 2010, pp. 9-25.

———. “Not a Hoax: New Evidence in the New York Journal’s Rescue of Evangelina Cisneros.” American Journalism, vol. 19, no. 4, 2002, pp. 67-94. W. Joseph Campbell, PhD, fs2.american.edu/wjc/www/nothoax.htm.

———. “Not Likely Sent: the Remington-Hearst ‘Telegrams.’” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 2, 2000, pp. 405-422. W. Joseph Campbell, PhD, fs2.american.edu/wjc/www/documents/Article_NotLikelySent.pdf.

———. “William Randolph Hearst: Mythical Media Bogeyman.” BBC News, 14 Aug. 2011, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14512411

Lowry, Elizabeth. “The Flower of Cuba: Rhetoric, Representation, and Circulation at the Outbreak of the Spanish-American War.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, pp. 174–190. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42003444.

Park, Robert E. “The Natural History of the Newspaper.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 29, no. 3, 1923, pp. 273–289. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2764232.

Pérez, Louis A. “The Meaning of the Maine: Causation and the Historiography of the Spanish-American War.” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 58, no. 3, 1989, pp. 293–322. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3640268.

Taylor, WIlliam. “USS Maine Explosion.” Disasters and Tragic Events: An Encyclopedia of Catastrophes in American History [2 Volumes], vol. 1, 2014, pp. 164-166. ABC-CLIO, 2014. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=781660&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Extra! Extra! Extra-Terrestrial Hoaxes!

While I have written a full-length second part to Hidden Bodies, my history of astronomical discovery, delving further into the blind alleys and paths to discovery that astrophysical science has taken, from aether to dark matter, that episode is reserved for patrons, so in lieu of its transcript, I present a blog post for a patron exclusive that I released to podcast listeners instead.

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While in Hidden Bodies, I focused on wrong ideas about the solar system, in this post, I want to tell the related stories of some famous hoaxes about extraterrestrial life which themselves are surrounded by misconceptions and myths. We’ll begin with a story that has to do with the son of astronomer William Herschel. If you recall, William Herschel was a vocal proponent of the idea that the Moon, Mars, and even the Sun, were inhabited by intelligent life. I spoke briefly about Herschel’s beliefs about the inhabitation of the Sun, and in more detail about the observations he believed demonstrated that Mars was populated. Before all that, though, and much closer to home, he claimed in 1776 to have spotted large swathes of vegetation on the lunar surface that he believed to be cultivated, leading him to search the Moon for towns. The circular marks on the Moon that today we know to be craters he believed were villages, cities, and even vast metropolises. What makes Herschel’s claims even more interesting is the fact that, about 60 years later in 1935, his son John Herschel was famously credited for actually seeing in great detail the vegetable and animal life on the moon in what is considered to be one of the greatest hoaxes of all time.

On August 21st, 1835, the cheap “penny press” newspaper The New York Sun printed what it said was a reprint of an article that had originally appeared in the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The article discussed William’s son John Herschel—a famed astronomer in his own right—his gargantuan telescope in South Africa, and the amazing discoveries he had recently made. The article made claims that, though seemingly plausible, were completely untrue. John Herschel had indeed built a large telescope in the Cape of Good Hope, but it did not sport a 7-ton lens capable of 42,000 times magnification, and with it he certainly did not spy planets in other solar systems, which as we know from the last episode mankind was unable to detect until the 1990s. The biggest bombshell of the article, that Herschel had confirmed the existence of life on the Moon, was not emphasized, despite its enormous implications, and thus the first article in this series attracted little attention. It was not until the second piece, five days later, that readers began to take notice. Through his telescope, the paper claimed, Herschel had observed that the Moon’s surface was covered with dark red flowers and populated with strange animal life, such as horned goats and bison-like beasts that moved in herds, all of which had a distinctive appendage that crossed the forehead from ear to ear, not to mention a bizarre globular amphibian that rolled along the beaches. In the third installment of the series said to have been printed in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, it was revealed that intelligent life existed on the Moon, in the form of beaver-like creatures that went about on two feet, carrying their babies in their arms and living in huts from which issued smoke, indicating they had mastered fire. Finally, in the fourth piece, the observation of some winged humanoids, which Herschel supposedly named Vespertilio-homo, or man-bats, was described. Apparently, these beings spoke to each other intelligently and lived in elaborate structures. Finally, some blatantly racist notions cropped up in the account, as it was described that these dark-colored man-bats looked only slightly more intelligent than orangutans and tended to engage in public copulation, but that there existed another group of man-bats of a lighter color that was described as superior and more beautiful and like unto angels. According to these articles, the lunar beings had constructed gigantic geometrical structures, perhaps as a way to signal us Earthlings.

Portrait of a man-bat (Vespertilio-homo). Public Domain.

After the second article in this series appeared, circulation of the Sun newspaper began to increase, and many other penny papers began to republish their pieces. Many appear to have believed the story entirely. There are accounts of Christian organizations planning how best to convert the man-bats to Christianity, and humanitarian societies convening meetings to discuss how they might provide aid to the lunar needy. It would be weeks before the articles’ sources could be checked, when it was discovered that the Edinburgh Journal of Science had actually shut down about two years before the articles were said to have been published by them. A rival paper then accused the Sun’s editor, Richard Locke, a descendant of English philosopher John Locke, of having written the pieces himself in order to attract readers with sensationalism. Locke and the Sun never retracted the story, even as recently as 2010, when they playfully wrote that they were “looking into” claims that there are no lunar man-bats. The paper’s response seems to suggest that only a fool would have taken the pieces seriously, a stance which accords well with an alternative interpretation of the so-called Great Moon Hoax as actually being a satire penned by Locke that had not been widely understood at the time of its publication. And there is support for this interpretation. According to this version of events, Locke had written the pieces in order to satirize Scottish astronomer and “Christian Philosopher” Thomas Dick, as well as other proponents of so-called Natural Theology, which looked to astronomy and physics for proof of the existence of God. Dr. Dick and others, having learned that even a drop of water can be observed microscopically to be teeming with life, reasoned that the universe must likewise be crawling with life forms. Dr. Dick even put forth an estimation of the universe’s population, suggesting it was probably around 22 trillion, that the Moon itself must have about 4.2 billion inhabitants, and that we should build huge geometrical glyphs in order to send them a message. Supposedly, on the eve of publishing his articles, Richard Locke told friends that if it were taken seriously or scorned as a hoax, then his satire had failed. In the end, it may never be known whether he had only taken inspiration from Dr. Dick in a scheme to increase newspaper circulation, or if he truly meant it as a trenchant criticism of Dr. Dick and his ilk and simply accepted the derision he later received as penance for having failed in his literary endeavor.

Dr. Dick, the “Christian Philosopher” and “Natural Theologist” whose ideas about extra-terrestrial life Richard Locke may have been satirizing in his moon hoax. Public Domain.

Today, though, it is not the Great Moon Hoax that takes the title of the greatest media hoax of all time, nor is it the Balloon Hoax written by Edgar Allen Poe for the same newspaper some years later. Rather, that title usually goes to Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast on the night before Halloween 1938, another hoax related to William Herschel, who had so popularized the notion of a Martian civilization that he inspired H. G. Wells to write the novel that Orson Welles was adapting. The reason this incident is usually credited as the biggest media hoax is because of the mass panic that it supposedly elicited, but of course, a hoax is typically a purposeful act. Orson Welles, who appeared before news reporters a day later to insist that he found it baffling how anyone could have mistaken his radio drama for a genuine news broadcast, certainly does not seem to have intended to cause a panic, even though in later years, he certainly seems to have relished the notoriety it had earned him. The content of the broadcast was designed to create some verisimilitude, with an orchestral performance being interrupted by dramatized news bulletins that described the launch of spacecraft seen on Mars and their landing in a rural area, followed by their attacks, wielding poison gases and heat rays, until finally New York had been obliterated. In Welles’s defense, the broadcast was introduced as radio theatre, and since entire episode transpired within the program’s hour-long runtime, any rational or intelligent person should have surmised that the story was unfolding a little too quickly. There was simply no way that the Martians made their trip millions of miles and decimated American military forces all within a half an hour. The fact that the program announced the declaration of martial law alone should have tipped off listeners, as the wheels of government simply don’t move that fast. And the fact that the Martian invaders supposedly fell victim to germs before the hour was over also beggared belief, as that’s quite a fast onset for the common cold. But the seemingly credible explanation is that listeners tuned in late and didn’t listen to the entire broadcast before panicking, running out into the streets, and choking the roadways in their attempts to flee. The stories are many, almost all from newspapers that appeared the next day. After listening to the broadcast, terror seized millions, most fled their homes with their families, causing accidents and deaths in the stampede to reach some place of safety. Some chose to stay where they were, but attempted suicide, preferring death by their own hands to being cooked alive by alien heat rays. But how accurate is this characterization of the panic that ensued.

A sample of the sensational newspaper headlines in the days ensuing the War of the Worlds broadcast.

Most accounts come from newspapers, as I said, or from a 1940 Princeton psychological study, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. However, as media critic and historian W. Joseph Campbell writes in his book Getting It Wrong, most sociologists now agree that this Princeton study was foundationally flawed. It relied only on interviews with 135 people, all known to have been frightened by the program, which simply cannot prove the kind of widespread alarm and panicked flights that it claimed to prove. So we must look to the newspapers themselves. Likewise, each newspaper that covered the kerfuffle the morning after tended to claim that thousands in their area had fled their homes or choked up telephone lines with panicked calls, but only mentioned one or two vague anecdotal examples. There is an important distinction to be made between real evidence and anecdotal evidence here. Offering one or two or even dozens of anecdotes never proves that something is common or widespread. It only ever proves that it happened once, or twice, or a dozen times, depending on how many anecdotes are offered. Campbell, who examined the coverage of 36 major newspapers, observed that the anecdotes provided to support their claims about mass panic were typically lacking in detail. Moreover, what their examples demonstrated in a lot of cases was not that people were misconstruing the broadcast for a genuine news bulletin, but rather that rumor-mongers who had heard second- or third-hand that some calamity was transpiring were running around town getting people riled up without having ever listened to a moment of the broadcast. Perhaps the only real evidence of a large-scale reaction to the program were the reports of phone lines being backed up with increased traffic, in many cases with calls to local newspapers and police stations in order to ascertain what was happening. But of course, this is not a panic reaction. Rather, if you had misconstrued the nature of a radio program or heard someone shouting about alien invasion and the end of the world, calling a newspaper or a police station to confirm that, in fact, it was a false alarm would actually be the most calm and rational thing to do.

The press dressing down Orson Welles the day after his radio broadcast. Public domain.

So how do we explain this sensationalized version of the events following the War of the Worlds broadcast, which has since become ingrained in our culture as a lasting myth? One explanation is that the broadcast happened in the evening, and newspapers went to print in the morning, leaving them little time to do any in-depth collection of reports and evidence. In fact, on such a timeline, when major newsworthy events seemed to be transpiring, papers tended to rely on the wire service. It’s clear that many of the newspapers who covered the supposed panic over the radio broadcast were simply reprinting claims that had come over the wire, often word for word. It was essentially the same phenomenon as seems to have transpired, on a smaller scale than the newspapers claimed, the night before. It was a contagion of false alarm. Some scattered misunderstanding of the broadcast was spread as a rumor by people acting as Paul Reveres, as Campbell puts it. In the same way, Associated Press round-ups of some anecdotes that suggested sweeping panic were spread like a rumor themselves, until the broad and uniform newspaper coverage appeared to prove that mass terror had swept the country the night before, when in fact, there is no strong evidence that it did. Additionally, the fact that newspapers considered radio to be a rival medium for news consumption prompted the newspapers to latch onto the story and embellish it, especially with editorials following the initial coverage, chiding radio and suggesting that any medium that could create such panic using sensationalism may need to face strict censorship in the near future. Ironically, though, it appears that it was the newspapers themselves that were engaging in sensationalism and stirring up something of a moral panic about the trustworthiness of their competitor.

Further Reading

Campbell, W. Joseph. Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. University of California Press, 2010.

Vida, István Kornél. “The ‘Great Moon Hoax’ of 1835.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 18, no. 1/2, 2012, pp. 431–441. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43488485. Accessed 14 May 2021.

Hidden Bodies: A Brief and Incomplete History of Astronomical Discovery

It is not certain when Aristotle wrote his book On the Heavens, but it is thought to have been written sometime around 350 BCE. In it, he addresses the debates on cosmogony of his day, for example asserting the weakness of the argument of flat-earthers. As I’ve discussed before, the view of the Earth as spherical was common, even popular, all the way back then, and championed by Aristotle. However, in laying out his model of the universe, he favored a geocentric cosmology, viewing Earth as the center of the universe, an immutable and eternal constant with other planets, the Sun, and the stars revolving around it, and beyond the stars, a spiritual plane that he called the Sphere of the Prime Mover. Even then, though, there were alternative views. As Aristotle notes, the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus believed that the Earth revolved around a Central Fire. However, this Central Fire was not the Sun, in his view, which he said also revolved around the center with the Earth, and he further believed that on the other side of this Central Fire at the universe’s center was an Antichthon, or Counter-Earth, a strange idea that survived long enough to become the fodder of sci-fi. Modern astronomers have even been obliged to disprove the existence of such a phantom planet, which would be detectable because of its gravitational influence on other planetary bodies. But Philolaus’s model influenced Aristarchus, who saw the Central Fire as being one and the same as the Sun, building a heliocentric model of the universe and even suggesting that the stars were themselves other suns. But Aristarchus’s model was often rejected in favor of the Aristotelian geocentric model, thereafter developed by Hipparchus of Nicaea and Ptolemy of Alexandria, who tweaked the model to suggest that each heavenly body, in its orbit of Earth, also moved in an epicycle, or a small circle, performing little loop-de-loops as it revolved around us. The heliocentric view of the universe would not rise again, as it were, until the 16th century, when Polish monk Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres set forth a model of the universe that the Church rejected. Then in 1610, when Galileo recognized that the planetary bodies he’d been observing were moons orbiting Jupiter, not revolving around Earth, the geocentric model of the universe was in its death throes. However, this new model still held that we were very close to the center of the universe: our sun, Sol. This notion would not be shattered until the 20th century, when head of the Harvard College Observatory, Harlow Shapley, placed our solar system in the boondocks of the Milky Way galaxy. Still, the Milky Way, it was thought, even by Shapley, was the only galaxy there was. Until Edwin Hubble showed that there were other galaxies beyond ours, proving it to Shapley in what Shapley described as a “letter that destroyed my universe.” Thus goes the march of scientific progress. When we believe we understand something, our illusions are obliterated by the next discovery. Today, we have the multiverse theory to suggest that our universe may not even be the only one, making our existence feel more and more insignificant.

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In my recent blog post, covering the history of immunological science and the development of vaccine technology, as well as in a patron bonus on germ theory, I found it interesting to explore both the hits and misses of scientific progress. It illustrates well the scientific principle that only through experimentation, collection of evidence, observation and comparison can truth be established. We see in the history of science the concept that, as Isaac Newton once wrote, each generation stands on the shoulders of giants, building upon what has already been proven and disproving what has not in order to achieve a more perfect understanding of our world and universe. I find this gratifying because of how very different it often seems from historiology. Don’t get me wrong. Professional historians work tirelessly to revise and perfect our understanding of the past. The term “revisionist history” in fact has unfairly developed a negative connotation, when in reality, every professional historian engages in measured and evidence-supported revision. But since history is often viewed as static and unchanging, our evolving understanding of it often takes a long time to catch up. Textbooks continue to disseminate oversimplified narratives rife with myths and misconceptions. That, of course, is the bread and butter of this blog. Take, for example, Copernicus and Galileo, about whom there remain a wealth of myths that even scientists like Carl Sagan were known to repeat. The first is the Demotion Myth, the idea that the heliocentric model represented a demotion of the Earth’s place in the universe. Actually, according to medieval and early modern beliefs, in which the center was the worst place to be, like the center of Dante’s model of hell, moving Earth away from the center was in reality something of a promotion according to contemporary philosophy. Further myths claim that Copernicus waited until his deathbed to publish his heliocentric model, but that was more of a coincidence. Likewise, many myths surround Galileo, from apocryphal experiments atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa wrongfully attributed to him, to erroneously crediting him with the invention of the telescope, the thermometer, and the scientific method. Folklore tells us Galileo was excommunicated, convicted of heresy, and immured in a dungeon. In fact, he was put on trial, but in reality it was for breach of an agreement with the Holy Office. As the Pope had endorsed his work, Galileo had agreed not to present the Copernican model as proven fact, but rather to discuss the pros and cons of all cosmological models. Pope Urban VIII was actually sympathetic to the Copernican model, but when Galileo broke his agreement and presented it as fact, it put the Pope in an awkward situation. Far from being tossed in a dungeon, though, Galileo was sentenced to live in a 5-room suite in the Palace of the Holy Office, was able to receive guests and, records show, could come and go at great liberty, if not as he pleased. These myths make it clear that, while the science to which they contributed was built upon and furthered, the history of their lives was muddled and misrepresented. So let us retire, this once, from the benighted realm of Historical Blindness, and bask in the light of empirical science, specifically the luminous realm of astronomy, where wrong ideas have also abounded, but have almost universally been overcome by reason.

Saturn depicted by Galileo (top), Huygens (middle), and Cassini (bottom). Image credit: RM Chapple

One of Galileo’s wrong ideas had to do with Saturn. In 1610, he was the first to observe this planet using a telescope, and he saw what appeared to be a triple planet, or a large planet with two moons on either side. However, two years later, he observed that these moons had disappeared, and two years after that, seeing that they appeared to have returned, he speculated that they were some kind of arms. But the shape of Saturn would baffle astronomers for a long time, sometimes appearing as three bodies and sometimes as an egg on its side. Some fifty years after Galileo first spied it, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch astronomer, discovered Saturn’s moon Titan using a telescope superior to Galileo’s and in the process, he observed these arms of Saturn, which appeared to pierce it through its center, making it look something like a spinning top, but then vanishing with time. It was Huygens who hypothesized that these arms were a ring around the planet that when viewed edge-on appeared to be arms, or moons with inferior optics, and became impossible to discern from other angles. Huygens’s ring theory was not widely accepted at first, but other astronomers came around to his way of thinking, coming to believe that Saturn had a ring around it… a solid ring, for if it were not entirely solid, how could it possibly hold together as the planet spun? A hint came 15 years later, when Giovanni Domenico Cassini observed a gap in the ring. This gap proved it was not some giant ring of stone, all of a piece, so the mystery deepened. How did the isolated masses within the ring remain in place? Perhaps it was gaseous or composed of fluid? Not until the mid-19th century did James Clerk Maxwell demonstrate through equations that none of these possibilities would have been stable. Thus it was discovered that Saturn’s ring was composed of small unconnected particles. Almost forty years later, in 1895, James Keeler would further our understanding, observing that there were actually multiple rings of Saturn, and the innermost did not move at the same speed as did the outermost. So the history of astronomical discovery shows us that even when we see something with our naked eye, what we are seeing may not be entirely apparent.

