Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Abe Lincoln in Fact and Fiction

On Presidents’ Day, 2025, visitors to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia can meet and greet, interact with professional historical reenactors, and ask historic presidents about their lives, impact on history, and their time as leaders of the United States. They can enter a voting booth and vote for their favorite historic president and display their knowledge of the nation’s commanders in chief in Presidential Trivia. (https://constitutioncenter.org/calendar/presidents-day-2025)

In Land of Lincoln, Springfield, IL, visitors to the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum can take journeys with Abraham Lincoln and learn about his early life in a Kentucky cabin, his campaign for the presidency in 1860, his leadership during the Civil War, the death of his son Willie in 1862, and his assassination in 1865. Or they can download Lincoln Unlocked and take interactive tours using augmented reality and digital storytelling, see rare artifacts and photos, and find profiles of historic figures. (For more information, visit PresidentLincoln.illinois.gov or follow ALPLM on Facebook, X and Instagram.) Or they can Experience Abraham Lincoln in the Union Theater through the special feature, Lincoln’s Eyes, an immersive, special effects film that tells about Lincoln’s life and death. (https://presidentlincoln.illinois.gov/Event/25546/Special-Performance-of-Freedom-in-Form-Nine-Vignettes-for-Richard-Hunt/event-details/)

In Chicago at the Chicago History Museum, children, teens, and adults can write a letter to today’s president, decide how they themselves would mount a campaign for the office of the presidency, and leave messages about current issues they think are most important and how to address them before walking through the Lincoln exhibit.

https://learningoosterzonbmrq.z21.web.core.windows.net/free-printable-abraham-lincoln-pictures.html

Abraham Lincoln died more than 150 years ago, yet he and his life are still major topics of interest. Just consider the number of books published in the last few years and those planned for this year.

 Among the nonfiction books published between 2020 and 2023 are:

Abraham among the Yankees: Abraham Lincoln’s 1848 Visit to Massachusetts

The Agitator and the Politician: William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham Lincoln, and the Emancipation of the Slaves

Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln’s Vital Rival

The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History

Books published in 2024 include these about Lincoln and his time:

Abraham Lincoln: Statesman Historian

Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment

Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents

Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration

Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

Freedom Was in Sight: A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, DC, Region

Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to the Civil War

 Already scheduled for publication in 2025 are:

The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Fremont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation

Loving Lincoln: A Personal History of the Women Who Shaped Lincoln’s Life and Legacy.  

Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy

Righteous Strife

Among the most recent fiction titles are:

https://www.amazon.com/Rail-Splitter-Novel-John-Cribb/dp/1645720640

The 2023 novel seeks to understand Abraham Lincoln the man by learning about Abe Lincoln the boy. Rail Splitter begins with Abe’s father worries about his 17-year-old son. He frets that the teen is heading down the wrong path, fooling around with more education than he needs instead of putting his back into a piece of land and turning it into something useful. Young Abraham himself is not sure what path he will follow, but he’s sure of one thing: it won’t involve owning a farm. See this author’s full review at: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-rail-splitter/

The novel is the prequel to author John Cribb’s 2020 novel Old Abe, which tells the story of the last five years of Lincoln’s life, beginning with his election to the White House and passing through the dark days of the Civil War and his tragic death.

https://www.amazon.com/Old-Abe-Novel-John-Cribb/dp/1645720160

It’s estimated that between 15,000 and 20,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln. Here are a few of them.

Best Sellers and Classics

One of the most recent nonfiction books about Lincoln is a nationwide best-seller. The Demon of Unrest has sold more than 10 million copies since its publishing date April, 2024. The book covers the first five months of Lincoln’s presidency, from inauguration to the raising of the Confederate flag at Fort Sumter, plumbs the diary of a plantation owner, and highlights the actions of a military leader at the fort, a nearly rabid secessionist, and the country’s Secretary of State. 

Chorus of the Union, published in June, 2024, delves into the rivalry between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, beginning with their debates for the US Senate in 1858 and their runs for the presidency in 1860.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, published in 2005, remains one of the most popular and well-regarded books about the Lincoln presidency. Chronicling the campaigns of the men who ran against Lincoln—William Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates—and their addition to Lincoln’s Cabinet, the book is rated among the top 500 on the all-time list of Civil War biographies and was made into the movie Lincoln by director Stephen Spielberg.

On the fiction side, Lincoln at the Bardo by George Saunders, the 2017 novel about Lincoln and the death of his son Willie, won the 2023 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Impeachment, a work of alternate history by Stephen L. Carter posits that Lincoln survived the assassination attempt but then was put on trial by the US Congress after the war because of what congressmen considered to be his questionable and unconstitutional use of presidential authority. The book won the Kirkus Prize in 2012.