Such was the case with Mars when William Herschel studied it with one of his homemade telescopes during the late 18th century. He made some important discoveries during his study, having to do with the rotation and axial tilt of the red planet. He also observed that the white spots on Mars’s poles, observed by both Cassini and Huygens and hypothesized earlier that century to be polar ice caps, changed size according to the season. This confirmation that ice existed on Mars helped to fuel Herschel’s speculation that the planet was inhabited. Herschel tended to vocally believe that all planets were inhabited, envisioning the moon as being akin to the English countryside, and even suggesting that the Sun supported life… not on its scorching surface, of course, but in some cooler underground realm, like a reverse Hollow Earth theory in which it is somehow hotter on the surface and more temperate within. Thus it’s no surprise that when Herschel viewed and mapped Mars in 1783, he asserted that all the visibly darker areas were oceans and declared the planet capable of supporting life, encouraging the perennial belief in Martians. With the 19th century construction of more and more advanced observatories, further mapping of Mars was accomplished, starting in 1877 by Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli in Milan. It was he who named these supposed Martian continents and seas, giving them mythological names. Schiaparelli also observed something surprising. There appeared to be a network of pale lines in certain regions, which Schiaparelli called canali. When this news reached the English speaking world, his work was translated, and it was discovered that there were “canals” on Mars. At the time, canals were something of an engineering wonder, and the recent completion of the Suez Canal had been touted as a great accomplishment of mankind. So when the English speaking world heard “canal,” they thought massive artificial waterways, which would mean intelligent and industrious Martians. In reality, Schiaparelli’s word canali had been mistranslated. A more accurate translation would have been “channels,” a word less suggestive of engineering. But it was too late. The Martians were out of the bag. American astronomer Percival Lowell mapped what he saw as a network of canals with “oases” at certain intersections, speculating that the drying of the Martians’ planet had forced them to draw water from their polar ice caps. But again, what they had spied through their telescopes was not as clear as they believed. These features could be glimpsed only briefly and occasionally through Earth’s shimmering and shifting atmosphere, and as it turned out, they were an optical illusion. The lighter and darker regions were not oceans and continents, but rather what are called albedo features. Rather than bodies of water, or vegetation, as was an alternative theory, they didn’t correspond to topographical features at all and were likely just areas where wind had swept away the pale surface dust to reveal the darker ground beneath. As for the canali, they were an artifact of the human eye, creating phantom lines between briefly visible features, and the suggestion of infrastructure introduced by the English mistranslation added a psychological element, such that astronomers were looking for lines, expecting to find them, and staring until they saw them, making Mars something like the Magic Eye posters of the 1990s.

Martian canals depicted by Percival Lowell. Public Domain.

While sometimes astronomers were looking right at something and unable to discern what it was, or believed it was something it was not because of what others had told suggested, other times they searched and searched for something that wasn’t even there, again because some had insisted it would be there. The enduring search for a “phantom planet” is the perfect example of this. In the early 18th century, astronomers began to hypothesize about the regularity in distance between the planets in our solar system, concluding in 1772 with Bode’s Law, a formula for predicting the distance between planets that it was hoped would make the discovery of new planets possible. And indeed, it did. In 1781, William Herschel spotted Uranus, which he believed to be a comet, but of course it wasn’t. What it was was the 7th planet from the sun, right where Bode’s Law said it would be. After that, Johann Bode, one of the originators of the law, urged astronomers to search for another planet between Mars and Jupiter, as there was a gap there indicating the presence of another planet. This hypothetical planet was the subject of much interest at the turn of the century, and a group of astronomers who fancied themselves the Celestial Police devoted themselves to finding it. A discovery of a heavenly body in that slot between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was made the next year, but not by one of the Celestial Police. One Giueseppe Piazzi discovered a heavenly body that he dubbed Ceres, and it was thought the predicted planet had been found. However, the next year, Heinrich Olbers discovered another body with about the same orbit: Pallas. After that came Juno and Vesta, and it became clear that numerous objects were in orbit there. Thus the asteroid belt was discovered, and a theory emerged that it represented the remains of a larger planet that had once orbited there where Bode’s Law had predicted a planet would be found. This “lost planet” was named Phaeton in an 1823 pamphlet by Johann Gottlieb Radlof, a German schoolteacher who took this theory and used it as a catastrophist explanation of certain myths and biblical incidents. In this way he was something of a predecessor of Immanuel Velikovsky, the catastrophist to whom I devoted an entire episode in my Chronological Revision Chronicles. But as usual, despite such pseudoscience, science marches on. Ceres and others of the largest asteroids in the belt are today considered dwarf planets at most, and the belt is believed to be material that simply never accreted into a planet because it was too perturbed by Jupiter’s gravitational influence.

Nearly a hundred years after the formation of the Celestial Police and the search for the lost planet, astronomers found themselves again all aflutter in search of a theorized planet, this one between Mercury and the Sun. It all started in 1810, when French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier constructed a model of Mercury’s orbit of the Sun according to Newtonian laws. When he had a chance to verify his model by observing Mercury’s transit, or its crossing of the disk of the Sun, however, it failed to confirm his model. It appeared there was some excess value observed in its perihelion precession for which Le Verrier simply could not account. Le Verrier’s solution was that there must be another small planet between Mercury and the Sun that was affecting Mercury’s orbit. He called this theoretical planet Vulcan, not in some prescient anticipation of Star Trek but, of course, after a Roman fire god, from whose name we also derive the word “volcano.” It wasn’t long before he received some confirmation of his theory in the form of an amateur astronomer’s claim to have spotted this previously unseen planet crossing the Sun. Despite the fact that another astronomer expressed doubt owing to the fact that he had been observing the sun at the same moment and had seen nothing of the sort, Le Verrier accepted the account as evidence in favor of his theory, and the amateur astronomer was lauded for his sighting. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that afterward, many amateur astronomers began to come forward claiming without any corroborative evidence that they too had observed Vulcan in years past. What Le Verrier needed, though, were sightings of the planet in transit that were confirmed by more than one astronomer. Since a solar eclipse would provide the best conditions for such a sighting, the total solar eclipse of 1878 served as their best opportunity to confirm the existence of Vulcan. Astronomers from all over converged by rail on the American West, gathering at the summit of Pike’s Peak in Colorado or overrunning the small town of Separation, Wyoming, places that just happened to lie on the eclipse’s path of totality, where the shadow of the moon would sweep over the country. Respected astronomers at these different locations did indeed sight something they believed to be an intra-mercurial planet, and not just one, but two! Excitement built that not only Vulcan but also another unknown planet had been discovered. Unfortunately, none of their coordinates matched, and the idea that four new planets had been discovered between Mercury and the Sun simply beggared belief. So the search continued, especially during eclipses, until, in 1915, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity satisfactorily explained the excess precession of Mercury, which meant there was no longer any reason to believe that Vulcan existed. Now, it is thought that many of the objects supposedly spied in transit were sunspots or perhaps artifacts of telescopic optics that had been damaged, like Icarus, when pointed too close to the Sun.

Astronomers gather in Separation, Wyoming, in 1878 to observe a solar eclipse in hopes of confirming the existence of the planet Vulcan. Image courtesy of the Carbon County Museum.

Despite this difficulty in sighting even our closest planetary neighbors, humanity has long held the conviction that the number of planets in the cosmos was innumerable. Greek Philosopher Epicurus told Herodotus that “the universe is boundless both in the number of the bodies and in the extent of the void” and that “there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours.” But for much of human history the only things that could be spied beyond our immediate solar system were luminous bodies: stars. The very fact that planets do not emit light made it essentially impossible to see any so-called exoplanets beyond our solar system. Planets, of course, only reflect light, but when searching for planets that orbit other stars, the great distance and the faintness of their reflected light in comparison to the brightness of their stars’ light make them hidden bodies out there in the void. In fact, hard as it may seem to believe, we did not have any evidence for the existence of planets outside of our own solar system until the 20th century. Astronomer Peter Van De Kamp had begun to hypothesize that planets outside our solar system could be detected by their gravitational effect on the movement of the stars they orbited. His first couple of identifications resulted in hypothetical planets that seemed far too large to be planets, but in 1963, he detected a wobble in the movement of Barnard’s Star, 36 trillion miles from us, and thus the belief in extrasolar planets, and possibly planets that can support life, was bolstered. Currently, the existence of more than 4,000 exoplanets has been confirmed, but surprisingly, Van De Kamp’s discoveries are not among them. As it turns out, all of the star wobbles that Van De Kamp took as evidence for the presence of a planet were actually caused by adjustments to the optics of his telescope. The first real evidence for the existence exoplanets didn’t actually arrive until the early 1990s, a fact which I find astonishing.

Despite the evidence for the corruption of Van De Kamp’s calculations favoring a planet orbiting Barnard’s Star having appeared decades earlier, as recently as 2013 astronomers were still seeking to definitively rule out their existence, which they appear to have finally done. This is the strength and power of science. It takes nothing for granted. Although the existence of oceans and canals on Mars has been ruled out, the existence of water on the red planet remains a topic of much study. In 2011, high resolution images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed dark streaks on some slopes indicating seasonal water flow over the surface of the planet, and just last year, radar data from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft detected possible underground lakes. And while the Phaeton theory that the asteroid belt is the remains of a destroyed planet is only supported by fringe pseudoscientists like Zecharia Sitchin, ideas about phantom planet and other hidden bodies within our solar system continue to be entertained. The notion of a planet Vulcan is mostly extinct, but some astronomers still suggest that intramercurial objects, which they call vulcanoids, could still exist and help to explain the various mysterious sightings in the 19th century. There is even some support for an unseen “Planet X,” but since Pluto has been demoted to a mere dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, it is typically referred to as Planet 9 these days. Indeed, the only credible theory for the existence of another planet within our solar system places it in the same neighborhood, for the unusual orbits of the objects in the Kuiper Belt have led astronomers to hypothesize that the presence of a large body hidden far beyond Pluto may account for it. So, in astronomy and science generally, as in history, it is unwise to suggest too soon that the truth has been entirely settled.

Further Reading

Bakker, Frederick A. “The End of Epicurean Infinity: Critical Reflections on the Epicurean Infinite Universe.” Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, edited by Bakker F., Bellis D., Palmerino C., Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 48, Springer, 2018, pp. 41-67. SpringerLink, link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-02765-0_3.

Baron, David. “The American Eclipse of 1878 and the Scientists Who Raced West to See It.” Mental Floss, 28 July 2017, www.mentalfloss.com/article/503114/american-eclipse-1878-and-scientists-who-raced-west-see-it.

Bartusiak, Marcia. Dispatches from Planet 3: Thirty-Two (Brief) Tales on the Solar System, the Milky Way, and Beyond. Yale University Press, 2018.

Basalla, George. Civilized Life in the Universe : Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials. Oxford University Press, 2006. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/civilizedlifeinu0000basa/page/n3/mode/2up.

Choi, Jieun, et al. “Precise Doppler Monitoring of Barnard's Star.” The Astrophysical Journal, vol. 764, no. 2, 31 Jan. 2013, pp. 131-142. IOPScience, iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/764/2/131.

Matson, John. “50 Years Ago an Astronomer Discovered the First Unambiguous Exoplanet (or So He Thought).” Scientific American, 30 May 2013, blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/50-years-ago-an-astronomer-discovered-the-first-unambiguous-exoplanet-or-so-he-thought/.

O’Callaghan, Jonathan. “Water on Mars: Discovery of Three Buried Lakes Intrigues Scientists.” Nature, 28 Sep. 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02751-1.

Sant, Joseph. “The Copernican Myths.” Scientus.org, 2019, www.scientus.org/Copernicus-Myths.html.

---. “The Galileo Myths.” Scientus.org, 2020. www.scientus.org/Galileo-Myths.html.

Anti-Vaccinationism, a Historical Hindrance to Herd Immunity

The Reverend Cotton Mather was an exceptionally influential minister among New England Puritans. I recently discussed his role in spreading the fame of the enigmatic Dighton Rock, and his influence on the witch-hunters of Salem is widely known. Few, however, are aware of his role in popularizing early smallpox immunization efforts in America. In 1706, Mather was gifted a slave named Onesimus. Upon receipt, he looked this gift man in the mouth, as it were, searching his body for the telltale scars of a former smallpox infection and asking Onesimus if he had already had the disease. Onesimus showed Mather a small scar where he had been inoculated against the disease in Libya, the country of his birth. Mather afterward questioned numerous slaves in the area and found that the practice, which had come to be called variolation after the Latin name of smallpox, variola, was quite common and appeared very successful. Indeed, there was a long history to the practice of variolation against smallpox, a rudimentary form of immunization that involved purposely introducing biological material from an infected person—preferably one with a mild case of the disease—into the system of an uninfected person. The method goes as far back as 1000 CE in China, where they ground up infected scabs and blew them up people’s noses like snuff. By Mather’s day, the practice typically consisted of extracting pus from a smallpox sore and placing it under an uninfected person’s skin through a small incision on the arm. A variolated patient did develop a case of smallpox, but a milder and less deadly form, afterward developing immunity against the brutal “Speckled Monster” that had ravaged mankind for thousands of years and had spread the world over through trade routes, exploratory contact, and war. The more Mather learned about it, the more he supported the practice in Boston, and during a terrible smallpox outbreak in the 1720s, he convinced a local physician in his congregation to inoculate almost 300 Bostonians. While about 14% of those who contracted smallpox during this outbreak died from it, only six people, or about 2%, of those variolated died. But nevertheless, some did die, and this resulted in one of the first major backlashes against immunization efforts. Some declared that it was bad medicine, as it purposely caused a wound and an infection, while others saw it as a “devilish invention,” suggesting that some contracted smallpox as a punishment from God, and protecting them from God’s wrath was wrong. The debate was so fiery that one anti-variolater lobbed an improvised bomb into Cotton Mather’s house through a window. On it was a note that read, “Mather, you dog, Damn you, I’ll inoculate you with this.” Ironically, the only reason Mather was even able to read the note was that the poorly-made bomb failed to detonate. This furor over smallpox variolation would last for some time, but it would eventually subside, and the practice of variolation would become widespread, even among the nation’s Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, who traveled from Virginia to Pennsylvania to be variolated; John Adams, whose whose wife and children were variolated; and George Washington, who made variolation a requirement for all American soldiers. But of course, this was by no means the end of resistance to immunization science. And today, as we try desperately to get the Covid-19 pandemic under control in order to preserve lives and salvage our economies, it’s more important than ever to understand the history of anti-immunization rhetoric in order to refute its current iterations and encourage widespread vaccination.

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As some of you may recall, I touched on historical anti-vaccination claims before, in an episode about Alfred Russel Wallace, whose contribution to anti-vaccinationist rhetoric will be discussed here again, but there is far more to the topic, and I’ve long wanted to talk about it. Now, with the push to vaccinate here in America and the corresponding push against vaccination by the practice’s critics, it seems like the best time to talk about this. When considering vaccination coverage generally, the fact that it remains very high in America, with about 95% of children receiving the doses of vaccines recommended, indicates that resistance to vaccination is not as widespread as one may think. Anti-vaxxers would like us to think that they are a massive movement, and with the amount of news coverage they get, one might assume they are. However, recent efforts by Facebook to curb anti-vaccination misinformation have uncovered that two thirds of all the anti-vax content on social media appears to come from only a dozen online sources, called the “Disinformation Dozen.” This does not mean that such misinformation should be allowed to spread unchecked, though, and when it comes to the Covid vaccine, this science denial becomes even more dangerous. Many adults, even those who are susceptible to anti-vaccine pseudoscience and conspiracy theory, still get their children vaccinated because of the vaccination requirements of schools, and beyond this, they only espouse anti-vaccination claims in an abstract way, the same way they’ll share conjecture that 9/11 was an inside job, or that JFK’s murder was actually the result of a shadowy government conspiracy. “You know what I heard…” they’ll tell friends over beers, but the idea never affects their behavior beyond their yearly decision of whether or not to get a flu shot, because they had all their vaccinations as a child. But the Covid vaccine is new, admittedly rushed, and must be administered to adults, who are far more susceptible to severe cases of Covid-19 than children, in order for us to reach herd immunity. So now these adults who fancy themselves “free-thinkers” and already have the seeds of anti-vax misinformation in their minds are making the decision not to be vaccinated. Even if they are not swayed by the absurd fringe claims that Bill Gates is putting microchips in us through the vaccine, or that, as Congress’s resident lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene has asserted, Covid-19 vaccination records are the Mark of the Beast prophesied in Revelation, they remain hesitant due to distrust of the pharmaceutical industry or the government, or because of an imperfect understanding of the science behind this vaccine and vaccination in general. Before I was vaccinated, a family member told me that I didn’t need to get the shot because people were reaching herd immunity against Covid-19, which of course is false and fails to understand the basic fact that herd immunity to infectious diseases like Covid-19 is only achieved through widespread vaccination. So to start this history of anti-vaccinationism, we need to lay a foundation of basic understanding by discussing immunization science.

Rev. Cotton Mather’s house, scene of a failed bombing by someone who opposed Mather’s support of smallpox inoculation. Public Domain.

Most of the credit for the development of vaccination science goes to Edward Jenner, an English doctor who accepted the efficacy of inoculation, having been variolated himself as a child. In the 1790s, Jenner noticed that, in a given population suffering a smallpox outbreak, milkmaids seemed to rarely catch the disease. His hypothesis was that these milkmaids had developed immunity because of their exposure to cows that were infected with a similar disease, cowpox. More specifically, when these milkmaids came into physical contact with the cowpox pustules on udders, they were exposed to a pox that created only mild symptoms in humans and conferred immunity against the far more virulent and deadly smallpox. To understand how deadly and how virulent full-blown smallpox was, consider its symptoms. After a couple days of fever and body aches, a rash appeared inside the mouth and then spread over the entire body, becoming pustules, which might break, creating bloody sores. The most severe form had a fatality rate of up to 33%, with victims dying because of blood toxicity, infection, and blood loss. Those who survived typically suffered terrible scarring, sometimes over their entire body, and often blindness as well. In 18th century Europe, the death toll reached about 400,000 a year. After a year of Covid-19 that saw nearly 1 million deaths across Europe (and 1.3 million deaths across the Americas), this may seem tame, but with differences in population density, the comparison isn’t so simple. Suffice to say that the Speckled Monster was a violent, global scourge. Therefore, Jenner’s discovery was a medical miracle. He took pus from a cowpox pustule on the hand of a milkmaid and applied it to the arm of his gardener’s 9-year-old son using the variolation method, and months later, when he exposed the boy to smallpox several times, the boy never contracted the disease. Thus, the vaccine was born, named after the Latin word for cow, vaccus. Jenner wrote a book on the topic in 1798, and within five years, it had been translated into 5 languages and vaccination programs were underway in developed nations and colonies all over the world. There actually remains some mystery over whether early vaccinations were all derived from cowpox, as some early samples have been tested and shown to have been taken from a similar animal disease, horsepox. Regardless, the principle had been established, and through vaccination, the disease smallpox has been virtually eradicated. Because of this and how the science has been used to combat the spread of other diseases, the development of this immunization technique is considered the foremost medical breakthrough in the history of mankind.

At the time that Jenner developed the vaccine, the medical community’s understanding of how and why it worked was imperfect. After all, this was before the widespread acceptance of germ theory. Today, we know that vaccines work by activating the body’s immune system and relying on its memory. Amazingly, when it is exposed to the bacteria and viruses that cause disease, it is afterward able to remember certain features of them, like surface proteins, so that it will be better able to fight them off again in the future. This is called adaptive immunity. Vaccines have come a long way since the dangerous days of cutting open an arm and inserting infected pus into the wound, but the idea remains the same—the human body was better able to resist cowpox, and remembering features of that virus made it easier for the body to defeat the smallpox virus. Since then, vaccines became less dangerous, using weakened viruses or bacteria, or even rendering them incapable or replicating by killing them using formaldehyde or other chemicals. Some just introduced parts of a pathogen for the immune system to remember, or just toxins that a pathogen produces. Regardless, the central mechanism is the same. Think of antibody response as a bloodhound ready to track down and neutralize an intruder; the vaccine is just giving our bodies’ bloodhounds the scent to help them find and attack the invader. Now some of the Covid vaccines, the Pfizer and Moderna shots, use a brand-new method of exposing us to the viral proteins we want our immune system to remember: mRNA or messenger RNA. By injecting designer mRNA, our own body’s cells are directed to build the virus surface proteins that make Covid-19 so virulent. Therefore, no part of the virus is ever introduced into a vaccinated person’s system. Rather, cells are programmed to teach our immune systems how to battle the virus, should it ever enter our bodies. While this technology is new for vaccines against viruses, which may cause some vaccine-hesitance, it’s actually not as new as some believe. Scientists have been studying mRNA’s use in the creation of cells that mimic stem cells and in the development of a vaccine for cancer for more than 30 years, with hundreds of scientific papers published and dozens of longstanding clinical trials. So to suggest that this technology, which essentially programs the body’s immune response in the same way as traditional vaccines except through a different mechanism, was only developed in a rush during the last year, is inaccurate.

Dr. Jenner performing his first vaccination. Public Domain.

As the example of backlash against variolation efforts in colonial America shows, anti-vaccination sentiment is also not a new development and has been around since the dawn of immunization science. Many years after the development of Jenner’s smallpox vaccine, a variety of laws in 19th century England made vaccination compulsory. The Vaccination Act of 1840 outlawed the outmoded and far more dangerous technique of variolation and provided free vaccination to the poor, but by 1853, with vaccination rates not improving, a new act was passed making vaccination of infants required by law, with parents liable to be fined or imprisoned if they did not comply. This compulsory vaccination program was expanded by the Vaccination Act of 1867, which required all children under 14 to be vaccinated and began levying fines on doctors that failed to report families that resisted vaccination. In 1871, punitive measures against the poor who failed to comply included the confiscation of property and placement in a workhouse. It was in response to these draconian laws, which were actually pretty typical of laws governing the poor in the Victorian Age, that robust anti-vaccination activism emerged. As one might expect, a central complaint among these first organized anti-vaccinationists was the power of the state over personal liberty and its persecution of those who refused or were hesitant to be vaccinated. There were also, though, critics who complained that vaccination science was unproven, that it caused other diseases such as syphilis, or that disease actually emanated from decaying organic matter—the miasma theory of disease—and thus injecting oneself with what was essentially poison could not actually prevent disease. Rather, these “sanitarians” or “anti-contagionists” asserted that keeping city streets clean was the only way to prevent disease. Alternatively, there was again, as in Mather’s day, religious opposition on the grounds that immunization interfered in God’s plans, but with a new spin. 19th century critics like John Gibbs claimed that death by disease was foreordained. Therefore, if vaccination reduced death by smallpox, there would just be more death by consumption, whooping-cough, or measles, for divine providence could not be thwarted.

In 1867, John Gibbs’s cousin founded the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, and throughout the 1870s, the cause became popular among the working class and the poor in provincial organizations. It was among these small northern town associations that the most extreme justifications for resistance were prominent, and it was among them that it became a movement of civil disobedience, with organized refusal to comply with the law resulting in some leaders of the movement being imprisoned for their beliefs. Meanwhile, among middle-class intellectuals in London, the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination was organized. Among these was Lord Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the scientific principle of Natural Selection, who like other vaccine critics took a more holistic view of health and likewise distrusted the growth of state power and medical authoritarianism. He also took a sanitarian view by attributing reductions in smallpox infection rates to general improvements in sanitation. Wallace further argued, much as some have about today’s Covid vaccines, that more study and experiment was necessary to prove the efficacy of the smallpox vaccine. At the time, Wallace was working with imperfect statistical evidence, and of course, the systematic tests he proposed have since been completed, and then some. Therefore, it’s hard to characterize Wallace, whose heroic refutation of flat-earthers I have previously discussed, as anti-scientific, even despite his obsession with seances and spiritualism. This demonstrates, though, that 19th century anti-vaccination rhetoric was not solely the domain of anti-intellectual denialists. Eventually, in 1896, all of these organizations combined into one National Anti-Vaccination League concentrated on parliamentary change. In 1898, they achieved victory when a new law was passed allowing abstention from vaccination on the grounds of “conscientious objection” (the first time the phrase was used before its later use in the context of the refusal of military service). However, by this time, vaccination had so reduced rates of smallpox infection that compulsion was no longer a necessity, making this victory more of a pacifying concession.

Wood engraving depicting fears over a compulsory vaccination act. By E.L. Sambourne, courtesy Wellcome Images (CC BY 4.0)

This would not be the end of anti-vaccination activism against compulsory smallpox vaccination, however. The formation of anti-vaccination leagues had spread to New England in the mid-1880s, and the compulsory vaccination of children being made a pre-requisite of enrollment in schools precipitated a surge of anti-vaccination rhetoric through the Progressive Era of the 20th century. Much of the resistance originated at first from farming families, who complained that the transient fevers that often resulted from vaccination kept their kids out of the fields and prevented them from bringing in the crop before the beginning of the school year. Some religious opposition was present here as well, though from a somewhat unorthodox source. I am referring to the Swedenborgian Church, which believes in the unusual mystical prophecies of Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed to have had transportive visions that allowed him to talk with angels and demons. Swedenborg claimed the Last Judgment began in the mid-18th century, and that the Second Coming of Christ had actually happened, through the revelation of his own teachings. In 1906, the Swedenborgian Church in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, or the General Church of New Jerusalem, resisted vaccination against smallpox during an outbreak because of their devotion to homeopathic medicine, and from among the members of this church emerged John Pitcairn, anti-vaccination giant and founder of the Anti-Vaccination League of America. However, the majority of the opposition to compulsory vaccination in early 20th century America came from parents who believed their children had been injured by a vaccine. In 1914, a New York state Republican committee delegate named James Loyster lost his son to infantile paralysis. As it happened three weeks after a vaccination, he came to believe that it had been caused by the vaccination—the old post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. This prompted him to undertake a crusade against vaccination. He surveyed many residents of upstate New York, and he believed that he had discovered some fifty cases of injury and death caused by vaccination, which he argued far outweighed the mere three deaths by smallpox during the same period, apparently never considering that the smallpox death rate had become so small precisely because of vaccination. Among the bereaved parents who lobbied against compulsory vaccination was one illustrator whose daughter, some time after vaccination, had become paralyzed and died due to a heart defect. The limp-limbed ragdoll this illustrator designed, Raggedy Ann, which he said reminded him of his late daughter, would many years later become something of a symbol for anti-vaccinationists. James Loyster took the anecdotes he had gathered from people like the Raggedy Ann doll creator, and he made pamphlets, which he distributed to New York legislators. Eventually, he succeeded in getting the state’s compulsory vaccination law altered. The Jones-Tallett amendment rescinded the requirement in rural areas and towns with populations of less than fifty thousand, except in cases of an outbreak, when compulsory vaccination could be enforced once again. However, Loyster rejected the law, seeing it as a defeat, since in cities of more than fifty thousand, the amendment actually expanded vaccination requirements.

As with anti-vaccinationism in 19th-century England, it’s clear that it would be unfair to characterize the philosophy of compulsory vaccination objectors as uniform. Beyond objections to the temporary loss of child labor or because of perceived dangers, there was objection to the laboratory experimentation on animals that took place to develop vaccines. These vaccine critics were early animal rights activists called anti-vivisectionists, who protested, as the name implies, surgical experimentation on live animals. Though they may seem like odd bedfellows with animal rights activists today, there was also a strain of libertarian ideology present among anti-vaccinationists. The two sons of John Pitcairn, the Swedenborgian founder of the Anti-Vaccination League of America, inherited the organization and likewise were leaders in the movement, and they also funded the Sentinels of the Republic, a conservative political organization that opposed federal overreach and socialism in any form, rejecting any social reforms of the day, including New Deal legislation, limitations on child labor, and even the establishment of the Department of Education. Among many anti-vaxxers of the Progressive Era, a government that compelled citizens to do anything, even for reasons of public health, looked a lot like Bolshevism. Then there were those who saw it as a matter of personal liberty, believing their control over the kind of medical care they received to be as sacrosanct as the freedom of religion. Among these were religious groups like the Swedenborgians, whose doctrines included a philosophy on health. Christian Scientists emerged as a similar group. They believed that illness was not actually physical and could best be overcome by appealing for recovery through prayer. The group was widely criticized around the turn of the century after some cases of children dying because they had only been “treated” by practitioners of Christian Science rather than by actual doctors. Charges were made that followers of Christian Science were unlawfully presenting themselves as medical practitioners, and this was another common thread among anti-vaccinationists. There were a variety of alternative medicine movements that positioned themselves in opposition to vaccination. Naturopathy was one, with its emphasis on natural therapeutics. Physical Culture was a movement emphasizing natural foods, exercise, and fresh air that also engaged in germ theory denialism, contending that disease resulted only from unclean living and poor fitness. Then there was chiropracty… that’s right, chiropractors. Now don’t get me wrong. I have benefitted from spinal adjustments myself, or at least I believe I have, but chiropracty started as a form of absolute quackery. True believer chiropractors claimed that people only became ill because of spinal misalignment, which disrupted the body’s flow of energy. One can almost hear a low voice out of the past moaning: woo… woooo….

Anti-compulsory vaccination rally, 1919. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons User Cavernia (CC BY 2.0)

In the 1930s, anti-vaccinationism in America declined. First, a series of Supreme Court decisions found that compulsory vaccination laws were perfectly constitutional, and then the figures who had spearheaded major anti-vaccinationist organizations passed away. By the end of the 1970s, smallpox had been eradicated because of vaccination, and numerous other diseases, including measles, diphtheria, pertussis, and polio are now kept under control, also through immunization. Modern anti-vaccinationism didn’t really show up until 1998, when a British physician named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet in their Early Report feature titled “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.” The paper speculated that the vaccine for the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, might cause gastrointestinal inflammation, which in turn could be the cause of autism, a development disorder diagnosis that had become and continues to be more and more common in children. When it came out that Wakefield had falsified data and acted unethically in subjecting children to unnecessary spinal taps, his paper was retracted, he was disgraced, and his license to practice medicine revoked. Nevertheless, it has become a common claim among anti-vaccinationists today that vaccines cause autism. Wakefield has since made a pseudoscience career for himself by further fanning the flames of this disinformation, claiming that children who receive too many vaccines too quickly or receive them while unwell or on other medication are susceptible to being turned autistic. Other claims have to do with the presence of thimerosal in vaccines, used as a preservative, because it contained mercury, which is a known neurotoxin. Everyone seems to know that mercury was used by milliners in hat making, and that it drove them insane, thus the term “mad as a hatter.” However, the thimerosal in vaccines used ethyl mercury, which does not cross the blood-brain barrier like its counterpart, methyl mercury does, so this concern was groundless, and regardless, the chemical was removed from vaccines by the CDC in 2001 simply to pacify anti-vaxxers. While it’s true that we don’t really know why autism incidence has risen so dramatically since the 1970s, the fact that we can now more clearly recognize and more accurately screen for signs of being on the autism spectrum might account for the much of the increase in diagnoses. The fact is that no vaccine-autism connection has ever been found despite numerous scientific studies being conducted specifically to determine whether one exists. Studies that found zero association between the MMR vaccine and autism have been published in the scholarly journal Pediatrics, the similarly titled Journal of Pedatrics, The Lancet, the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and the New England Journal of Medicine, to name a few. But anti-vaxxers don’t let a little thing like empirical evidence get in the way of their convictions.

Again, though, as in the past, modern anti-vaccinationists do not all approach the subject with the same philosophy and motivation. Objections predicated on religious doctrine remain, though with some variations. As with those who long ago objected to interfering with Providence, some anti-vaxxers, like Suzanne Humphries of the International Medical Council on Vaccination, will say that the pharmaceutical industry has set itself up to replace God, striking fear into humanity that they will be struck down by pestilence if they do not accept this peculiar communion in a syringe. Then there is the streak of environmentalism among anti-vaxxers, among hippies who object to the animal products in them or to what they deem to be toxic chemical ingredients, even though any chemical component that might be harmful in larger amounts exists in vaccines only in such a negligible quantity that the body can easily eliminate it. Environmentalist objection to vaccines sometimes blends with religious objection, arguing that the body’s natural defenses are better equipped to fight disease without technological aid because that is how God designed it in His infinite wisdom. The view that the fight against vaccination is a fight for personal liberty remains, but it has blended in an interesting way with feminism. Specifically, Second Wave Feminism introduced the idea that medical paternalism was a key element of the patriarchy, and that women must fight to reclaim control of their healthcare from the male-dominated medical industry. This view that women know their bodies best translated into anti-vaccination rhetoric in the form of mothers insisting that their maternal instincts were far more trustworthy than professional medical advice. This notion of the superiority of personal instincts over expert opinion would not be reserved only for women or mothers, though. Since the 1970s, while second-wave feminism was encouraging women to wrest away the reins of their healthcare from the patriarchy, the notion of respect for patient autonomy was spreading as a core principle of medical ethics. This was in response to some terrible ethical violations, some of which were indeed perpetrated by vaccine researchers who tested their vaccines on children with developmental disabilities. With the advent of the Internet, patient autonomy took on new meaning, for suddenly patients could easily self-diagnose, and doctors, who depended on positive online reviews and satisfaction scores to run a successful practice and maintain Medicare reimbursement, were under pressure to give patients what they wanted. Add to this the spread of misinformation online, and you have a recipe for quackery and anti-intellectualism. All of these undercurrents can be observed in the remarks of minor celebrity and prominent anti-vaccinationist Jenny McCarthy during her television appearance on Oprah. “The University of Google is where I got my degree,” she explained in defense of her claims that her son Evan became autistic because of a vaccine, adding, “my science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.” When pushed to clarify how she could be so certain, she credited her own “mommy instinct” for letting her “know what’s going on in his body.”

Father of modern anti-vaccinationism Andrew Wakefield, doubling down. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Bladość (CC BY 4.0)

But clearly the most common thread in all anti-vaccination rhetoric is the belief that vaccines cause harm or injury, especially to children. The fact is, though the risk of harm from vaccines may be minimal today, there have historically been cases of serious damage done by vaccines. As mentioned, the early practice of variolation was almost barbarous by comparison with vaccination, involving crude purposeful infection that often still resulted in death. Then after Jenner’s breakthrough using material from people infected with cowpox, it turned out that the donors of infected material sometimes were also infected with other diseases that were then passed right along to the person being vaccinated. There were cases in which numerous children caught syphilis and died because of this cross contamination through vaccination. Even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when vaccination had become more sterile, episodes still occurred with bacteria-contaminated needles or vaccination solutions that were contaminated with other diseases. In the 1950s, when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine went to market through numerous pharmaceutical companies, one incident saw batches shipped with live instead of dead viruses, resulting in a manmade polio outbreak that saw 200 people paralyzed and ten killed, many of them children. But these were contained events, which were discovered and corrected. Much anti-vaccination rhetoric, as with most science denialism, relies on baseless conspiracy theory, claiming that the government and the pharmaceutical industry collude to cover up the harms of vaccines in order to make money. However, the simple fact that harms have been identified, admitted, and addressed disproves this. The fact that vaccine manufacturers are shielded from liability by legislation certainly contributes to this conspiracy theory. For example, in America, when Republican President Ronald Reagan signed a law creating the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, he set up a mechanism for reviewing claims of vaccine harm and compensating plaintiffs that demonstrate some probability that an injury was suffered due to vaccination. This program encourages manufacturers to continue making vaccines by removing the threat of lawsuits. Some might argue that this means manufacturers no longer need to worry about safety, but this is not accurate, as there is tremendous government oversight of vaccine safety. The CDC and FDA have their Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, to which anyone can contribute reports, and the CDC has their own separate program as well, the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which collects safety data directly from health care providers. As for the big government conspiracy theorists’ claims that all of these government agencies are in on it, the fact is that vaccination requirements are decided by local and state governments, not some shadowy federal monolith. While it’s true that vaccination recommendations are passed from these federal agencies, these recommendations are made by technical advisory groups that hold meetings that are open to the public. As usual, conspiracy theories like these break down under simple, clear logic.

The victory of immunization science over diseases has always been relative. While variolation against smallpox carried a 1-2% chance of death, this is vastly preferable to the 10-33% chance of death from smallpox. The idea has always been that the benefits justify the risks. The risks today are minimal, but they are still present. For example, the MMR vaccine comes with some small risk of febrile seizure, but then again, these convulsions also occur naturally in a small percentage of children, are typically short and mostly harmless, and vaccines can in some cases prevent febrile seizures by protecting against diseases that cause them. To be considered medically vital, we only need to determine that the potential benefits of vaccination outweigh the risk of side effects, and that can easily be demonstrated by the elimination of smallpox and polio by vaccination, as well as the initial elimination of measles before flagging vaccination rates allowed for its recent resurgence. This resurgence of measles also demonstrates that this decision of whether benefits outweigh risks is not a matter of individual preference. Vaccination against infectious disease is a matter of public health that requires collective action. This is the case for compulsory vaccination. Many today don’t understand the concept of herd immunity. It was touted last year as a kind of laissez-faire solution to the Covid-19 pandemic, as if it would be over with more quickly if we all ran out and purposely infected ourselves like one big chicken pox party. The fact is that herd immunity is only achieved through mass vaccination. The more people are immune to a disease, the less it will spread, which confers safety even on those who aren’t immune, but the rates of immunity required to achieve herd immunity vary depending on how contagious the disease might be. For the flu, a vaccination rate of 50-75% of the population confers herd immunity, but for measles, 83-94% immunity is needed, and for whooping-cough, 92-94% immunity must be achieved. Numbers like that don’t tend to occur without mass vaccination. We may not yet know what percentage of the populace that must be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19, but considering how contagious it is, we should assume that we will need something like 94% of the populace to be immunized. So if you are considering not getting vaccinated, or if you know someone who is hesitant, urge them, convince them, explain to them that we need to take action. If they are leery of the mRNA technology in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, encourage them to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which instead uses a disabled adenovirus that contains some genetic material from the novel coronavirus in order to instruct the immune system on how to combat it. If they are disappointed that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine only has a 66% efficacy, let them know that this is likely just an aberration based on the fact that the clinical trials were held during the pandemic’s surge, and remind them that many flu vaccines also have a 60% efficacy but remain effective. We have a chance to take some control over this virus and to seize some form of normalcy that may pave the way for an economic recovery, but we all have to trust science and do our part. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

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Until next time … remember… there’s denialism and then there’s post-denialism. True denialism disguises itself as logical and even scholarly, and because of that is very insidious. If it is not countered, it evolves to become post-denialism, the obtuse, purposeful opposition to reason that requires no evidence, just the desire to undermine. It’s the difference between a pseudo-academic denialist manifesto and a tweet that just says Covid-19 is a hoax. We must address the first to in order to prevent the second.