Sci-Fi and Not-so-Fi

Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, sandwiches in actual events in Lincoln’s life with a series of imaginative adventures on the trail of the undead. The book by Seth Grahame-Smith appeared in 2010 and was made into a movie in 2012.

In the 2024 Jack the Ripper and Abraham Lincoln, author Tony McMahon describes the link between Lincoln’s assassination and the Whitechapel killings by Jack the Ripper, less than 25 years later. It’s Francis Tumblety, a doctor who was arrested but soon released following the assassination, a man who was later imprisoned but then escaped because of his suspected involvement in the Ripper killings.

The 2022 Lincoln: The Fire of Genius by David J. Kent highlights little-known, at least for this reader, aspects of Lincoln’s life: his own patent and his legal cases as a patent attorney, his work as a state legislator to foster technological advancement, his support for the Smithsonian Institution, creation of the National Academy of Sciences, and use of the latest in weaponry, telegraphy, and balloon surveillance during the Civil War.

 Legal Cases

Lincoln’s Greatest Case, published in 2016, traces one of the lawsuits Lincoln defended as an attorney. Author Brian McGinty tells the story of the crash of the steamboat Effie Afton into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge during its construction across the Mississippi River in 1856 and explains how the lawsuit influenced the development of the nation’s infrastructure.

Lincoln’s Last Trial by TV host Dan Abrams describes Lincoln’s defense of Peachy Quinn Harrison, the son of a friend and political supporter who was accused of the murder of Lincoln’s own law clerk, mentee, and friend and the high stakes surrounding the lawsuit—a loss at this stage of Lincoln’s life, when he was being considered as a possible dark horse candidate, could have put an end to his political life.

The Personal Side

In the early 2000s, several books examined Lincoln’s private moments and relationships.

Lincoln’s Melancholy reveals Lincoln’s bouts of deep depression and the ways he tried to cope with them in a combination of historical record research, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and insights from contemporary understandings of melancholia. The 2006 book by Joshua Wolf Shenk was one of The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year, and it received the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award as well as an award from the National Mental Health Association.  

The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp and released in 2005, provides a psychological analysis of Lincoln’s relationships with male colleagues and friends, a broken engagement and questionable love story, and his romantically strained marriage.

The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage follows Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln through 22 years of marriage, from their early days in Springfield, IL, to the White House, and their complex, challenging lives together. The 2009 book by Daniel Mark Epstein was the first book to focus on the president, the man, the first lady, and the woman.  

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Imaging Illness

The “Saint of Spitalfields,” Rev. Tobias Atwater, is found stabbed to death, his body mutilated and jammed into a sewer pipe, a popped balloon in his waistcoat pocket.

Days later Sir Maxwell Ball, chairman of the East London Waterworks Co., is found stabbed to death in an iron “slipper bath” tub in the Whitechapel Bathhouse, a popped balloon in his waistcoat pocket.

These are the first of a series of murder victims who were associated with London’s cholera epidemic in 1849: Some of them mishandled the spread of disease by releasing unfiltered water into the drinking water supply; others preyed upon the poor whose families were dislocated because of the epidemic.

It is November, 1866, nearly 20 years after the worst outbreak of cholera in London history that took more than 14,000 lives. The Inspector of Nuisances rushes feverish parents to what’s known as the fever hospital, sends children to the Whitechapel Workhouse where they pick oakum for long hours during the day and suffer under the hands of abusers at night.

This is the setting for Murder by Lamplight, the 2024 murder mystery by Patrice McDonough that dramatizes London’s delayed response to cholera and public health officials’ reluctance to acknowledge the source of the epidemic, persisting in the belief that the disease spread through the air despite carefully gathered evidence that traced the path of infection via the water supply.

https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Lamplight-Patrice-McDonough-ebook/dp/B0C6FW2HCM

 For this author’s review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/murder-by-lamplight-a-dr-julia-lewis-mystery/

 The novel refers to the work of Dr. John Snow, who created a mortality map or what was known at the time as The Ghost Map in 1854. The map was one of the first, if not the first, scientific image to demonstrate how contagion spreads. It makes use of the principles of epidemiology that as recently as the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 have been used to survey communities where disease occurs, identify vulnerable areas and populations, and begin to understand how disease spreads and what may be done to slow it down.

 Ghost Mapper

https://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/dr-john-snow

Dr. John Snow first became aware of cholera when he was a physician-in-training and was sent to treat miners who were dying of the disease in Killingworth, northern England. At the time, he noted the link between unsanitary conditions and disease, telling his family that the mine “was one huge privy,” and he suspected the cause of the epidemic could be found in food or water. Cholera resided in and affected the digestive system, and as Snow observed in Killingworth, miners “always take their victuals with unwashed hands.”  (Marilee Peters: Patient Zero)

After finishing his medical training, Snow established a medical practice in London where he specialized in anesthesiology, experimenting with various doses of ether and chloroform on animals as well as himself in his home. (Ghost Map)

Snow began focusing on cholera and its mechanism of transmission in 1848 when he learned of a peculiarity—two men had died from the disease within days of one another after spending the night in the same room of a lodging house. The disease then spread throughout the nearby area over the following week. Snow discounted the miasma theory of cholera transmission that was prevalent at the time—ie, the disease spread through the air—when he learned the same doctor had treated both men in the same room in the lodging house and breathed the same air but never contracted the disease. (Ghost Map)

After consulting with chemists and water and sewer authorities, Snow theorized that cholera was caused by ingesting water or material that had been contaminated by people who had already been infected, and he started gathering evidence to support the theory. He studied the water supply in London’s districts and learned that residents were less likely to die from cholera if their water came from a particular area of the Thames--upstream from where sewage routinely drained into the river. People of northern London got their water from various sources, including rivers other than the Thames. People living in southern London who were more at risk for cholera got their water downstream from the area of the Thames where the city’s sewers discharged their waste. (Ghost Map)

Snow tested his theory by surveying people in their homes, asking who and how many people had been affected by the disease, how many had died, and where they got their drinking water. He soon found irregularities in the water supply system: Though buildings were close by one another, they did not receive water from the same source. One tenement received water from one of the city’s two private water supply companies, while neighboring buildings got water from the other company.

An outbreak of cholera along Broad Street in Soho gave him a unique opportunity—he could take water samples from all the local pumps and try to track patterns of disease contamination.

 The Broad Street Epidemic

The first case of cholera along Broad Street was detected on August 31, 1854. By September 10, 500 people were dead from the disease.

Snow walked up and down the streets in the neighborhood and interviewed residents to learn who had contracted the disease and document where they lived and the source of their water. He encountered oddities: None of the workers at the Broad Street Brewery died or even was affected by the disease, but none of the workers drank water from nearby pumps either. They were given rations of beer, and the water used in the brewing process was boiled before entering the tanks.  https://www.history.co.uk/articles/1854-broad-street-cholera-outbreak

Likewise, only a few people living in St. James Workhouse, a charity home with more than 500 men, women, and children located around the corner from Broad Street, contracted the disease while hundreds of their neighbors living only a few doors away succumbed. (Patient Zero)

Snow suspected that cholera was being spread via the Broad Street pump but was stymied by one fact: An elderly woman who lived across town and nowhere near the Broad Street pump had died in the epidemic on September 2. Through his interviews, Snow learned that the woman’s sons worked in a percussion cap factory on Broad Street and sent a jug of water drawn from the Broad Street pump to their mother every day because she believed the water tasted better. (Patient Zero)

With these anomalies aside, Snow was able to show that the source of the disease and the epidemic was the Broad Street water pump. The results of his investigations? A map.

The Map

A map of mortality, or what’s known as the Ghost Map, was prepared by Dr. John Snow in the summer of 1854. On a cross section of city streets, Snow marked every case of cholera that had been reported at each address. He then flagged the locations of water pumps in and around Broad Street. The result was clear: Black bars marking every cholera-related death radiated out from the Broad Street pump. The density of the markings was thickest at locations closest to the pump, and it lessened at locations farther away. (Patient Zero)

https://www.slideserve.com/thais/gen-101-public-health-powerpoint-ppt-presentation

Though somewhat skeptical of Snow’s findings, the Board of Governors of the parish overseeing Broad Street voted on September 8 to remove the handle to the pump that supplied water to residents, and the trajectory of the disease turned. Deaths from cholera continued in the area for several more days, but they then declined significantly, and no new cases of the disease were reported. (The Ghost Map)

Mapping Disease Today

Much like John Snow, epidemiologists create maps of disease outbreaks to identify their source and plot their paths. The Covid-19 pandemic was traced to Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019, and its course was illustrated in maps across the globe and in the US.