Further Reading

Colgrove, James. “‘Science in a Democracy’: The Contested Status of Vaccination in the Progressive Era and the 1920s.” Isis, vol. 96, no. 2, 2005, pp. 167–191. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431531.

Garde, Damien. “The story of mRNA: How a once-dismissed idea became a leading technology in the Covid vaccine race.” STAT, 10 Nov. 2020, www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-once-dismissed-idea-became-a-leading-technology-in-the-covid-vaccine-race/.

"New clues on the historical origin of the vaccine used to eradicate smallpox." ScienceDaily, 11 October 2017, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171011180558.htm.

Porter, Dorothy, and Roy Porter. “The Politics of Prevention: Anti-Vaccinationism and Public Health in Nineteenth-Century England.” Medical History, vol. 32, no. 3, 1988, pp. 231-252. National Center for Biotechnology Information, doi: 10.1017/s0025727300048225.

Rothstein, Aaron. “Vaccines and Their Critics, Then and Now.” The New Atlantis, no. 44, 2015, pp. 3–27. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43551422.

Weston, Kathryn M. “Killing the Speckled Monster: Riots, Resistance, and Reward in the Story of Smallpox Vaccination.” Health and History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2016, pp. 138–144. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5401/healthhist.18.2.0138.

The Story of Chevalier d'Eon and the Inadequacy of the Historical Analysis of Transgender Identity

In the 1890s, German medical doctor Magnus Hirschfield noticed a disturbing trend among his homosexual patients. Many of them attempted suicide, and many more bore scars from suicide attempts. When one young military man left behind a suicide note urging Dr. Hirschfield to “contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms,” Hirschfield embarked upon his life’s work of advancing sexual science and devoting himself to sexual rights activism. He founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897 to defend gay rights and work against societal hostility toward homosexuals. Around 1904, Hirschfield was called to consult on the case of a suicidal man who had been hospitalized after an electrical accident. This turned out to be one Martha Baer, who had been raised as a woman but had chosen to express himself as a man and go by the name Karl. Karl Baer was not a female-to-male transgender person as we would recognize one today. In fact, he had been born biologically male, but due to the relatively common birth defect known as hypospadias, in which the urethral opening forms somewhere other than the tip of the penis, his sex was misidentified. Raised as a girl, this erroneous gender assignment caused him especially great distress after puberty, when he began to grow body and facial hair. His sexual attraction toward women led him to identify as a lesbian, and eventually to identify as a man. Dr. Hirschfield diagnosed Karl Baer’s gender misidentification based on biology, performed corrective surgery, and helped Baer obtain official gender reassignment in the eyes of the law. While this surgery was essentially a hypospadias repair, it is viewed by many as the first gender reassignment surgery, and certainly Dr. Hirschfield went on to advance social and medical knowledge of intersex individuals as well as cases of what he would call transvestism and transsexuality. At his Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, Hirschfield provided counseling and treatment for a wide variety of people struggling with their sexualities and gender identities. While he still often viewed transgender individuals as suffering from a physical or psychological disorder, he pushed for reform and understanding and was in many ways ahead of his time. Unsurprisingly, his work was not popular with the Nazis, who shut down his institute in 1933. While in exile in Paris, at a cinema, Magnus Hirschfield had the distinct displeasure of watching a newsreel in which fascists plundered his institute and burned his life’s work. Today, many conservative and religious ideologues justify their intolerance of and opposition to transgender rights by claiming that it is a modern phenomenon, a symptom of liberal decadence, but in truth there is nothing new about transgender identity, just as there is nothing new about blaming changing gender notions on societal decadence. But in many cases, as in the case of Hirschfield’s institute, this history has been erased by the intolerant.

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This post started out as another survey, this time listing and discussing all the transgender figures in history in an effort to demonstrate the ubiquity of the phenomenon throughout history. I envisioned it as a refutation of the critics who try to assert that this is a new phenomenon. However, what I found is that this is a difficult task. No doubt, it is an easy thing to turn up lists of historical figures who have been embraced as forerunners by the transgender community. But I feel compelled to dig deeper and consider some further points. First, we would today recognize an entire spectrum of subsets within the term “transgender.” Dr. Hirschfield rightly recognized transvestites, or “cross-dressers” –people who were comfortable with their biological sex but enjoyed dressing in clothes typically reserved for the opposite sex—as separate from transexuals, or those who longed to live entirely as a member of the sex they were not assigned at birth, or even to surgically alter their biological sex in order to more fully realize this desire. Our modern terminology did not arrive until the 1960s, when psychiatrist Robert Stoller began using terms like “gender identity” and “gender assignment.” The term “transgender” wasn’t coined until 1970 by activist Virginia Prince and was originally used to denote heterosexual transvestites. Today, the term is used more generally as an umbrella term, including those who identify genderfluid and non-binary or genderqueer. We now recognize sex assigned at birth and gender identity as just two elements in a larger spectrum of personal identity, which also includes gender expression, and sexual orientation, which itself can be further broken down into physical attraction versus emotional attraction. This evolution of our terminology and understanding of personal identity is what complicates our ability to identify trans figures in history. If we use it as an umbrella term, then it’s more simple. Any persons in history whose outward gender expression is recorded as being at variance with their birth-assigned sex can comfortably be labeled transgender. However, the critics of trans rights typically aren’t denying the presence in history of figures known to have dressed in the clothing their society reserved for the opposite sex. So it would seem some further differentiation and categorization is needed to refute those who desire to erase trans people from history. For example, everyone is familiar with the legends of Joan of Arc and Mulan, women who dressed as men in order to fight as soldiers. Few would argue that they are transgender figures, a fact that clearly indicates how important motivation is to making such an identification. The fact is that it is very difficult to discern what motivated gender transgressive behavior by historical figures, especially past a certain point in time, when polite society dictated that people should not speak or write about such matters. Thus we are left with only inferences and educated guesses. For example, there were many women who dressed as men in order to fight in the American Civil War, but one in particular, Albert Cashier, might be differentiated from the others and from figures like Mulan and Joan of Arc as well, for he chose to live as a man for more than fifty years, long after the conclusion of the war.

19th century depiction of Elagabalus in priestly vestments. Public Domain.

So to discern whether a given figure may reasonably be raised as an example of a transgender individual, we must scour the historical record for evidence of their motivations for gender transgressive behaviors like transvestism or for some indications of their feelings about their gender identities. Another problem that a historian faces in attempting this is the reliability of the primary sources that may give us such evidence. A perfect example of this difficulty is Varius Avitus Bassianus, who in 218 CE, amid a rebellion against Roman Emperor Macrinus, was raised up as a figurehead emperor at just 14 years old, taking the name Elagabalus. As the story is told, this emperor, assigned male at birth, alienated the aristocracy by dressing in clothing considered suitable only for women, by painting his face and wearing jewelry in an effeminate manner. It is even asserted that he wanted to be addressed as a woman, stating, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady,” and promised generous rewards for any physician who could surgically alter his genitals to be like those of a woman. This certainly sounds like a clear example of not just an ancient historical figure who identified as being of a gender opposite to the one assigned him at birth, but also of a trans person seeking gender reassignment surgery long before any such procedures had ever been invented. In my view, this is a strong argument for the presence of trans people throughout human history. The problem for the conscientious historian, however, is that the three primary sources from which all of this information about Elagabalus is gleaned, the works of Cassius Dio, Herodian, and his biography in the Roman collection of biographies, Historia Augusta, are all manifestly hostile toward Elagabalus, written by contemporaries who had been alienated, like so many others in his realm, by Elagabalus’s religious practices. So unhappy were the Roman elite with young Elagabalus as a figurehead that they ended up having him murdered within a few years of installing him, and his biographers in some passages include manifestly fictitious accounts of his outrages. As such, the accounts of this Roman Emperor’s gender transgressions may or may not be true.

Long before the terms “transexual” or “transgender,” the Age of Enlightenment gave the western world the term “Eonism” to describe such transgression of gender norms. The origin of this term, a remarkable person named Chevalier d’Eon, serves as the perfect example of both the presence of transgender figures in our historical past as well as the inadequacy of the historical record in helping us determine with any certainty the true feelings of historical trans figures regarding their gender identities. As such, the remainder of this episode will be devoted to this unusual and fascinating individual. Born Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont to a noble but not a wealthy family in 1728, he lived his life as a young man, and thus I will refer to him using the masculine pronoun for now, for clarity’s sake. A gifted scholar, he graduated as a student of civil and canon law at 21 years old, in 1749, and embarked on a political career as a secretary to a series of administrators before being appointed a royal censor. In this role, he read literature and history extensively, but rather than working to ban books, he appears to have spent his time acquainting himself with the most current Enlightenment thinkers. He began to develop political philosophies of his own, which tended toward the idea of benevolent despotism, that absolute monarchs were the ideal agents of progressive reform, taking power away from the aristocracy and the church and imposing policies inspired by Enlightenment principles. With such an ideology, it’s no surprise that he sought to serve the purposes of King Louis XV by entering the diplomatic corps and working with the French Ambassador to Russia for a few years. Despite being of slight build and a “pretty boy,” as some described him, he thereafter entered military service during the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France, serving as dragoon and sustaining an injury. He was afterward sent to London, appointed secretary to the ambassador negotiating the Treaty of Paris that would end the Seven Years’ War. For his service in drafting this treaty, he would be awarded a knighthood, earning the title Chevalier. Throughout his military career and during his years living in London, despite his slender frame and somewhat effeminate beauty, d’Eon earned himself a reputation as a manly fellow. He always went about in his dragoon’s uniform, always proudly defended his own reputation and honor, and eagerly escalated personal conflicts by frequently challenging other men to duels, as though to prove his own manhood. This aspect of his character is especially interesting considering what would later be revealed.

Chevalier D'Éon, as a younger man. Mezzotint by Vispré. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Outwardly, Chevalier d’Eon was a rousing success in London. After the signing of the Treaty of Paris, d’Eon returned to London to take charge of diplomatic affairs between the two nations, being promoted to the position of plenipotentiary minister during an interim period when the previous ambassador had returned to Paris and a replacement had yet to be appointed. Chevalier d’Eon was a fixture of King George III’s court and made numerous social connections among the English nobility. He was living a life of luxury, rubbing elbows with the wealthy and powerful. But then the rug was pulled out from under him. A new ambassador arrived, the Comte de Guerchy, whom d’Eon thought of as inferior in intellect. D’Eon was knocked back down to the role of secretary, a regression that caused d’Eon keen humiliation. Brazenly, d’Eon refused to step down from his post, and the newspaper coverage of d’Eon’s defiance was widely read because of just how entertaining it was. When pestered by an agent of Geurchy, the newly appointed ambassador, d’Eon refused to grant him an audience because he was not highborn and challenged him to a duel when the agent persisted. This set off a pamphlet war, with Guerchy denouncing d’Eon’s refusal to step down and d’Eon, explosively, claiming that Guerchy had tried to drug him, kidnap him, and have him murdered. Indeed, d’Eon even pressed charges against Guerchy for attempting to have him assassinated, a legal action which Guerchy tried unsuccessfully to have nullified. Amid this feud, Chevalier d’Eon published Guerchy’s private correspondence, seemingly to embarrass him. In retaliation, Guerchy had d’Eon charged with libel in France, where of course d’Eon refused to return, thereby making d’Eon an outlaw in his home country. In England, however, d’Eon still enjoyed wide support. King George III refused his extradition, and the public, reading about d’Eon’s stand against his king in newspapers that portrayed his struggle sympathetically, began to view him as a hero of the people, pushing back against royal abuses of power. He was compared with Britain’s own John Wilkes, a radical journalist who around the same time had made enemies of king and prime minister alike and had likewise been transformed into an outlaw who enjoyed popular support. But there was more to all of this than the public was aware. Chevalier d’Eon’s publication of private papers was, unbeknownst to all, a powerful message to King Louis XV. It was, in fact, an overt threat, for Chevalier d’Eon kept a volatile secret that the King of France could not afford to see revealed.

We know now that, even before his work as a secretary to the Ambassador to St. Petersburg, a young Chevalier d’Eon had been enlisted into King Louis XV’s espionage service, “Le Secret du Roi,” or the King’s Secret. In general, this spy organization within the diplomatic corps was tasked with gathering foreign intelligence and working for the king’s purposes even when they were at cross-purposes with the goals his diplomats were publicly trying to reach. For example, while in Russia, d’Eon had been working on some schemes in Poland. Outwardly, Louis supported Polish independence, but through his agents in the King’s Secret, he was endeavoring to install his cousin on the Polish throne. In England, Louis’s secret agenda was even more devious. While Chevalier d’Eon and the Ambassador drafted the Treaty of Paris to end hostilities between France and Britain, King Louis had his agents making inroads with and bribing politicians, with the end goal of launching an invasion. Chevalier d’Eon had actually been placed into an even better position to work toward Louis’s goals when he had been made plenipotentiary minister, and as such had been spending a great deal of money in his efforts to forge relationships that he could leverage. It has been suggested that one reason d’Eon was replaced was that he was spending too much money, and likewise that this was the reason he refused to step down, because he had become too accustomed to his lifestyle. Whatever the case, when he defied King Louis, he knew that his knowledge of the King’s machinations might work to his benefit, and his publication of private correspondence was a shot across the bow, warning that he was all too willing to betray confidences. King Louis could not afford for his plan to invade Britain to be revealed, as it would precipitate war before the French were prepared to renew hostilities. However, as time went on and d’Eon failed to preserve his title, his pension, and his reputation through implied threat and negotiation, his leverage began to lose its power. During the early 1770s, the rumblings of colonial rebellion in America weakened d’Eon’s position, for Britain already began to suspect that France might use the opportunity, while Britain was embroiled in a war with her own colonies, to break the treaty and make war on them again. However, by that point in d’Eon’s years long negotiation with Louis XV, there was another secret of d’Eon’s in play, one that had been revealed and would have far greater consequences for his reputation.

Chevalier d’Eon as an older man. Public Domain.

In 1770, rumors began to circulate among the British that, despite his masculine comportment, the slight and comely Chevalier d’Eon was actually a woman. Some began to portray him a heroine who became a man solely to serve her country, first in the military and thereafter in politics, like a modern Joan of Arc, or to use a more recent and British example, like Hannah Snell, who had donned men’s clothing to travel in search of the husband who had abandoned her and ended up serving as a foot soldier fighting against the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Most, though, doubted the rumor entirely, and the matter became the subject of much wagering in London, resulting in a pool being started at the actual London Stock Exchange. Interestingly, Chevalier d’Eon refused to confirm or deny the rumor and would not submit to a physical examination that would put the matter to rest, stating that it would be a great dishonor. When King Louis XV died in 1774. D’Eon renewed his negotiations with Louis XVI, seeking to maintain his title and pension and finally return to France. Due to the shrewd negotiations of playwright Pierre de Beaumarchais, who was working on the King’s behalf, the question of Chevalier d’Eon’s sex was made central to the matter. In a courtroom setting, witnesses swore that they had seen d’Eon in the nude, affirming that he was in fact biologically a woman. Using these testimonies to convince Louis XVI that d’Eon was a woman, Beaumarchais hammered out a deal. If d’Eon wanted to resolve the matter and return to France, he must adopt female dress and habits and agree to live the rest of his days as the woman he was. If he did so, he could keep his pension, but he would be stripped of his title of plenipotentiary minister because a woman could not hold such a position. To the surprise of many, d’Eon accepted, returned to France and lived as a woman the rest of her days, some 33 years. She was legally recognized as a biological woman, and she lived for many of those years as a sort of celebrity. She participated in fencing tournaments and was thought of as a kind of warrior lady, like the legendary Amazons. Thus it was a great shock when, after her death in 1810, a post-mortem examination revealed that she possessed “male organs in every respect perfectly formed.”

It is unsurprising that Chevalier—or as she would be known by the feminine form of her title, Chevalière—d’Eon is featured prominently on most online lists of historical trans figures. She is remembered by many as a male-to-female transgender person who had the audacity and genius to come out in the 18th century by convincing the world that she had actually been a woman cross-dressing as a man and was now just discontinuing her transvestism to live as the sex assigned her at birth. In her 1779 ghostwritten memoir, The Military, Political, and Private Life of Mademoiselle d’Eon, it was explained as such: she had been raised as a boy by her father because he required a son in order to ensure an inheritance from his in-laws. However, d’Eon’s post-mortem proved that this was just a cover story, and some other observations of the physician who examined the Chevalière’s body, specifically that she was round of limb and curvaceous, with “breasts remarkably full,” have led some to suggest that she was in some way biologically intersex. However, historians typically take an opposing view that is equally understandable. They might suggest that whatever feminine aspects her body showed were a result of weight gain and the shaping that occurs from wearing women’s clothing, such as corsets. These academics use the male pronoun and look at the circumstances surrounding d’Eon’s transition to argue he was a hoaxer, asserting that his adoption of women’s garments was simply a means to resolve his conflict with the French crown and negotiate his return home, or that it was not even his idea and he was forced by the playwright and negotiator for the crown, Beaucharnais, to humiliate himself by adopting women’s attire in order to return from exile. They will point to the fact that he never showed a desire to dress as a woman before the conclusion of his negotiation, that he in fact preferred his military uniform, and that he even resisted the stipulation to dress as a woman for two years. In fact, d’Eon even challenged Beaucharnais’s partner, who claimed d’Eon had confided to him that he was a woman, to a duel, a challenge easily avoided by saying it was dishonorable to fight a woman. Then there are further reports from during the remainder d’Eon’s life that, although he dressed as a woman to comply with the terms of his repatriation, he refused to behave as one would expect a lady to behave, climbing into and out of carriages without aid, and remaining after dinner parties to socialize with the men when the women retired.

Portrait of Chevalier d’Eon in women’s clothing. Public Domain.