Present-day maps depend on data similar to that collected by Snow—reports of particular symptom clusters and deaths related to them as well as where they are occurring—and are gathered by means of sophisticated local, regional, and national public health surveillance systems. They also rely on statistical modeling of data that identifies which individuals in the population are susceptible or more likely than others to contract the disease, which are infectious and capable of spreading the disease, and which at one time had the disease but are now no longer infected. (https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2021.0014)

 Scientific techniques for tracking disease have been fine-tuned during the Covid pandemic. Among them are geospatial analysis, which tracks the spread of disease over a geographical area over the course of time; data mining, which dives into geographical information systems and finds patterns of disease spread among interstate travelers and mobile device users; web-based mapping, which disseminates information about disease spread for Internet users. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7832930/

The objective of today’s disease imaging technologies is the same as John Snow’s: step-by-step accumulation of information from infected individuals about where and how they may have acquired the disease to find the means of transmission, identify and eliminate the source, and take steps to stop the spread.  

 Sources:

Steven Johnson: The Ghost Map, Riverhead Books, 2006.

Marilee Peters: Patient Zero, Annick Press Ltd., 2021.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7832930/

https://www.history.co.uk/articles/1854-broad-street-cholera-outbreak

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2021.0014  

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Evolving History

Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in October restaged the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, taking theatergoers back to 1925 when the state of Tennessee prosecuted teacher John Scopes for violating the recently passed Butler Law prohibiting anyone from teaching “any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of Man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animals.”

After Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, schools in the US soon began teaching the theory of evolution. (Edward J. Larson: Trial and Error)

In the 1920s, however, state legislatures tried to prohibit the practice:

In 1921 and -22 Kentucky and South Carolina’s efforts were defeated.

In 1923, schools in Oklahoma were prevented from purchasing textbooks that published information about and teachers from teaching evolution.

In 1924, the governor of North Carolina dropped two textbooks from public schools’ curricula so students wouldn’t see “a picture of a monkey and a man on the same page.” (Trial and Error, p 61)

In 1925 the Tennessee legislature passed its prohibition nearly unanimously—71 to 5 in the state house and 24-6 in the state senate—and other states followed the same path: Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas. (Trial and Error)

The US Supreme Court in 1968 ruled unanimously that an Arkansas law outlawing the teaching of evolution violated the First Amendment of the Constitution separating church and state. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/epperson-v-arkansas/

Nevertheless, more than 50 years later, teaching about the theory of evolution is still being challenged. A US District Court in August of this year dismissed an Indiana lawsuit alleging that the teaching of evolution violated the state constitution (National Center for Science Education). And while the theory is taught in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, it must be accompanied by the teaching of creationism in 17 states. (https://nesc.ngo)

Attitudes about evolution are, dare I say, evolving. A three-decade longitudinal study shows GenXers’ acceptance of the theory increases with age. Between 38 and 44 percent of the 5000 GenXers in the study accepted the theory when they were in high school compared to between 54 and 57 percent today. And their uncertainty declines over time: 37 percent were unsure about the theory in high school; only 11 to 13 percent are today. (https://eeb.msu.edu/news/awesome-or-bogus-gen-x-attitudes-toward-evolution.aspx

The theory of evolution itself is evolving. Scientists are documenting how humans continue to evolve as a result of changes in medicine, agriculture, and culture.  (Conor Feehly: How Are Human Still Evolving, Discover magazine)

Where Language Came From

One area of particular interest is the evolution of language. Steven Mithen, a prehistory professor at the University of Reading, explores The Language Puzzle by tracing developments across time in anthropology, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, and psychology. He compares and contrasts language among the closest living relatives to man—chimpanzees—noting that chimps make sounds that are similar to words but they do not form actual speech because of anatomical and cognitive limitations. (Steven Mithen: The Language Puzzle, Basic Books, 2024)

The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved: Mithen, Steven: 9781541605381: Amazon.com: Books

One of the first scientists to try to unravel the language puzzle was the naturalist Richard L. Garner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynch_Garner

As a child growing up in Appalachia, Lynch first came up with the idea that animals talk. “I believed that all animals of the same kind could understand each other, and I recall many instances in which they really did so.” Yet his elders denied that animals could actually speak. That led him to investigate the sounds animals make, how these sounds compare or differ from speech, and the overall question: what is speech? (Richard Lynch Garner: Apes and Monkeys. Their Life and Language, 1900).

https://www.amazon.com/Apes-monkeys-Their-life-language/dp/B00085QGBY

 Garner’s book, Apes and Monkeys, published in 1900, challenged the belief at the time that animals did not interact with their environment or communicate with one another by presenting his observations of monkeys and apes in a caged environment as well as the wild, his interactions with monkeys he considered to be friends, and his time in the French Congo where he lived in a six foot-square cage for weeks at a time. He noted how monkeys keep watch and warn one another of possible danger, discriminate between items of food and invariably choose the largest one offered, adjust to games with a set number of marbles and search for missing ones when the total differs from what they’re used to. (https://www.erbzine.com/mag18/garner.htm )

While in the cage he built near Lake Ferman Vax in Gaboon, he watched as a school of monkeys surrounded and inspected the structure, heard the changes in bird calls over the course of the day, worried when a leopard approached after tracking his scent, and woke every morning to the cry of the king gorilla.  