Nearly every academic point raised to claim Chevalière d’Eon was a mere impostor can be refuted pretty easily and logically, starting with the claim that she never wore women’s clothing before 1777. According to her own memoir, while traveling to Russia on a diplomatic mission he had dressed as a woman in order to evade the British, and while at the court of Empress Elizabeth of Russia, would have taken part in that monarch’s unusual weekly masquerades, which forced everyone to cross-dress and weren’t exactly masquerades in that no masks were to be worn. The notion that she did not wish to dress as a woman receives a further blow by evidence that d’Eon promptly purchased an entire set of lady’s garments as soon as it became clear that dressing as a woman would be a stipulation of the repatriation agreement. Furthermore, d’Eon’s early resistance to dressing as a woman after the agreement was signed, as well as the challenging of Beaumarchais’s partner to a duel, likewise have an alternative explanation. It turned out that, in making d’Eon’s gender identity a part of the negotiations, Beaucharnais and his partner were motivated by greed. Recall that the rumors of Chevalier d’Eon’s womanhood had sparked a great deal of wagering in London. It turns out that the odds favored d’Eon being a man, so Beaumarchais and his partner stood to win a lot of money if they bet d’Eon was a woman and then were able to legally prove it. And this is exactly what they did, producing witnesses willing to perjure themselves by stating they had seen or touched Chevalier d’Eon’s female genitals. So d’Eon’s early refusal to comply with the order to dress as a woman, as well as her anger and attempt to duel these men, was prompted by the fact that she discovered they had used her gender identity in a scheme to make money. However, there is every reason to suspect that the original rumor about d’Eon being a woman was started by d’Eon herself, and that it was she who suggested using the repatriation negotiation to make this gender identity official. Remember that at any time, d’Eon could have disabused everyone of this notion. And she had good reason to, as well, for maintaining her female gender identity ensured that she could not retain her plenipotentiary minister title. This was something that she had previously made central to her demands, so it stands to reason that living as a woman was worth more to her than maintaining her status. When Beaumarchais’s partner afterward tried to sue the bettors who refused to pay on their wagers and was obliged produce evidence of d’Eon’s womanhood in a court of law, he did so counting on the fact that d’Eon would not show up to present evidence to the contrary, which she did not. And finally, following the French Revolution and Louis XVI’s execution in 1793, d’Eon returned to London, and thus was no longer subject to the terms of her repatriation agreement, yet she continued to live as a woman until her death in 1810. Some will argue that she enjoyed her reputation as a heroic woman too much to give it up, and others suggest that reversing the transition would have been too great a dishonor, but the simplest explanation, which accords with all the events of her life previous to that, is that Chevalière d’Eon had always secretly wanted to live as a woman and had schemed in the 1770s to find a brilliant way to do so despite the gender norms of her society.

Even when the academic literature about Chevalière d’Eon concedes that she may have wanted her gender transition, it tends to search for some further explanation, as though unwilling to accept the simple and clear idea that she had always identified as a woman, even throughout her military career and her constant belligerent dueling. They point to d’Eon’s sexual orientation to suggest a homosexual lifestyle may have led to the gender transition. As evidence, they observe that there is no record of his being engaged in heterosexual affairs. In fact, he lived for years in London apparently having an affair with his married landlady, who during the repatriation negotiations swore that she regularly slept with d’Eon, had seen d’Eon naked, and knew d’Eon to be a woman, which was at least in part, or in some sense, a lie. Likewise during several of her later years, d’Eon lived with a widow. But regardless of these relationships, the fact is that Chevalière d’Eon’s sexual orientation proves nothing about her gender identity, a fact that seems to escape some historians. Still other academics look to gender norms and evolving notions of masculinity in Enlightenment Europe in an effort to “explain” her gender transition. They point to the “effeminacy” that had become more and more common among the upper-class male, especially courtiers like Chevalière d’Eon. This was, after all, the age of fops and Macaronis, who preferred dainty and embroidered hose and garter belts, and wore their wigs high with dangling curls in a style previously popular only among women. However, to suggest that d’Eon’s gender transition was a result of the 18th century feminization of men would be to ignore the fact that in most circles, even those in which d’Eon moved, “effeminate” was still considered an extremely offensive descriptor for men, an insult over which duels were commonly fought, and the “effeminacy” of courtiers was one of the greatest criticisms of decadent court life. But again, regardless of the accuracy of this argument, it misses the mark on an even more fundamental level. Searching for a cultural “cause” of d’Eon’s gender transition is a tacit denial that she might have identified as a woman her entire life, regardless of her social environment.

A sketch of Chevalière d’Eon as an older woman. Public Domain.

Another academic view of Chevalière d’Eon’s gender transition is that it was more of a philosophical or theological statement. Once again, these academics look to notions about gender roles that were then prominent in the zeitgeist for an “explanation” of her transition, and also to evidence of the literature that d’Eon kept in her library. They make much of the fact that Chevalière d’Eon owned one of the largest collections of querelle des femmes literature in the world. This proto-feminist literary genre attempted to refute the notion, common in that era, that women were a corrupting influence in royal courts and society in general, arguing instead that women were actually morally superior to men, and that men should imitate their virtuous ways. But again, with the knowledge of gender identity we have today, Chevalière d’Eon’s transition does not require some further explanation. Furthermore, it’s backward to suggest d’Eon’s feminist views caused her transition, when it seems far more likely that her feelings about her gender led her to seek out and collect literature that complemented her deepest convictions about herself. Academics who suggest her transition was a result of her theological principles make this same mistake, but at least they rely on her own words, from an unfinished autobiography. Later in life, Chevalière d’Eon found religion, specifically leaning toward Jansenist Christianity, about which I spoke a great deal in my series on miracles in Enlightenment France. In her autobiography, though, she revealed a theological reason for disregarding her gender entirely. According to her, the bodies God gives us are absolutely corrupt, a tenet with which many devout Christians would agree wholeheartedly. Chevalière d’Eon’s point is that sexuality and gender variance is meaningless to God and irrelevant to whether or not one achieves salvation. In the end, all physical differences, whether they be that of biological sex, or infirmity, or race, will vanish when in paradise we are reborn in glory. When historians look at this and suggest these beliefs might “explain” her gender transition, it boggles the mind. If anything, these views, which she seems to have developed long after her transition, served to comfort and reassure her that there was nothing morally wrong with the acceptance of her gender identity. In fact, rather than picking this theology of gender apart for some better understanding of a gender transition that should be simple to understand, I think it should be viewed as a remarkable interpretation of Christian doctrine that promotes tolerance—something that many Christians today should consider adopting.

Recently, the opponents of trans rights—or should I more accurately say the oppressors of trans people?—shifted the focus of their arguments. In the recent past, they have focused on transgender women posing a threat to cisgender women, portraying them as public restroom prowlers. More recently, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling suggested that recognizing the rights of trans women somehow negates the rights of cisgender women. You may notice that much of this opposition is focused on male-to-female trans people, as it seems the gender identity of these individuals in particular upsets patriarchal notions of masculinity. But another thread in recent arguments against recognizing the struggles of trans people as legitimate focuses instead on the science of human biology. Nothing can be more ironic than Qanon conspiracy enthusiast congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posting a sign outside her office that states “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. ‘Trust the Science!’” Of course, I recognize that the irony of her saying “trust the science” may not actually be lost on her, since she put the phrase in scare quotes, but I don’t trust that she has really worked out the problem with mockingly repeating a phrase while seemingly trying to be earnest with its use. Regardless, let’s close our discussion by talking a bit about science and transgender issues. Actually, science has come a long way since the days of Dr. Hirschfield’s institute. The fact is, science no longer tells us there are only 2 genders. One example is the 2018 article “Only Two Sex Forms but Multiple Gender Variants: How to Explain?” in the academic journal Communicative & Integrative Biology, in which the author concludes that “there are probably as many different gender variants as there are sexually reproducing individuals.” The error of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s argument, of course, comes from the erroneous conflation of sex and gender, but science no longer recognizes only two sexes either. This can be clearly discerned in the 2015 Nature article “Sex Redefined” which states that “[t]he idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.”

But if we look at the history of scientific examination, and specifically psychological studies, of gender transitions that were conducted throughout the 1990s, we see some of the same problems that are present in the academic exploration of transgender history. One tested hypothesis was that boys who were “pretty” or deemed beautiful were treated more like girls and because of this treatment became transgender. Findings seemed to support this hypothesis, but the whole notion could be inverted, such that these “pretty boys” had actually changed their appearance to fit their gender identity, rather than changing their identity to match how others viewed them. Likewise, a similar study’s findings suggested girls who were seen as “ugly” were treated like boys and then identified as male, even though it appears those who later identified as male may have originally not been seen as pretty because they had cut their hair short to complement their burgeoning transgender identities. Researchers also tested the hypothesis that parents with depression or borderline personality disorder somehow turned their children trans, but again, the notion could be flipped to suggest that these parents actually suffered depression and BPD because of the mistreatment and struggles their transgender children were enduring. Then there was a study that sought to confirm that parents who allowed their kids to play with the wrong toys were somehow responsible for their children becoming transgender, when obviously the child’s desire to play with the toys deemed inappropriate to his or her gender was already present. What all these studies had in common was that psychologists and researchers viewed transgender identity as a mental illness, “gender identity disorder.” Because of this, they invariably approached their studies as experiments to determine the “problem.” This is exactly how historians often approach the study of transgender figures in history. If they are not trying to disprove entirely the notion that a historical person was transgender, as we understand it today, they seek to determine what might have “caused” the person to dress or act as a member of the opposite gender. They try to explain away their gender transgressions because historians are trained look more deeply, to avoid supposition, and to doubt the obvious. However, the story of Chevalière d’Eon shows us that, just as scientists struggled to measure and test transgender identity, so too historians often dismiss the apparent in their efforts to analyze it. It seems that academics would do well to remember that practicing critical thinking does not mean rejecting what is clear and evident.

A portrait capturing Chevalière d’Eon’s beauty. Public Domain.

Further Reading

Ainsworth, Claire. “Sex Redefined.” Nature, 18 Feb. 2015, www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943.

Clark, Anna. “The Chevalier D'Eon and Wilkes: Masculinity and Politics in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, 1998, pp. 19–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30054266.

De Loof, Arnold. “Only Two Sex Forms but Multiple Gender Variants: How to Explain?” Communicative & Integrative Biology, vol. 11, no. 1, 2018. NCBI, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5824932/.

“The first Institute for Sexual Science (1919-1933).” Magnus-hirchfield.de, magnus-hirschfeld.de/ausstellungen/institute/.

Icks, Martijn. The Crimes of Elagabalus. I.B. Tauris, 2011.

Kates, Gary. “The Transgendered World of the Chevalier/Chevalière D'Eon.” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 67, no. 3, 1995, pp. 558–594. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2124220.

Lander, James. “A Tale of Two Hoaxes in Britain and France in 1775.” The Historical Journal, vol. 49, no. 4, 2006, pp. 995–1024. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4140148. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.

Stevens, Heidi. “Marjorie Taylor Greene wants us to ‘trust the science’ on transgender rights. Here’s the science.” Chicago Tribune, 26 Feb. 2021, www.chicagotribune.com/columns/heidi-stevens/ct-heidi-stevens-marjorie-taylor-greene-transphobia-trust-science-0226-20210226-atqjgfqht5hzjl54qjbeu4hk24-story.html.

Turban, Jack. “The Disturbing History of Research into Transgender Identity.” Scientific American, 23 Oct. 2020, www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-disturbing-history-of-research-into-transgender-identity/.

Written in Stone: The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories

One day in 1680, The Reverend John Danforth, a recent graduate of Harvard, was walking along the shoreline of Assonet Neck, just across the Taunton river from the town of Dighton, Massachusetts. The high tide had swelled the river, swallowing some rocks that stood sentry beside the waters, but one great reddish-brown sandstone boulder drew his eye, only half submerged in the tide. Upon closer inspection, Danforth saw strange markings on this rock. Were they letters? Glyphs of some sort? Fascinated, he made a drawing of what he saw. His was to be the first of many sketches, rubbings, and photographs of Dighton Rock, or as it would become known, the “Writing Rock,” and Danforth’s drawing only showed the uppermost of the markings. There were more beneath the rising waters. Ten years later, Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister who exerted such a strong influence on the Salem Witchcraft Trials, made the rock famous in his book, The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated. The natural assumption was that Native Americans, specifically the local Wampanoag, had inscribed the stone, but years later, after much staring at the strange markings, some began to suggest they were the product of other cultures and to argue that the “Writing Rock” stood as evidence of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact, and more specifically, in some theories, Semitic contact. The theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans had been around among the Spanish for more than a hundred years when the Dighton “Writing Rock” became famous, but as I discussed in the second part of my series on the Lost Tribes myth, it didn’t reach its height in the English-speaking world until about a hundred years after Mather wrote about the rock. It was then, in the 1760s, that we see Ezra Stiles, who would later become the President of Yale College, and Count  Antoine Court de Gebelin of the French Academy both expressing a view that the rock was inscribed with ancient Phoenician characters, suggesting that it was left by explorers from Carthage. From there, it was only a short leap to suggest it was actually written in Hebrew, since both Phoenician and paleo-Hebrew developed after the Bronze Age collapse to represent formerly indistinguishable languages, and thus bear marked similarities. In fact, Harvard scholar Samuel Harris Jr. asserted in 1807 that he had been able to translate specific Hebrew words on the Dighton Rock: “idol,” “king,” and “priest.” And this would not be the last inscribed stone found in the U.S. that supposedly bore Hebrew writing. You may be guessing already, though, based on what I said in the previous edition and just from knowing how this usually goes, that there is strong reason to consider nearly all of them to be frauds.

As Dighton Rock shows us, not all of the inscribed rocks used to support pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories can be dismissed as modern hoaxes. The Dighton Writing Rock was present in Massachusetts a little less than a hundred years after the beginning of English colonial settlement in America at Roanoke Island, and even then it appeared ancient to those who studied it. Dighton Rock also demonstrates that there were myriad other theories of pre-Columbian contact besides the theory of the Lost Tribes of Israel in America. In fact, not even all the theories of Semitic contact with the New World were the same. Some believed Native Americans were descended from Noah’s son Japheth rather than Shem, making them not “Semitic” as such, and not necessarily descended from the Lost Tribes. A Maryland schoolteacher names Ira Hill would suggest in 1831 that the writing on Dighton Rock had been left by an expedition of Jews from the time of King Solomon’s reign, making it again not a theory of Native American shared ancestry with the Lost Tribes. In 1837, Carl Christian Rafn, a Danish scholar, became convinced that the markings on Dighton Rock depicted the well-known story of Norse contact with the New World. This translation seems to have been disproven in 1916 by Brown University professor Edmund Dellabarre, who demonstrated that Rafn had doctored depictions of the markings to better support his view. Then Dellabarre himself declared that he could discern Latin on the rock, finding a year, 1511, and a name, Miguel Cortereal. This developed into the theory that a lost Portueguese expedition had left the markings. Today, Dighton Rock has been removed from the tidal waters and placed in a museum, where all the theories of its script are explained and accompanied by pictures showing how different elements of its inscriptions are emphasized by each. Is it Phoenician, Norse, Portuguese, or is it, simply Native American? When shown drawings of its markings, it’s said that George Washington laughed and said they were certainly just doodles made by American Indians, and that he had seen similar markings frequently on trees and believed them to be largely meaningless. Indeed, before hi Portuguese theory, Professor Edmund Dellabarre seems to have shared the opinion that they were meaningless, for after staring at it a long time, he declared, “After prolonged and close searching, I got so that I could find any given figure almost anywhere.” Thus he dismissed all the different interpretations of the markings as “psychic projection”… and ironically went on to insist he could read Latin on the stone clear as day. But perhaps that’s one of the reasons inscribed stones like these have exerted such an influence on the minds of so many, because we can see what we want to see in their vague markings. In the case of Dighton Rock, it certainly doesn’t help that some inscriptions on the stone appear to have been made at different times, engraved over existing markings, making it a kind of palimpsest of indecipherable figures and shapes… much like history itself after a great deal of study.

Dighton Rock, displayed with pictures emphasizing elements of its inscription interpreted to support different theories of its origin. Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0)

There was nothing quite so mysterious about the artifact found in the summer of 1815 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, only about 117 miles west-northwest of Dighton Rock. Innkeeper Joseph Merrick had purchased land that many years earlier had been a settlement of the Mohegan tribe, and that summer, he had hired a farmhand to clear the yard near his house. The plough the boy used to clear the debris turned up a black leather strap attached to a leather box, which  Merrick cut open. Inside, he found four pieces of yellowed parchment, which had been written on in a script he did not recognize. Thinking it of such an age as to possibly be worth something, Merrick says he invited people to see it, including some neighbors, who in their clamor to examine the items, “tore one of the pieces to atoms.” After that, he was more careful with them, showing them only to local ministers and men of high character, who almost all agreed that it was a phylactery, an object housing Hebrew texts traditionally strapped onto the arm or head by Jews during prayer. Most of these local clergymen agreed that it was of great antiquity and must certainly prove that the natives of the region were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. In order to obtain some support for this thesis, the phylactery was thereafter sent to a former student of the aforementioned Ezra Stiles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and thereafter to the American Antiquarian society. However, nothing came of it, perhaps because it was not taken seriously. After all, even among the locals, there had been some doubt.

It seems the most knowledgeable of the local ministers who first examined the Pittsfield phylactery did not believe it was ancient. Congregational minister William Allen, who could read Hebrew and therefore translated the texts within the phylactery, identified them as verses from Deuteronomy and Exodus. He pointed out that the phylactery had been discovered among dirt and chips of wood on the surface, and was not excavated from any great depth. Moreover, he observed that it was well-preserved, and thus he proposed that it had been dropped on that land in recent years by some wandering Jew, as it were. Or, some years earlier, as Allen recalled, Merrick had employed some British and German prisoners of the War of 1812 to work on his property. Perhaps one of these had secretly been a Jew and had lost the item during his labors. What Allen did not realize, however, was that the mere fact he was able to decipher the text would seem to indicate that it was not written in the paleo-Hebrew that the Lost Tribes would have used, as knowledge of that script did not develop until the 1850s. When the Antiquarian Society appeared to have no interest in the phylactery, those from Pittsfield who believed it proved the Hebraic origins of Native Americans reacquired it and sent it instead to Elias Boudinot, the Cherokee writer who would go on to compose A Star in the West, arguing that North American native peoples were descended from the Lost Tribes. However, the book does not mention the Pittsfield phylactery. It is unknown if the artifact made its way into Boudinot’s possession, and if so, what became of it afterward. It simply disappeared. But it was not forgotten. In 1823, a Vermont minister named Ethan Smith described it in his book with the self-explanatory title View of the Hebrews: The Lost Tribes of Israel in America. Ten years later, Josiah Priest cited the Pittsfield phylactery as evidence in his book American Antiquities, which argued that Native American earthworks in Ohio and New York, so-called “mounds,” were actually created by some lost race, likely the Lost Tribes. And about ten years after that, in his newspaper the Times and Seasons, Joseph Smith, the prophet of Mormonism, was telling the story again as support for the Book of Mormon’s version of American prehistory and quoting from both Ethan Smith and Josiah Priest.

The Mormons would soon be given good reason not to trust in such dubious archaeological finds to support their beliefs. A year after Smith’s newspaper published an article about the Pittsfield Phylactery, a man named Robert Wiley, living near the Mormon city of Nauvoo, Illinois, said that he had been having recurring dreams of a treasure hidden in an Indian mound in Kinderhook. In April of 1843, acting on those premonitions, he gathered a group to excavate, including one Wilbur Fugate and a couple of Mormons they knew. Sure enough, they discovered some bones and some ancient-looking brass plates, cut in the shape of a bell and bound together by a rusted iron ring. These plates bore strange markings, and the Mormons among them immediately rejoiced and insisted that the plates be taken to Joseph Smith, who they were sure could translate them. Now, even if Smith really was a fanatic who truly believed his own claims about angelic visitation and inscribed golden plates, and not merely a hoaxer and cult leader, he seemed to show some restraint when it came to the Kinderhook plates, preparing facsimiles and not immediately declaring that he had translated them by revelation, as he supposedly had the gold plates from which he derived the Book of Mormon. The obvious explanation for this, assuming reason and cunning on the part of Joseph Smith, was that others had seen the Kinderhook Plates, unlike his gold plates, which he said he was forbidden to display, and since these brass, bell-shaped plates might have been genuine, or might even have been a trap, he had to tread carefully. An inaccurate translation or a revelation declaring the plates authentic when they were actually a hoax would have revealed Smith to be a fraud. Nevertheless, he did declare that the writing on them was similar to the “reformed Egyptian” of the gold plates. Within a year, Joseph Smith was dead, and his followers soon after removed to Utah, where in a Church history of Smith it was revealed that Smith had indeed been translating the Kinderhook Plates, revealing that they told the story of a descendant of Ham in America. At around the same time, though, the plates discoverers, Robert Wiley and Wilbur Fugate, were swearing out affidavits that the Kinderhook Plates had been a prank on the Mormons after all. Mormons, meanwhile, did not want to hear it, insisting the plates were real. Only in the later 20th century did testing reveal that they had been etched with acid, a modern technique, and that within the inscription was a hidden message: “Fugate Fakes,” the deciphered inscription reads, “April Fools Day 1843 for Joseph Smith.”

Facsimiles of the Kinderhook Plates. Public Domain.

Just as it was very convenient that some Mormons were present for the unearthing of the planted Kinderhook Plates in 1843, so it also appears quite convenient, perhaps even planned, that in Newark, Ohio, in 1860, when local surveyor David Wyrick went running through the town to announce his discovery of an unusual artifact at the local Indian earthworks, he just happened to run into Colonel Charles Whittlesey, the foremost authority on the Mound Builders of Ohio, who happened to be in town on unrelated business. Wyrick must have presented a pathetic figure lurching through town that day, for it was said he was so afflicted with rheumatism that his hands and feet were swollen to grotesque proportions. He was a sympathetic character in Newark. Having failed as a newspaperman, he had devoted himself to surveying the earthworks of Newark, fantasizing that he might one day be able to prove his theories about the Mound Builders. These were much the same as Colonel Whittlesey’s own theories, and Josiah Priest’s aforementioned claims in the book American Antiquities, a notion today called the “mound builder myth,” the overtly racist view that Native Americans could not possibly be responsible for the construction of the impressive earthen mounds found in the New World, and thus there must have been some precursor race, such as the Lost Tribes of Israel. And it certainly seemed like David Wyrick had discovered proof of this when he unearthed the “Holy Stone,” an arrowhead-shaped stone inscribed with Hebrew phrases on each side. This artifact would come to be known as the Keystone when, later that year, his excavation uncovered another “Holy Stone,” a limestone carving of a robed figure with a Hebrew inscription of the Ten Commandments that would be named the Decalogue Stone. Wyrick finally died in 1864, but the story did not end with him. A year later, from a mound east of Newark, two far more strange stones were discovered, an inscribed sculpture of a head and another inscribed sculpture that resembled an animal on one side and faces on other sides. And finally, three years after that, another stone, this one shaped more like the Keystone and inscribed with the Ten Commandments like the Decalogue Stone, was found nearer the original mound of one of Wyrick’s discoveries. Was Wyrick’s discovery too good to be true? And what of the others that followed?

One of the earliest theories about the first Newark Holy Stone, the Keystone, put forth by a local Masonic expert, was that it was an artifact of ancient Freemasonry, originating some time after the building of the Second Temple in the 6th century BCE. This led to speculation that the ancient Jews who had come to America were Masons, and in their famous earthworks could be discerned geometric Masonic symbolism. This theory shows the bias of its proponents, though, for only a Freemason would believe in the Judaic origin of Freemasonry, going all the way back to Solomon’s Temple, or as Masonic lore likes to claim, back to the Tower of Babel, or even to Enoch preserving sacred geometrical knowledge from the deluge. In that way, the pseudohistory of Freemasons has a lot in common with the legend of Hermes Trismegistus and the preservation of alchemical knowledge. But in reality, this fraternal order can only trace its origins back to 14th century stonemason trade guilds. So that would seem to put the Masonic theory in the ground, as it were. What remains is the more common notion that the Keystone proves the Lost Tribes theory of Native American origins. But this too was quashed at the time, very shortly after the story became national, when a series of attack pieces against the Keystone’s discoverer, David Wyrick, appeared in Ohio newspapers, and then in the New York Times and Harper’s Weekly. First, it was suggested that Wyrick was profiting from the display of the Keystone, giving him a pecuniary motive for producing such a find beyond the academic motive of promoting the Lost Tribes theory. Then the stone’s authenticity was challenged. It was too polished and showed none of the signs of weathering to be expected from an artifact of great antiquity. And it had been discovered too near the surface to be considered very ancient. Moreover, experts in Hebrew recognized that the characters on the Keystone were modern Hebrew, an alphabet that appeared in contemporary Hebrew Bibles and had only been in use a few hundred years, and they were inexpertly chiseled at that. Thus, Wyrick became a laughingstock to those who didn’t know him, and even those who sympathized with him reserved their judgement about his finds. When later that year he excavated in another nearby mound where some bones had been discovered and turned up a wooden platform of seeming antiquity, he was mocked for having dug up an old horse trough. Undeterred, though, he continued digging, and beneath that platform, he discovered the Decalogue Stone. But this was too great a coincidence for most to believe. The inscription on the Decalogue Stone appeared to be in a far more ancient form of Hebrew, so it seemed Wyrick was simply trying to address the objections his critics had to the Keystone, and closer examination showed that this was still not the paleo-Hebrew of the Lost Tribes but rather a post-Exilic script, and that it still showed similarities with the modern Hebrew form of characters, as if the engraver had first learned the modern script and then afterward taught himself the more ancient version.

Photos of David Wyrick’s “Holy Stones,” Image courtesy of the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum

While at the time, all signs seemed to point to Wyrick being a hoaxer, those who knew him best refused to believe it. And with further hindsight, it appears he may have been unfairly maligned. Only a few short years after his discoveries, he had fallen into financial ruin, so if he had perpetrated a hoax to make money, it did not work, and still he remained devoted to his efforts, trying for years to organize further excavations. In 1864, in penury and probably still suffering from his rheumatism, he committed suicide. Some newspapers, still intent on sullying his name, reported that an old Hebrew Bible and other evidence of his manufacture of the items was found in his residence, but these claims were unsupported. Only a year after he was gone would his name be cleared in the eyes of many, after the inscribed head and three-sided carving were discovered at a farm east of Newark, each with Hebrew lettering. But these finds did not prove Wyrick right in the way you may think. Instead, they seemed to prove that someone else was responsible for the frauds. One of his former collaborators, an area dentist named John. H. Nicol, who had been with Wyrick at the excavation of the Decalogue Stone and afterward had declared the find a fraud, was also present at the discovery of the inscribed head, and afterward declared that he had inscribed these latest finds himself, buried them, and arranged for their discovery. Afterwards, decipherment of the Hebrew on the inscribed head showed that it was actually the letters J, H, N, C, and L—a signature of the forger, John H. Nicol. It seems Nicol was asserting that he had faked these two later stones for the sole purpose of proving that Wyrick’s Holy Stones were also fakes, but since he had been present at the Decalogue’s unearthing, many then and today presume that he had actually forged all of the stones. Then there are alternative suspects, such as a local Episcopalian minister who perhaps too easily was able to decipher the peculiar variation of poorly engraved Hebrew on the Holy Stones, or a local stonecutter whose work on gravestones bore some superficial similarities to the finds. However, the discovery of yet another stone three years later further confuses the matter. The so-called Johnson Stone bore the same general tapering shape as the Keystone but was inscribed with the same style of Hebrew lettering as the Decalogue Stone. It was dug up in the same group of mounds where Wyrick and Nicol had unearthed the Decalogue Stone but by reputable individuals, with apparently none of our suspects involved. How to explain this? If Nicol or Wyrick or whoever had made the Holy Stones had buried yet another fraud, why hadn’t they “arranged” for its discovery? Had they lost track of where they’d buried it? Or had they actually just buried it hoping that it would eventually be turned up independently and thus corroborate their frauds? We may never know, for further study of the Johnson stone is impossible. Like the hoaxes claimed by John Nicol, and like the Pittsfield phylactery before them, the Johnson Stone has been lost.

A major argument against all of these Hebrew-inscribed artifacts being genuine was the general lack of Hebraic artifacts to be found at Native American sites across the country. This argument received a blow a few decades after the affair of the Newark Holy Stones when another rash of artifact discoveries occurred, this time all over Michigan, and instead of just a few inscribed stones, thousands were unearthed over the course of 30 years. The first, an earthenware vessel or clay cup, was discovered by James Scotford, a local sign maker, in October of 1890 while he was digging a posthole. Over the next year, Scotford discovered numerous artifacts, all with similar markings, and as people who heard of his discoveries showed up, he started a kind of guided expedition business, leading his clients out among the deforested timberland of the area and digging up small mounds that he said were manmade, though others claim they were natural hummocks or tumuli that had resulted from the uprooting trees. Typically, Scotford dug to a certain depth, never deeper than two feet, and then invited his clients to dig further, at which point, invariably, an artifact was unearthed, and his clients would then sign affidavits swearing to the fact that they had discovered it themselves. Scotford convinced his supporters that these objects were the remnants of a major ancient civilization, though no evidence of any actual dwelling structures have ever been uncovered. He claimed that the large swathes of hummocks he was excavating represented a vast necropolis of burial mounds, though no human remains were ever discovered within them. Believers in the authenticity of the Michigan relics, including some Mormons who hoped that they could corroborate the Latter Day Saint claims about American prehistory, pointed out that the sheer number of finds proved they couldn’t be frauds. However, absolutely no Michigan Relics were ever found except in the presence of James Scotford, or, later, in the presence of the partner he took on, Daniel Soper, the former Secretary of State of Michigan, whose political career had ended in scandal with accusations of embezzlement.

A photo of some of the Scotford-Soper forgeries, from Francis Kelsey’s “Some Archeological Forgeries from Michigan,” American Anthropologist , New Series, Vol. 10, No. 1, Jan. - Mar., 1908, pp. 48-59.

Already the fraud in the Michigan Relics appears clear. However, physical evidence that the artifacts were modern forgeries was also abundant. Firstly, the script and markings that appeared on all the items was unconvincing. It was a mishmash of cuneiform interspersed with Egyptian-esque hieroglyphs, all of them stamped on rather than engraved. The confusion of languages was explained by Scotford and Soper with claims that the civilization must have been polyglot mix of different cultures that had all somehow made their way into the Americas, but this failed to explain their laziness. Some characters were stamped on and then simply reversed and stamped again to appear like a different symbol, and entire rows were comprised of one symbol stamped over and over. Then there were the materials themselves, which showed every sign of modern origin. The symbols were stamped onto commercially smelted copper, onto slate that been freshly machine-cut, and onto unbaked clay that actually disintegrated in water, leaving no doubt that it would not have survived intact underground for very long. In fact, on the reverse side of some clay pieces, the impression of a machine sawed piece of wood can clearly be discerned, where the piece had obviously been set to dry. Then there is the fact that every single one of them bore the same prominent mark, what looked like an I, an H, and a forward slash. Scotford and Soper suggested this was a “tribal mark,” but most view it to be the signature of the forgers. All of this is unaccountable and damning. No further evidence is needed to cement the Michigan Relics as outright counterfeits, but one more is worth noting insofar as it shows a parallel with previous inscribed stone frauds. There appears to have been correction on the part of the forgers to answer certain criticisms, just as the first Newark Holy Stone was criticized for being in modern Hebrew, and then the next one displayed a more ancient script. Some early Michigan artifacts had a lion with no tail stamped onto them, and after some experts suggested that a primitive artist would not omit the tail, other artifacts appeared on which the lions’ tails could more clearly be seen.

This survey of archaeological frauds perpetrated to convince the public of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact could go on and on. I have skipped, for example, the Grave Creek Stone, the Davenport Tablets, and the Bat Creek Stone, about which I may have more to say in upcoming patron exclusive readings of some historical fiction I wrote about these incidents. I’ve also omitted Minnesota’s Kensington Runestone and the Heavener Runestone of Oklahoma, which are held up as proof of a pre-Columbian Norse presence in North America. Don’t get me wrong.  Pre-Columbian Norse exploration of North America at Newfoundland has been proven, but not as far inland as Minnesota and Oklahoma. And the parade of pseudoarcheology would continue during the 20th century to tantalize the Church of Latter-Day Saints and other proponents of the theory of ancient Semitic contact in American prehistory. There were the Tucson Artifacts of Arizona in 1924—a cache of inscribed crosses and swords—and then there was the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone, a boulder in New Mexico inscribed with the Ten Commandments that was first recorded by a professor in 1933, who said the local guide who led him to it claimed to have seen it as far back as the 1880s. The thing with these inscribed stones is that they cannot be dated using radiocarbon analysis, which requires organic material. The leather of the Pittsfield phylactery might have been, if it hadn’t been lost, or maybe not, as the oils and preservatives applied to leather over time have been known to interfere with Carbon-14 dating. Neither can stratigraphic dating typically be relied on, as these are freestanding boulders, or if buried, they were excavated without proper field notes being taken. Anyway, the surviving descriptions tend to suggest that they weren’t found at a depth that would indicate antiquity. Moreover, with the knowledge of contact and commerce between indigenous tribes, it is illogical that items such as the Newark Holy Stones or the Michigan Relics would be found only in one discrete geographical region, and not popping up at other sites farther away. And every time, when there is no clear evidence of skulduggery, there is still some explanation, such as that a travelling Jew in more modern times had accidentally let an artifact or an heirloom fall or even buried it for some purpose we cannot know. And in many of these cases, those who peer at the scratchings on these stones tend to see what they want to see. As Professor Edmund Dellabarre said of Dighton Rock before succumbing himself to the same phenomenon: “Whenever we can, we tend to find something definite in the faint and orderly in the confused and to trust what we find.… There is a pleasure in seeing uncertainties and irregularities resolve themselves into definite form, and the forms take on connected and acceptable meaning.”

Until next time … remember… the longer you stare at anything, clouds, wallpaper patterns, wood grains, marble veins… you will eventually believe you see something hidden there.

Further Reading

Brecher, Edward. “The Enigma of Dighton Rock.” American Heritage, vol. 9, no. 4, June 1958, www.americanheritage.com/enigma-dighton-rock.

Friedman, Lee M. “THE PHYLACTERIES FOUND AT PITTSFIELD, MASS.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 25, 1917, pp. 81–85. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43058052.

Hunter, J. Michael. “The Kinderhook Plates, the Tucson Artifacts, and Mormon Archeological Zeal.” Journal of Mormon History, vol. 31, no. 1, 2005, pp. 31–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23289247.

Kelsey, Francis W. “Some Archeological Forgeries from Michigan.” American Anthropologist, vol. 10, no. 1, 1908, pp. 48–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/659777.

Lutz, Cora E. “Ezra Stiles and the Challenge of the Dighton ‘Writing Rock.’” The Yale University Library Gazette, vol. 55, no. 1, 1980, pp. 14–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40858740.

Stamps, Richard B. “Tools Leave Marks: Material Analysis of the Scotford-Soper-Savage Michigan Relics.” Brigham Young University Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, 2001, pp. 210–238. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43044267.

The Abode of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Part Two: Diaspora

Spanish colonialism in the New World began with Christopher Columbus’s establishment of settlement on Hispaniola in 1493. Spurred by the discovery of gold, Spain pressed its claim and spread quickly, to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba. By 1508, they were establishing themselves on mainland South and Central America, and 15 years later, Franciscan friars arrived to build missions across New Spain. Spanish colonial missions served more than one purpose: to convert the native peoples to Christianity while also pacifying them and acculturating them to Spanish society while the natural resources of their land were extracted. As the work of these monks among the natives of various regions continued, many ecclesiastics observed that these indigenous groups, far removed from each other by both distance and culture, seemed to keep Hebrew customs and resemble the Jews in some regards. Bartholeme de Las Casas went so far as to declare that they were “of the Lost Tribes,” an assertion that encouraged even further the efforts to convert them to Christianity, for the conversion of the Jews, as discussed in the previous episode, was seen as an important milestone on the road to the eschaton, or the conclusion of God’s divine plan for our world. Another view, however, suggested that Satan had led these fallen people into counterfeit Hebrew customs in order to make them resistant to Christian conversion, as were the Jews themselves, an argument that history has shown to be both anti-Semitic and inaccurate. These early, contradictory views of Spanish ecclesiastics regarding the Israelitish origin of the Native Americans can be observed clearly in the 1607 work Origin of the Indians of the New World and West Indies by missionary and chronicler Gregorio Garcia. He cites numerous perceived similarities between native peoples’ and Hebrew physical attributes, customs, dress, and religion, suggesting that the miraculous river crossing described in 2 Esdras actually represented the passage of the Lost Tribes across the Bering Strait. Many are the inconsistencies in his argument, such as that both the Jews and the Native Americans lacked cleanliness and that they both tended to bathe frequently. And if the bigotry against the Jews and the indigenous people wasn’t clear enough there, then consider his argument that both the Jews and Native Americans were ungrateful, the Native Americans to their Spanish colonial masters, and the Jews to the God that favored them, whose Son they had rejected. Perhaps most inconsistent was Garcia’s answer for why the natives of the Americas no longer spoke Hebrew when all the legends said that the Lost Tribes would only speak Hebrew. Well, clearly, he argued, their language had changed over time, but actually, he insisted, there are still traces of Hebrew in their various languages. Then again, he suggested, their language was entirely different only because the Devil had led them to take a new language so that they could not easily be converted to Christianity. Here, at the beginning of a new era in the search for the Lost Tribes, we see many of the same specious arguments, logical flaws, and racist themes that would come to characterize the more recent theories of what became of the northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel after their deportation by the Assyrians.