In the preface to the book, author Garner “frankly confesses to his own belief in the psychic unity of all animate nature. Believing in a common source of life, a common law of living, and a common destiny for all creatures, he feels that to dignify the apes is not to degrade man but rather to exalt him.

“Believing that a more perfect knowledge of these animals will bring man into closer fellowship and deeper sympathy with nature, and with an abiding trust that it will widen the bounds of humanity and cause man to realize that he and they are but common links in the one great chain of life, the author gives this work to the world. When once man is impressed with the consciousness that in some degree, however small, all creatures think and feel, it will lessen his vanity and ennoble his heart.”

The fictional memoir Man in a Cage, published in 2020, recaps Garner’s early experiments recording the sounds primates make min the Cincinnati Zoo and his first trip to Africa.

Man in a Cage - Kindle edition by Nevins, Patrick. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

 As written by this author in a review for the Historical Novel Society (see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/man-in-a-cage/), “Man in a Cage chronicles Garner’s travels and difficulties gaining support for his work—the promised Edison phonograph that never arrives in Gabon, the sudden loss of funding—as well as the threats and dangers of the jungle from sudden fever and a mysterious attack on the cage: was it done by animals or men?

“Written in a fresh, almost ingenuous manner, the first-person narrative lets readers share Garner’s enthusiasm and breathlessness as he navigates elephant trails and fingers of jungle, discovers subtle animal behaviors… [takes note of] underlying conflicts among tribesmen, traders, and missionaries…and [encounters] uncertainty about the theory of evolution, and outright disparagement among religious groups that classify any thought of the links between man and primates as heresy.”

Evolution on Trial

 The Scopes Monkey Trial, called the Trial of the Century in 1925, is actually only one of five Trials of the Century in the 1920s. The first was the prosecution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti (1920-7), next was the rape conviction involving silent film star Fatty Arbuckle (1921), then the Hall-Mills trial involving an Episcopal priest and a choir member (1922), and the “perfect crime” trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (1924).

The Scopes trial pitted high-profile personages against one another. For the prosecution: William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate known for his oratory in support of Evangelicals, farmers, and the downtrodden. For the defense: Clarence Darrow, fresh from his 12-hour summation in the Leopold and Loeb case that exhorted the court to refrain from sentencing the boys to death, nothing that “all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.” (Gregg Jarrett: Trial of the Century, p 43)

The defendant John T. Scopes agreed to become involved when local Dayton, Tennessee, businessmen sponsored and the American Civil Liberties Union funded a lawsuit that tested the constitutionality of the Butler Law and incongruously required teachers to use a specific biology textbook but then make it criminal for a teacher to teach from the pages devoted to evolution. (Trial of the Century, p 146)

The trial lasted less than two weeks and had its share of controversies and carnival consequences. The judge would not allow any testimony from experts about the theory of evolution and its grounding in science. The town of Dayton became a sideshow with self-appointed preachers railing against evolution, shops and stalls hawking toy monkey souvenirs, and reporters from more than 100 newspapers wedging themselves among the 1000 people in the gallery. (ACLU: State of Tennessee v. Scopes, July 21, 1925)

Though the jury took only minutes to find Scopes guilty and the judge fined him $100 for teaching that man descended from a lower order of animals, the verdict was reversed on appeal. The Tennessee Supreme Court found that the judge erred in deciding on the amount of the fine; only juries could impose fines of more than $50. But it upheld the constitutionality of the law that stopped teachers from teaching the theory of evolution. (James C. Foster: Scopes Monkey Trial, Free Speech Center, July 2, 2024)

Known for the brisk back-and-forth between Darrow and Bryan, trial testimony was, not surprisingly, dramatized in the 1955 play as well as the 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. The two men jousted over the meaning of Biblical references to Cain’s wife, the length of a day of creation, the time men have lived on earth, the time the earth was created, and the date of Noah’s flood. Darrow asks Bryan:

“What do you think that the Bible itself says? Don’t you know how it was arrived at?”

“I never made a calculation.”

“A calculation from what?”

“I could not say.”

“What do you think?”

“I do not think about things I don’t think about.”

“Do you think about things you do think about?”

As the Henry Drummond character said in the play and film: “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.”

 Sources:

Richard Lynch Garner. 1900 Apes and Monkeys. Their Life and Language. Boston/London: Ginn & Company

https://www.erbzine.com/mag18/garner.htm 

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/epperson-v-arkansas/

https://nesc.ngo

Edward J. Larson: Trial and Error

Conor Feehly: How Are Human Still Evolving, Discover magazine)

Gregg Jarrett: Trial of the Century, p 43

ACLU: State of Tennessee v. Scopes, July 21, 1925

James C. Foster: Scopes Monkey Trial, Free Speech Center, July 2, 2024)

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Ship Wrecked—Failed Prosecutions

 The Eastland disaster faded from memory not only because of other, more notable shipwrecks at the time—the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania (see the previous Time Stamp post). It also has been largely forgotten because of the delayed and prolonged legal process that never assigned blame or compensated victims’ families.

Investigations after the wrecks of the Titanic and Lusitania were hardly more satisfactory.

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ds.13444/ US Senate inquiry committee convenes.

The US Senate investigation conducted after the sinking of the Titanic ran from April 19 to May 25, 1912, concluding at its end that the British Board of Trade had been lax in regulating steamships overall and hastily inspected the Titanic itself.

The British Board’s own investigation attributed the disaster to the excessive speed of the ship but not the captain who piloted the vessel at those speeds, noting he “was only doing that which other skilled men would have done.” U.S. Senate investigation of the Titanic's sinking

The sinking of the Titanic did result in new safety measures. The first 1913 International Conference for Safety of Life at Sea ruled ships must have enough lifeboat space for every person onboard as well as lifeboat drills. Ironically, the installation of more lifeboats in keeping with the requirement made the Eastland more unstable.  https://www.britannica.com/topic/International-Conference-for-Safety-of-Life-at-Sea

German propaganda postcard of Lusitania. The torpedo is incorrectly depicted as hitting the port side of ship. Next to the Kaiserliche Marine ensign is shown Grand Admiral Tirpitz, major proponent of submarine warfare.

The German Government after the loss of the Lusitania claimed the ship had been “armed with guns…and as is well known here, she had large quantities of war material in her cargo.” "Sinking Justified, Says Dr. Dernburg; Lusitania a "War Vessel", Known to be Carrying Contraband, Hence Search Was Not Necessary" (PDF). The New York Times. 9 May 1915. p. 4. 

 While the Lusitania had been fitted with gun mounts during construction (so she could later be converted into a merchant marine cruiser), guns had not been added or armed. One inspector found no guns or mounts onboard before the ship sailed. And the ammunition on board were cartridges for small weapons that were “non-explosive” in nature, even in bulk. "Sinking Justified, Says Dr. Dernburg; Lusitania a "War Vessel", Known to be Carrying Contraband, Hence Search Was Not Necessary" (PDF). The New York Times.

The German government did bar U-boats from the English Channel and the waters along the west coast of the UK until January, 1917, when it removed all restrictions on U-boat routes.

Survivors and their relatives sued the German government after its defeat in WW I and agreed to an arbiter’s decision on compensation. The government was liable for direct personal injuries and property loss on a case-by-case basis. (https://www.rmslusitania.info/primary-docs/mcc/candlish

Eastland Prosecutions

Criminal cases were brought in the state of Illinois and in the federal circuit court, but only one criminal case was ever prosecuted, and it took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the Eastland had been built by the Michigan Steamship Company.

Immediate Criminal Investigation

Less than a week after the sinking, seven inquiries were launched by officials in Chicago and Cook County, including law enforcement—state and district attorneys and the coroner—commerce and public utilities commissions, steamboat and harbor and wharves inspectors and city council committee members.

A Cook County coroner’s jury impaneled the day after the sinking ruled on July 29 that the ship was unseaworthy because it had not been properly constructed, maintained, or operated and that four top officials of the steamship company as well as its captain and chief engineer should be brought before a Cook County criminal grand jury.

The Cook County grand jury did indict company officials. The jury held that the officers of the firm knew the ship was unstable and still allowed 2500 passengers to board, were negligent in hiring an incompetent engineer, did not have a sufficient number of sailors on board to help in the event of an accident, and failed to properly maintain ballast tanks. The jury also charged the ship’s captain, Harry Pedersen, and chief engineer, Joseph Erickson, with criminal carelessness and negligence.