With the regions previously believed to be the abode of the Lost Tribes having been explored more and more, the New World naturally became the next place where people believed the ten northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel may have ended up. While the Spanish missionaries who first raised the notion gradually seem to have stopped believing it after decades of actually living among these indigenous peoples, the theory would emerge again in the 17th century, after a Portuguese man named Antonio de Montezinos, who had converted to Judaism and went by the name Aaron Levy, returned from some travels in South America during the early 1640s with the tale that he had discovered a tribe in the jungles of Ecuador that he was certain represented the remnants of the Lost Tribe of Reuben. He swore to the truth of this (as much as one can swear to the truth of a conjecture) in an affidavit, and in 1644 he told his story to Menasseh Ben Israel, a rabbi and diplomat, who believed him and took this as a sign that the Messianic age would soon dawn, when it was prophesied that Jews would be scattered over all the world. This spurred his composition of a book, The Hope of Israel, about which more will be said shortly. His book sparked interest and garnered support for the “Hebraic Indian” theory among Jews, who had previously dismissed the idea. And at the same time, Montezino’s affidavit was used as a central piece of evidence by a Puritan minister, Thomas Thorowgood, who spread the same theory among the English in his book, Jews in America, or Probabilities that Americans are of that Race. Support for the theory would continue, sporadically, through the 19th century and even in some circles up to modern day. Perhaps the best example of this theory’s mad proliferation of supposed evidence can be illustrated by the composition of the book Antiquities of Mexico, by Irish antiquarian Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough. So convinced was Kingsborough by the idea that pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations were actually the settlements of the Lost Tribes that he spent years and a fortune bankrolling the absurdly massive book, which reproduce ancient codices on huge pages that measured two feet by one foot. With more than five hundred of these gigantic pages in each volume and more than 9 volumes, one can reasonably assert that it became something of an obsession for him, and in the end, it consumed him, as the debt he incurred in printing the book put him in prison, where he contracted the typhus that would kill him shortly after his release. While unreadable, his work did end up furthering the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans because one Barbara Allan Simon wrote a book called The Ten Tribes of Israel Historically Identified with the Aborigines of the Western Hemisphere, which appears to have essentially been a summary of Kingsborough’s work. And so the theory was dispersed, through the years and across the world, despite the quality of its evidence.

An image of Spanish colonial abuse of American aborigines featured in the massive “Codex Kingsborough.” Public Domain.

Not all versions of this theory were the same. As indicated above, Franciscan missionaries saw the Lost Tribes in Caribbean island natives as well as mainland peoples, while the Viscount Kingsborough focused more on lost Mesoamerican civilizations. In his effort to negotiate the return of European Jewry to England, from whence they had been expelled by King Edward I in 1290, Menasseh ben Israel appealed to Christians there that wanted to see the end times begin by suggesting that, if Jews were already in every land but England, they only had to be let back in to England for prophecy to be fulfilled and the eschaton to unfold. But his theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans was also rather different. He argued that the Ten Tribes has crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas, but that the Tartars followed them, made war on them, and drove them down through Central and South America. He cited tenuous similarities of place names as evidence: the Yucatan being named after Joktan, a great-great-grandson of Noah’s son Shem, and Peru being a transposition of the name Ophir, one of Joktan’s sons. Much of the evidence for the theory that Native Americans were the Lost Tribes also relies on the perceived similarity of words, such as Antonio Montezinos’s claims, which came from the fact that he heard this Ecuadorian tribe chant something that sounded vaguely similar to the Jewish Shema prayer. The most cited piece of “evidence” is that certain tribes seemed to call their god by a name similar to the Hebrew name Yahweh, such as the Taíno name for their great creator spirit, Yaya. Customs between the two cultures were likewise linked according to perceived similarity, like measuring their time by nights, and washing their newborns. Some even suggested that prophecy foretelling the Lost Tribes would resort to cannibalism was fulfilled by these indigenous peoples that they suspected of cannibalism, and that the prophecies of plagues that would descend on the Jews were fulfilled by the many epidemics that Old World colonists introduced. It wasn’t long before counterarguments appeared, most notably in Hamon l’Estrange’s Americans no Iewes, or improbabilities that the Americans are of that race. L’Estrange correctly points out that, if you look close enough at any languages, you will start to see words that sound alike, and that there is no uniformity of religion among the many native peoples of the New World, not to mention the fact that many tribes were pantheistic rather than monotheistic. As for the customs, he rightly observes that computation of time by nights and washing of newborns and other parallel customs are common in a myriad of cultures. Nevertheless, even L’Estrange argued for a biblical origin of the Native American peoples, suggesting that, rather than the Lost Tribes, they were descended from Noah’s other sons, Japheth and Ham.

More scientific arguments as to the true origins and dispersion of indigenous Americans would eventually appear, with the prevailing theory being that Native Americans are descended from Siberian and South East Asian peoples who crossed the land bridge that formerly existed in the Bering Sea more than 10,000 years before the Israelites were deported by the Assyrians, and DNA evidence appears to support this. But long before such empirical resolutions to this mystery appeared, a variety of pseudo-archaeological hoaxes helped to forever cement the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans in the popular imagination. The first was in the early 19th century, when a man who claimed to be able to find buried treasure by scrying with a seer stone, an occupation that had landed him in court more than once as a disorderly person, turned his talents instead to founding a religion. With his head in a hat, staring at his seer stone, this man, Joseph Smith, dictated the Book of Mormon, supposedly divinely translating the “reformed Egyptian” of some engraved gold plates that he claimed an angel had led him to find, plates that he could not show to anyone. In the resulting book, it was “revealed,” among many other things, that Native Americans were descended not from the lost northern tribes exactly, but rather from Israelite refugees who lived in the time of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, who had crossed the ocean to settle in the Americas, along with one group from the time of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages who crossed to America on covered boats that are described like submarines. Much of the Book of Mormon is clearly inspired by ideas that were then in the zeitgeist, like the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans and contemporary views against secret societies, which serves as proof enough that it was the work of Smith and not an ancient text. If you’d like to learn more about this, there is a wealth of further information in my historical novel, Manuscript Found!, which can be found on Amazon.

A depiction of Joseph Smith’s claims that an angel led him to the golden plates and gave him the magic spectacles he used to translate them. Public Domain.

Smith was not the last to make claims about discovering an artifact that indicated Israelite settlement in ancient America. Nor even was he the first. In 1815, while ploughing his field, a hosteler named Joseph Merrick found a phylactery, or a box containing Hebrew texts that is traditionally worn during prayer. In 1860, David Wyrick discovered more than one stone inscribed with Hebrew in a Native American burial mound. Starting in 1890, James Scotford and Daniel Soper “discovered” thousands of objects in Michigan that seemed to support the theory. And in the 1930s, an archaeologist discovered a decalogue stone, inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew with the Ten Commandments, in New Mexico. All of these finds and their implications of pre-Columbian Semitic contact with the Americas have either been logically explained or debunked, and since discussing each would be a significant digression here, I’ll be devoting another post to them. To conclude, though, I would reiterate that modern science and scholarship have relegated this theory to the fringe, even though it is still believed by the Church of Latter-Day Saints and even by certain Native American groups who have embraced the idea of descent from Israel. Today, though, it should be clear to every sensitive and conscious person that the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans was very much anti-Semitic and represented yet another shameful aspect of colonialism. Identifying the Jews with a native population that was widely viewed as barbaric and primitive and in need of Christian salvation reveals a great deal about the global prejudice against the Jews, and the denial of Native American peoples’ own various histories and distinct cultures was just another form of indigenous erasure.

While this Lost Tribes theory was developing, another was growing back in England suggesting that the British themselves were descended from the Lost Tribes, rather ironic since Jews had been expelled from the country centuries earlier. British Israelism, or perhaps more accurately, Anglo-Israelism, began in 1649 with the publication of The Rights of the Kingdom by John Sadler, a friend and secretary of Oliver Cromwell’s. Also a millenarian and an acquaintance of Menasseh ben Israel, Sadler seems to have hoped that suggesting the British were of the Lost Tribes would further encourage the readmission of the Jews to his country and thereafter bring on the Millennium. His idea was seized and enlarged by one Richard Brothers in the 1790s, who turned it into more of a cult than an academic theory. He was not satisfied with identifying the British as the Lost Tribes. He further claimed that he was himself descended from the House of David and therefore destined to rule the “hidden Israelites” until the return of Christ. In fact, he went so far as to insist that he should reign as the king of England and to share with his followers prophecies that the king would die, leading to his arrest for treason and his imprisonment in an asylum for the criminally insane. Despite the fact that Brothers died a solitary and defeated man, halfway through the next century, Anglo-Israelism saw a resurgence, first in a popular tract published in 1840 which spread and gained traction among Bible study groups. The theory would further gain support in America in the 1930s among evangelicals struggling to reconcile their prejudice against Jews and their affection for the Hebrew scriptures.

The Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, said to contain the stolen Stone of Scone, which in turn is said to be one and the same as Ireland’s Lia Fail, or The Stone of Destiny. Public Domain.

In short, Anglo Israelism developed to argue that not just the British but other European nations as well were of the Lost Tribes, and then the U.S., Australia, and South Africa as well through migration. It claims that the Lost Tribes found their way to northern Europe and settled in England, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Holland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, northern France, Sweden, Switzerland, and parts of Germany.  Like the theory of the Hebraic origin of Native Americans, this belief relies a great deal on fast and loose and questionable etymology. For example, the Danish are said to be the Danites, and the word “British” is claimed to be derived from the Hebrew b’rith, which means “covenant,” and ish, for “man,” making British mean “man of the covenant.” Likewise, the word Saxon is said by the believers of Anglo-Israelism to be from “Isaac’s sons,” or the “sons of Isaac.” The fact is etymologists who are educated experts derive the word Saxon from a Teutonic word that means “dagger,” which Anglo-Israelists account for by claiming without evidence that there were two different peoples called Saxons. A great deal of the Anglo-Israel theory also relies on a legend surrounding the so-called Stone of Destiny. Supposedly, this was a stone consecrated to God by Jacob and carried in solemn processions during the time of David, the stone believed to have been referred to in the psalm that speaks of “the stone which the builders rejected.” Many Christians view this line as a prophetic reference to Christ, but here it is seen as a physical object, perhaps also the stone on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac. According to the Anglo-Israelist version of history, this stone was a cornerstone in Solomon’s temple until the Babylonians destroyed it. After that, it came into the possession of the Danites, who were said to be a seafaring people, and they sailed with it until they wrecked on the shores of Ireland. Now, perceptive readers may realize here that the timeline is fouled up. The Danites and the other Lost Tribes supposedly disappeared during the Assyrian conquest, long before the Babylonian destruction of the temple, but let’s not get caught up in minutia. They certainly don’t. So there in Ireland, the Danites established a nation, and the sacred cornerstone was revered as the Lia Fail, the Holy Stone of Ireland. The Irish claim that the Holy Stone remains there, at the Hill of Tara, an ancient ceremonial place, but the Scottish claim that the Lia Fail eventually came into their possession, becoming the coronation stone that they called the Stone of Scone. I spoke about this artifact briefly in a previous episode. King Edward I seized the Stone of Scone and turned it into the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, although there is further conjecture that the stone Edward Longshanks took was also not the real Stone of Destiny. Most late 19th century Anglo-Israelists seem to have believed the Stone of Destiny, Jacob’s Pillow, was still buried in Ireland in the Hill of Tara, the name of which they suggested was connected to the Torah. Others among them thought it was not the stone in the hill, but rather the Ark of the Covenant. Long story short, at the turn of the century, adherents of Anglo-Israelism dug up the Hill of Tara in several places, seriously damaging this historical site and, of course, failing to turn up the Ark or the Stone of Destiny, or any evidence to support their claim of descent from the Lost Tribes.

A manifestly anti-Semitic pamphlet written by Christian Identity founder Wesley Swift, which, disturbingly, is sold on Amazon even today.

Now, British Israelism may seem like a silly belief, or in light of the damage they did in Ireland, a harmful falsehood, but as it spread in the U.S., it transformed into an even more overtly racist ideology that provided pseudohistorical and theological rationale for domestic terrorism. It began in the 1950s, among fundamentalist evangelical Christian figures who were also involved with the Ku Klux Klan. To be precise, a Methodist minister and Klansman named Wesley Swift, a right-wing California politician named William Porter Gale, and a militant Klansman named Richard Butler adopted Anglo-Israelism and adapted it into a full-fledged racialist theology called the Christian Identity movement. These men took the idea of the Israeli origins of white Europeans in a more extremist direction, taking it all the way back to creation to assert that there were two creations, one of Adam and Eve, and one of the “mud people” who proliferated beyond the Garden of Eden. Their evidence is the separate mentions of the creation of mankind in Genesis 1 and 2, although scholars see these as two accounts of the same Creation, taken from two different sources but collected together in scripture. According to Identity adherents, though, the two separate creations were of white people and people of color. Then Eve’s original sin is believed by them to have been sexual in nature, that she engaged in intercourse with an outsider—the Serpent in their view being a “mud person” who had managed to enter Eden. So by their reckoning, the only unforgivable sin is miscegenation. The product of this miscegenation was Cain, the murderous brother, who was banished to live among the “mud people” for the murder of his brother Abel, a product of the union between Adam and Eve, and therefore a white person. According to their abhorrent beliefs, there are two lines of descent from Eve: through Cain, who would go on to manipulate and rule the “mud people” because he was in some part still superior to them, and then the line of Adam through his surviving son Seth. Therefore, rather than descendants of the Lost Tribes, per se, white people are the supposedly pure race descended from Adam, while all people of color are descended from the “mud people,” and the Jews, excepting Christ of course whom they count as being of their white race, are descended from Cain, corrupted by the blood of the “mud people” and still secretly manipulating and ruling over them through their conspiratorial machinations.

Although it may at first seem counter-intuitive for anti-Semites to identify themselves as the true Israelites, this explicitly racist evolution of the Lost Tribes theory must be seen in the context of white supremacists’ notion of so-called Aryan people as superior. By co-opting the place of the Jews as God’s Chosen People, these white supremacists were able to use existing belief structures to both exalt their own race and denigrate the Jews. According to the despicable claims of Christian Identity leaders, America is a Zion or New Jerusalem meant only for themselves, the supposed true Chosen People: whites, but it is overrun by “mud people,” and the government, which they believe the Jews control, will never help them drive out all non-whites. So they have created a religious belief system that demands armed resistance to the government. Christian Identity proponents have been instrumental in founding numerous paramilitary militia groups, some of whom openly admit that they refuse to acknowledge the authority of the federal government, groups such as the California Rangers, a paramilitary arm of the Christian Defense League founded by William Porter Gale in 1960, and the Posse Comitatus, the anti-Semitic survivalist militia movement that Gale later formed, members of which have engaged in tax evasion and counterfeiting and then killed federal marshals who attempted to arrest them. The Christian Identity theology spreads openly as a rationale among many armed citizen militias. In the 1970s and ‘80s, it drove the Silent Brotherhood, a so-called  "Aryan Resistance Movement," to engage in counterfeiting and armed robbery in order to fund their plans for murder campaigns and the overthrow of the government. Thankfully, this neo-fascist terrorist organization was stopped, and most of its agents arrested, but it would be naïve to think that there does not remain a clear and present threat from similar cells of Christian Identity adherents. For example, Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber, was credibly tied to an anti-government, Christian Identity group, and even today, Thom Robb, the current leader of the Ku Klux Klan, preaches Identity Christianity to members who are regularly implicated in hate crimes and racially motivated violence.

These are not the only theories about what peoples may be descended from the Israelites. There have been claims that the Lemba, an ethnic group in Zimbabwe, are descended from Jews who left Judea, and that the Bnei Menashe group in northeastern India, who have adopted Judaism in more modern times, really are the descendants of the Lost Tribe of Menasseh as they claim to be. In Ethiopia, the narrative that the tribe of Dan settled there, in accordance with the tale of Eldad the Danite that I spoke about in a recent patron exclusive, remains persistent. A community of Jews in Ethiopia that calls itself Beta Israel embraces this narrative, tracing their presence there all the way back to the 4th century CE, though only unconfirmed rumors like Eldad’s story and rumors attributable to the Prester John legend place any Jewish presence there before the 14th century. Back here in the U.S., another group latched onto the Lost Tribes myth as a racial origin story, but rather than white supremacists, these were black religious communities. In the late 19th century, more than one black preacher, William Crowdy in Oklahoma and Frank Cherry in Tennessee, claimed through divine revelation to have discovered that black people were descended from the Lost Tribes. The idea spread during the 20th century, combining with black nationalist movements and resulting in a migration of these “Black Hebrew Israelites” to Liberia, and thereafter, to Israel, where they overstayed their visas and established a community under Israel’s Law of Return, despite the Israeli government not recognizing them as Jews. Meanwhile, some groups of Black Hebrew Israelites in America, much like their Christian Identity counterparts, developed an ideology of hate that encouraged violence. To these militant Black Hebrew Israelites, while they were descended from the Lost Tribes of the Chosen People, white Europeans were descended from Jacob’s brother Esau, or Edom, who was described as ruddy and hirsute. As Edomites were said in Obadiah to have done evil things to the Israelites, and were prophesied to have the same evil things done to them in return, proponents of this violent faction of the Black Hebrew Israelites have engaged in racially motivated violence against white people and against Jews, whom they call “fake Jews” and whom they blame for slavery. So, as we have seen, the legend of the Lost Tribes has been taken up in many cultures and nations, raised whenever confronted with an alien “other” and used again and again to justify fear of and violence against Jews and also other feared or resented races. Its history is as long and violent and misunderstood as history itself.

Further Reading

Callahan, Tim. “The ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel.” Skeptic, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2019, pp. 8–13. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=138836779&site=ehost-live.

Hyamson, Albert M. “The Lost Tribes and the Return of The Jews To England.” Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England), vol. 5, 1902, pp. 115–147. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29777629.

Jackson, John L. “Black Israelites: DNA and Then Some.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 28, no. 3, 2013, pp. 537–539. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43898489.

Lyman, Stanford M. “The Lost Tribes of Israel as a Problem in History and Sociology.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20019954.

Markowitz, Fran. “Israel as Africa, Africa as Israel: ‘Divine Geography’ in the Personal Narratives and Community Identity of the Black Hebrew Israelites.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, 1996, pp. 193–205. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3317528.

May, H. G. “Archaeological News and Views: The Ten Lost Tribes.” The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 6, no. 3, 1943, pp. 55–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3209244.

McFarland, Michael, and Glenn Gottfried. “The Chosen Ones: A Mythic Analysis of the Theological and Political Self-Justification of Christian Identity.” Journal for the Study of Religion, vol. 15, no. 1, 2002, pp. 125–145. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24764349.

Sharpe, Tanya Telfair. “The Identity Christian Movement: Ideology of Domestic Terrorism.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 30, no. 4, 2000, pp. 604–623. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2645906.