Further prosecution in the state of Illinois stalled, however, while federal steamboat and marine inspectors participated in a formal board of inquiry. A federal grand jury in September handed down nearly 20 indictments of top members of the steamship company, the ship’s engineer and captain, and the Indiana Transportation Company for criminal carelessness and conspiracy to defraud the federal government by interfering with maritime law. Warrants were issued on September 29 for six of eight of the men who had been indicted federally and for only one of the three original charges—conspiracy to operate an unsafe ship.

The Federal Case

The principal allegation made by the prosecution revolved around the seaworthiness of the Eastland. US District Attorney Charles Clyne argued that the ship was top-heavy and likely to list or capsize if passengers moved or the sea or wind changed suddenly yet the officers of the company conspired to allow it to sail and the captain and chief engineer were not competent enough to sail her. (Hilton: Eastland Legacy of the Titanic)

The defense attorney for Capt. Pedersen pushed for dismissal of the case because of an overall lack of evidence of an actual crime. The attorney for engineer Joseph Erickson discounted the prosecution’s claims of unseaworthiness and incompetence and pointed to an unusual cause of the accident: Clarence Darrow argued that the ship foundered and capsized because it had been resting on a hidden underwater obstruction, such as pilings and bricks and concrete that remained after the collapse of a nearby building years before. However, the ability of a freighter to anchor at the same spot along the Chicago River wharf with no difficulty later refuted that argument. (Hilton: Eastland Legacy of the Titanic)

The presiding judge decided the defendants were not guilty on February 18, 1916, because there was no evidence of conspiracy—defendants were not colluding to cover up knowledge about the seaworthiness of the vessel. He did not rule, however, on whether the ship was seaworthy in the first place or whether an underwater obstruction played a part. (Hilton: Eastland Legacy of the Titanic)

Also unresolved were indictments brought against the captain and engineer in the state of Illinois. The indictments were held in abeyance while the federal case was prosecuted and never were reinstated afterward. (Hilton: Eastland Legacy of the Titanic)

Civil Cases

Civil lawsuits brought on behalf of the victims and their families took 24 years to wend their way through the judicial system, and in the end plaintiffs received little or nothing. Precedence was given to claims filed on behalf of the salvage company that had towed the vessel away from the accident site and the coal company that supplied fuel. https://eastlanddisaster.org/

The Trial That Never Was

On the 100th anniversary of the Eastland disaster, a mock criminal trial was sponsored by the Eastland Disaster Organization. Leaders of the legal community, including Judge Anne Burke and high-profile attorney Dan Webb (defense attorney for Fox news in the Dominion voting systems defamation case) participated in the trial at the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago.

Three men were charged with involuntary manslaughter: the president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer of the steamship company, and the facts from 1915 were viewed through the prism of 2015 law. https://www.chicagolawbulletin.com/archives/2015/06/19/eastland-disaster-06-19-15

The prosecutor argued that the defendants were negligent because they had not tested the ship after lifeboats had been added in response to the sinking of the Titanic and pointed to a letter written in 1913 by a naval architect that warned the Eastland was at risk of a “serious accident.”

Defense attorney Webb called the letter hearsay and based his defense on the fact that the US government itself had considered the ship to be seaworthy and safe.

Five of six members of the audience who served as jurors in the mock trial voted not guilty. The majority of the audience at large voted not guilty (58 percent), a few voted guilty (29 percent) and 13 percent believed some but not all of the defendants should have been found guilty.

https://www.chicagolawbulletin.com/archives/2015/06/19/eastland-disaster-06-19-15

 Fate of the Eastland

The ship was raised from the Chicago River in August, 1915. Two years later it was sold to the US Navy, converted into a gunboat, and took the name USS Wilmette. It did not engage in combat during WW I and was later used as a navy training vessel. It was decommissioned in 1945 and sold for scrap in 1946. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

 Sources

^ "Sinking Justified, Says Dr. Dernburg; Lusitania a "War Vessel", Known to be Carrying Contraband, Hence Search Was Not Necessary" (PDF). The New York Times. 9 May 1915. p. 4. Justification of the sinking of the liner Lusitania by German submarines as a man of war was advanced today by Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, former German Colonial Secretary and regarded as the Kaiser's official mouthpiece in the United States. Dr. Dernburg gave out a statement at the Hollenden Hotel following his arrival in Cleveland to address the City Club at noon on Germany's attitude in the present war

^ Halsey, Francis Whiting (1919). The Literary Digest History of the World War. Funk & Wagnalls. p. 255.