The Abode of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Part One: Conquest

When the great King Solomon died some 930 years before the Common Era, the golden age of Israel united under a single monarchy died with him. Among the Twelve Tribes of Israel—the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Simeon, Dan, Ephraim, Reuben, Gad, Menasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Asher, and Naphtali—Solomon had always favored the southern tribes of Benjamin and Judah, in whose territory lay the city of Jerusalem. His successor, Rehoboam, could not manage to keep the kingdom united, and the northern tribes rebelled under Jeroboam. Once divided, many in the southern Kingdom of Judah, who kept their Mosaic traditions, viewed the newly established Kingdom of Israel in the north as apostates. Thus, when Assyrian Shalmaneser V conquered the northern kingdom some two centuries later, around 722 BCE, it was suggested that the subsequent deportation of the ten northern tribes was an act of God, a punishment for their idolatry. These ten tribes of the northern kingdom would come to be known as the Lost Tribes of Israel. Together, prophecy and folklore have transformed their story into simultaneously a legitimate historical mystery and a wide-reaching historical myth that has been baselessly used to both defame and glorify different groups of people. The tale of the Lost Tribes of Israel really only begins with their deportation and forced resettlement in, according to 2 Kings, the “cities of the Medes,” which would appear to be Media in north-western Iran. After that, they disappear from history, but the legend tells us that they did not integrate, that much as the Jews of the Diaspora later would, they maintained their cultural identity and fled eastward, away from the lands where they had been resettled. It would later be claimed that they eventually came, after more than a year of travel, to a land untouched by mankind, called Arsareth. It is here that the Lost Tribes remain to this day, protected and kept in place by a magical river, the River Sambation, or the Sabbatical River, so-called because it is impassable 6 days a week but miraculously dries up on the Sabbath, a day on which travel is forbidden. But at the dawn of the Messianic Age, it is said that the Sabbatical River will be parted for them, and they will return to their homeland and once more reunite all the tribes of Israel.

A relief from an Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III’s palace, picturing deportees from a city sacked by Assyrian forces; courtesy the British Museum.

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In my recent post on Prester John, I mentioned that the famous Prester John letter claims the Lost Tribes of Israel survived in that legendary Christian king’s fantastical kingdom. Much like the Prester John legend, the legend of the Lost Tribes has inspired many an intrepid explorer to search for them in distant Asia and Africa, and also like the Prester John legend, which was inspired in part by the Acts of Thomas, the Lost Tribes legend first took definite shape in the apocryphal work, 2 Esdras. Scholars believe this work was written sometime after the destruction of the Second Temple, when Romans captured Jerusalem in 70 CE. For a long time, this work survived only incompletely, as it contained a lacuna, or literal historical blind spot of missing verses in the middle of it. It seems all Latin versions of this work had been copied from an original from which someone had torn out pages. These verses were not restored until the 19th century. Although attributed to Ezra the Scribe of the canonical Book of Ezra, some scholars believe it to be the pseudepigraphal work of as many as five different authors. And indeed it is picked and pulled from as if it were a collection of works rather than a coherent work. For example, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church accepts only twelve chapters from the work, calling it Izra Sutuel, and these same twelve chapters are valued by others as a text called The Apocalypse of Ezra. Originally, I was thinking of this episode as an edition of my Apocryphal Catechism series, but the legend of the Lost Tribes reaches so much further than its apocryphal beginnings, and has become so much more than it appeared in 2 Esdras, Chapter 13, verses 40-47. These 8 verses established only that the ten exiled northern tribes left the land of their resettlement for a “further country,” deciding once again to obey God’s commandments. So God helped them escape by holding back the waters of the Euphrates that they might cross. This appears to be the beginning of the legendary Sabbatical River, for it’s said that in “the latter time,” God will “stay the springs of the stream again, that they may go through” and return to Israel. Here, in this apocryphon, we are given the name of the untouched land the Lost Tribes traveled a year and a half to find, Arsareth. Some have tracked down in fragments and other works from antiquity mention of an Arsaratha, suggesting that this was an Israelite colony in Assyria whose name meant City of the Remainder, but if that were the case, then it certainly was not in an untouched land 18 months’ journey away from the place of their resettlement. Other scholars suggest that, rather than a proper city name, this was a corruption through the apocryphon’s many translations of the Hebrew phrase erez aheret, or “another land.” So at the beginning of the legend, all that we have is the Ten Tribes making their way over a river to a distant region, where they will abide until the end times.

For the evolution of this legend into an anti-Semitic motif, we must look to the 12th century, when the Lost Tribes were first conflated with the biblical Gog and Magog. I mentioned this in my last episode about the Prester John letter, that a brief mention of the Lost Tribes in the letter would later be twisted into the claim that these Lost Tribes were actually the evil and barbaric Gog and Magog supposedly trapped by Alexander the Great within the Caspian Mountains. The history of Gog and Magog is one of biblical contradiction and confusion. A Gog is mentioned in 1 Chronicles as a descendant of the prophet Joel, but any who might consider the legend of Gog and Magog literally would have to view this Gog as unrelated, for the prophet Joel, if it was he who actually wrote the Book of Joel, is believed to have lived and written during the Second Temple period and thus he and his sons were not among Lost Tribes in a faraway Arsareth. In Ezekiel, it is prophesied that Gog and Magog will one day lay siege to the land of Israel, and here Gog is identified as a person, the chief prince of “Meshek and Tubal” in a land called Magog. These tribal names, Meshek and Tubal, have long caused their own debate, with many believing they referred to descendants of Noah’s son Japheth, to whom various dubious theories of racial origin have traced a variety of peoples, including Scots, Poles, and Russians. Nowhere is it argued, though, that Japhetites were among the northern tribes of Israel deported by Assyrians, for it is traditionally held that, after the flood, Noah’s son Shem became the progenitor of the Hebrew and Arab peoples, as Abraham is counted among his descendants. Lastly, in Revelation, Gog and Magog appear again as the innumerable armies allied with the devil who march over the earth and attack Jerusalem. These sources actually don’t depict them as evil; Revelation specifically says that the devil deceives them in order to draw them to his side. But by the time they are included in the legend of Alexander trapping them in the Caspian Mountains, which some identify with the Caucasus, they have become heathen barbarians and unclean cannibals. In fact, later Islamic texts depict the inhabitants of Gog and Magog as inhuman monsters, with tails and huge ears that they use as bedding and claws with which they endlessly scratch at the wall that traps them. Considering depictions like this, it is clear that the equation of the Lost Tribes of Israel with Gog and Magog reflected and thereafter propagated anti-Semitic views.

A depiction of Alexander trapping the people of Gog and Magog. Public Domain.

The first person to suggest the Lost Tribes were one and the same as Gog and Magog appears to have been French theologian Petrus Comestor around 1173 in his paraphrasing of the Bible, Historia Scholastica. By Comestor’s retelling, Alexander had enclosed the ten Lost Tribes of Israel within the Caspian Mountains, and had been able to do so only with the help of the God of Israel. Comestor’s work saw widespread use in universities, and with translations in every Western European vernacular language, it became widely read as a “popular bible” for centuries. It is no surprise then, that after it became so popular, later editions of the Alexander Romance and the Prester John letter were altered to conflate these two legends, with the Alexander Romance’s mention of Gog and Magog thereafter transformed into a reference to the Lost Tribes, and the Prester John letter’s mention of the Lost tribes conversely changed into a reference to Gog and Magog. The conflation of the two reached their anti-Semitic height in The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a 14th century work purportedly written by an English knight, describing his fantastical journeys through the legendary realm of Prester John and the faraway territories of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The work is an amalgamation of previous stories from romances and extant encyclopedias. Who wrote it remains a mystery, and it seems likely that the narrating character himself, Sir Mandeville, was entirely an invention. The work claims that in the Caspian Mountains, the “Jews of 10 lineages” that men call Gog and Magog, have been enclosed. It claims that the Lost Tribes might actually escape their enclosure on one side, but still dare not because they understand no languages but their own. Further, Mandeville foretells how these Lost Tribes will go out into the world during the time of the Antichrist and will subjugate and destroy all Christian people. Even worse than this is the further implication that the Jews of the Diaspora have taken great pains to preserve their Hebrew language only so they will be able to communicate with the Lost Tribes and aid them in their conquest of Christians everywhere. Thus we see that these are really claims of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy of global domination, perhaps unsurprising when placed into historical context. A few decades before Comestor’s work, William of Norwich’s murder gave birth to that other Anti-Christian Jewish World Conspiracy theory, the Blood Libel, which I have spoken about in great detail in a previous episode. And The Book of John Mandeville is believed to have been written just a few years after the peak of the Black Death’s devastation of Europe, when, as I have also discussed in an even more recent episode, Jews were again scapegoated, falsely accused of starting the pandemic as part of a secret and deadly war against Christendom.

The writer of the Mandeville book seems to have taken some of his notions that the Lost Tribes represented a Jewish threat to Christianity from an earlier writer, Matthew Paris. In Paris’s Chronica Majora, and later in the Book of Mandeville, it’s suggested that the place where the Lost Tribes settled and/or were trapped was Scythia, a somewhat undefined Central Eurasian region where resided a race of nomadic horsemen described by Herodotus. These Scythians came to be erroneously identified with numerous warlike nomads, such as the Goths and the Hun. Essentially, Scythian came to mean barbarian hordes from somewhere out thataway. Considering the development of the Lost Tribes legend, it’s not surprising that they came to be thought of as Scythians eventually, and this led to their further identification with the Golden Horde. Matthew Paris was the first to identify the Lost Tribes with the Mongol invaders who at the time he was writing his massive chronicle were conquering numerous regions of Eastern and Central Europe under the command of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. But Matthew, along with most other Europeans, did not call them Mongols or even Scythians but rather Tartars, who had arrived from their homeland, Tartary, a vast and indistinct Asian territory. The name Tartar appears to be a corruption of an actual Turkic ethnic group, the Tatars, who were not so much the Mongols themselves but rather a people conquered by Genghis Khan and absorbed by his Mongol Empire. The name Tatar is believed by scholars to have been corrupted to Tartar as a pun on Tartarus, a hellish abyss from Greek mythology, for it was said that these invaders had ridden out of hell, that their homeland was an infernal region, a terrible and uninhabitable abyss. And Matthew Paris goes so far as to include a clearly fictional episode that is akin to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its imputation of Jewish conspiracy to betray Christendom. He claims that, in a secret meeting like that described in the Protocols forgery, Jews, who believed the Tartars, or Mongol invaders, to be the Lost Tribes returned, conspired to aid their campaign against the Christian West by smuggling provisions and weapons to them. If one doubts Matthew Paris’s prejudice against Jews or that he might have invented a Jewish conspiracy like this, one should look further into how his work spread the Blood Libel conspiracy theory by repeating accounts of Jewish ritual crucifixion, and further examine his depiction of the Lost Tribes, or Tartars, as irrational beasts with claws and fangs and disproportional bodies.

Depiction of Mongols as cannibals in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora. Public Domain.

In the 17th century, an English parliamentarian and millenarian writer named Giles Fletcher the Elder would further Matthew Paris’s presumption that the Tartars were the Lost Tribes. By the time that he wrote his work The Tartars Or, Ten Tribes, the Golden Horde no longer ruled its conquered territories in Russia, though some remnants of their Mongol-Turkish confederation remained. Fletcher, who had lived in Moscow as an ambassador for Queen Elizabeth most of a year in 1588 and ’89, believed he was uniquely positioned to finally provide evidence for what others before him had claimed, that the Mongols were the Lost Tribes of Israel. He recognized that his views were somewhat unorthodox, for at the time, most reputable Protestant thinkers believed the “millennium,” or the thousand year reign of Christ on Earth mentioned in Revelation, was only a symbolic reference to the time period between the Incarnation and the Second Coming—a view called amillennialism. The apocalyptic view that Fletcher espoused was manifestly heterodox, to put it mildly. He put stock in the idea that the Millennium would only begin after the prophesied battle of Armageddon, when Protestants would vanquish Roman Catholics and Jews, reunited with their Lost Tribes and all of them converted to Christianity, would simultaneously rout the Ottoman Empire. But he did not dwell on the eschatology so much as his evidence for identifying the Tartars as the Lost Tribes who would be converted before ushering in Christ’s earthly reign. His evidence was that the “Scythian or Tartar tongue,” which he narrows down further to the “Turkish language,” even though this was only one of the languages spoken among the confederation of peoples that was the Golden Horde, was strikingly similar to Hebrew, though he was no linguist and at King’s College studied Greek rather these languages he was comparing. Unsurprisingly, modern linguists do not find his claims convincing. More than this, though, he further claimed that there were among the Tartars ten hordes, corresponding to the ten tribes, and that Timur, or as Fletcher called him Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror of the 14th century, had expressly claimed to be descended from the Lost Danite Tribe. Unfortunately, no other sources appear to corroborate these claims, making them seem wholly invented. Lastly, he pointed to the practice of circumcision among the Tartars as evidence of Israelite cultural remnants, even though this practice had likely been introduced into Turkish and Mongol cultures with the spread of Islam. So after all, this first attempt to identify the Lost Tribes with a known people falls apart under scrutiny. And one finds that the entire legend of the Lost Tribes likewise becomes hard to credit under close inspection.

Contradictions in the scriptures from which the legend derives should be enough to cast doubt on its historicity. First is the matter of the river the northern tribes are said to have needed God’s help in crossing as they left the lands of their resettlement and struck out eastward toward lands untouched by men. The foundation of this legend in the apocryphal text 2 Esdras states that this was the River Euphrates, but from a geographical standpoint, that doesn’t make sense. If the northern tribes had been settled in the “cities of the Medes” as canonical texts clarify, then they had already crossed the Euphrates on their way from Israel to north-western Iran. So then if they were crossing the Euphrates again, they would have been on their way back homeward rather than striking out into the Far East. And maybe they did return in some numbers, for there is scriptural evidence that the ten northern tribes were never lost at all, at least not in their entirety. Prophetic texts in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea all promise the repatriation and redemption of the northern tribes, which would seem to indicate that there was definite knowledge of the northern tribes’ survival, and knowledge that they had retained their cultural identity even in exile. In fact, throughout Ezekiel, the prophet makes references to tribes other than the only two that supposedly remained 200 years after the Assyrian conquest of the north, and in three different chapters addresses “the entire House of Israel” as though tacitly admitting that members of all tribes remained. Likewise, in the canonical Book of Ezra 6:17, at the dedication of the Second Temple, a sin offering is made for all twelve tribes as though the Ten Lost Tribes remained, at least in part. One explanation for these indications is that all the talk in canonical texts of the Northern Tribes one day returning and being redeemed was not really about the tribes having been deported and physically lost but rather about the northern tribes’ perceived apostasy. In this sense, the northern tribes were only “lost” in the sense that all sinners and apostates are lost. After all, less than two decades after the fall of the north, in 701 BCE, Jerusalem and the remaining two tribes also fell to Assyrian conquest, resulting in another deportation, this time from among the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, but this deportation isn’t even mentioned in the scriptures.

Map of the territories of the tribes of Israel, from Tim Callahan’s “The ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel,” Skeptic, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2019, p. 9.

The fact that the Assyrian deportation of southern tribes never resulted in a legend of more Lost Tribes seems evidence enough that Assyrian conquest did not result in absolute obliteration or even complete deportation. But there is further evidence from Assyrian sources, such as inscriptions that summarized the exploits of their kings. These texts give actual numbers for those deported from occupied territories, and while some of the numbers recorded are suspected by scholars to be exaggerations, the number claimed to have been deported from the north is only 27 thousand or so, which would not appear to have been a complete evacuation of all their population, suggesting many from the northern tribes were permitted to remain in their homelands. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that northern tribes had ample opportunity to escape Assyrian deportation and seek refuge in the south. After all, the process of their conquest was not sudden. The dismantling of the northern Kingdom of Israel had begun all the way back in 738 BCE under the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III. More than one deportation took place as the Assyrians took the region piece by piece, and we know that Israelites were aware of the deportation policy because the prophets Amos and Hosea are recorded as warning them that they will be exiled. Then there’s the fact that their conquest was interrupted, as Tiglath-Pileser’s successor Shalmaneser V died just after capturing the major northern cities. Assyrian forces marched home to see the next king, Sargon, establish himself, and did not return to continue their subjugation of the Kingdom of Israel for two years, during which time, again, many might have escaped the conquered cities. Population records even show a surge of new citizens in Jerusalem, supporting the theory that many northerners fled to the more secure southern city. After Assyrian control was reasserted and deportation from northern cities resumed, archaeological evidence still appears to support the idea that this deportation was only partial. A consistency of style in later ceramics and architecture stand as evidence that the northern culture was not wiped out. All of this stands as convincing evidence that the ten northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel were never truly “lost” at all, a view that conforms well with the fact that this legend did not actually appear until the end of the Second Temple period.

The more one looks at the story of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the more clearly it can be seen as myth. For example, the idea that there is still some undiscovered Eastern land where an innumerable people remain cut off from the rest of the world is simply not credible. In fact, with modern knowledge of geography and the known dispersion of peoples, it is even hard to believe that back then the Lost Tribes might have found a land untouched by man in which to remain separate from other peoples, rather than just settling among an existing people and integrating. Thus, for a modern person to believe in the literal existence of the Lost Tribes of Israel, he or she must search for historical peoples or isolated races and make the argument that the Lost Tribes culture evolved into one we know existed or even still exists. While in a bygone era, explorers might strike out to exotic regions in hopes of finding the realm of Prester John or the abode of the Lost Tribes, today it has become more of an academic quest, with those who seek the Lost Tribes searching history books and ethnologies. Thus, much as Giles Fletcher the Elder made his argument that the Mongol Empire was descended from the Lost Tribes, many a theorist has suggested that the Lost Tribes ended up in some other region, in Africa, Japan, Western Europe, or even across the Bering Strait in the New World. And in this way, the legend of the Lost Tribe would experience its own diaspora, and as we will see in part two, would come to be used in a variety of dubious new religions and racist ideologies.

Further Reading

Barmash, Pamela. “At the Nexus of History and Memory: The Ten Lost Tribes.” AJS Review, vol. 29, no. 2, 2005, pp. 207–236. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4131732.

Callahan, Tim. “The ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel.” Skeptic, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2019, pp. 8–13. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=138836779&site=ehost-live.

Cogley, Richard W. “‘The Most Vile and Barbarous Nation Of All the World’: Giles Fletcher the Elder’s The Tartars Or, Ten Tribes (Ca. 1610).” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 3, 2005, pp. 781–814. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1353/ren.2008.0809.

Epstein, Morris, and עפשטיין מ'. “אור חדש על בעיית עשרת השבטים / NEW LIGHT ON THE TEN LOST TRIBES.” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies / דברי הקונגרס העולמי למדעי היהדות, ו, 1973, pp. 21–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23529107.

Hyamson, Albert M. “THE LOST TRIBES: AND THE RETURN OF THE JEWS TO ENGLAND.” Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England), vol. 5, 1902, pp. 115–147. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29777629.

Kirsch, Stuart. “Lost Tribes: Indigenous People and the Social Imaginary.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 2, 1997, pp. 58–67. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3317506.

Lyman, Stanford M. “The Lost Tribes of Israel as a Problem in History and Sociology.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20019954.

May, H. G. “Archaeological News and Views: The Ten Lost Tribes.” The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 6, no. 3, 1943, pp. 55–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3209244.

Nisse, Ruth. “A Romance of the Jewish East: The Ten Lost Tribes and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in Medieval Europe.” Medieval Encounters, vol. 13, no. 3, Nov. 2007, pp. 499–523. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/157006707X222759.