George W. Hilton: Eastland Legacy of the Titanic, Stanford University Press, 1995.

 https://www.chicagolawbulletin.com/archives/2015/06/19/eastland-disaster-06-19-15

 . The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

. https://eastlanddisaster.org/

(https://www.rmslusitania.info/primary-docs/mcc/candlish

U.S. Senate investigation of the Titanic's sinking

  https://www.britannica.com/topic/International-Conference-for-Safety-of-Life-at-Sea

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Ship Wreck

A young woman travels from the nearby suburb of Cicero to the Clark Street Bridge which spans the Chicago River. She unwraps a water-soaked cloth and removes the rose she clipped from one of her rose bushes, caresses the petals, then drops the blossom into the cold, dark water. It is July, 1944, 29 years after her sister and hundreds of others drowned when the ferryboat Eastland capsized. Her story is told in The Rose Keeper, a 2021 historical novel.

https://www.amazon.com/Rose-Keeper-Jennifer-Lamont-Leo/dp/1733705872

For this author’s review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-rose-keeper/

 At 11:45 on July 24, 2024, descendants of the passengers who died on the Eastland gathered along Riverwalk at the corner of Clark Street and Wacker Drive under the Clark Street Bridge for a moment of silence and a ceremony on the 109th anniversary of the tragedy. The ceremony was led by the Eastland Historical Society, founded in 1998 by families of the survivors to create a lasting legacy for those affected by the tragedy—victims, heroes, and survivors. https://eastlanddisaster.org/

The sinking of the Eastland is considered the worst disaster in the history of the city of Chicago and the history of seafaring on the Great Lakes. A total of 844 people lost their lives, more than the 606 who perished in the Iroquois Theatre fire in 1903 and the 300 to 400 who died during the great Chicago Fire in 1871. (George W. Hilton: Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic)

The tragedy killed more passengers than the sinking of the Titanic or the Lusitania. Of a total of 1523 lives were lost when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on April, 1912, 829 were passengers. Seven-hundred-eight-five of those who died when the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk on May 7, 1915, were passengers. Nearly all—841--of the people who died when the Eastland steamer sank on the Chicago River were passengers. (Legacy of the Titanic)

 State and federal criminal trials seeking to assign blame and recover damages drew in famous names: Clarence Darrow, defence attorney in the landmark Scopes monkey trial as well as the prosecution of the notorious murder-for-sport trial of Leopold and Loeb, defended the Eastland’s chief engineer Joseph Erickson, and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, later commissioner of baseball, presided. 

 Yet the wreck of the Eastland has largely faded from memory, perhaps not surprisingly since two others events occurring at roughly the same time command attention—the sinking of the Titanic and the loss of the Lusitania.

 Titanic and Lusitania

 Both the Titanic and Lusitania were prestige ocean-going vessels that attracted and catered to the wealthy. On board Titanic were American millionaires Benjamin Guggenheim and John Jacob Aster as well as railroad magnate Charles M. Hays. Traveling on the Lusitania were less familiar but no less prominent names—Arthur Henry Adams, president of U. S. Rubber Co., and Anne Shymer, president of U. S. Chemical Co.

And both vessels had high profiles.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/gabrielsanchez/haunting-pictures-from-the-titanic-before-she-sank

The loss of the Titanic was, of course, ironic because it had been called unsinkable. Shipbuilders decried the claim that the company had advertised the ship as unsinkable, blaming the “unsinkable” label on news articles that concluded the ship’s system of watertight compartments and electronically operated doors made the ship “practically unsinkable.” https://www.historyonthenet.com/the-titanic-why-did-people-believe-titanic-was-unsinkable

 A publicity brochure produced by the White Star shipping line praised Titanic and sister ship Olympia as “vessels designed to be unsinkable.” The company insisted the ships had been designed to be unsinkable, not that they were. When first informed that the Titanic was in peril, a vice president from the company nevertheless was confident the ship would stay afloat, saying at the time: “We believe the ship is unsinkable.” (The ship sank in little more than two hours.) https://www.historyonthenet.com/the-titanic-why-did-people-believe-titanic-was-unsinkable

The attack on the Lusitania should not have come as a surprise. WW I had been raging across Europe since July, 1914, and German U-boats had been operating in the waters off England since August of that year.

 Shipping lines had even been warned. On the day before the ship set sail from New York, the German embassy posted in newspapers: “vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or of any of her allies, are liable to destruction.” Lusitania nevertheless was considered to be too fast to be targeted by a U-boat commander and safe because it did not carry cargo but was a passenger liner. (It sank in 18 minutes.) https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/germany-gave-a-warning-so-why-was-lusitania-full/article_e8bc224e-d099-5b86-8894-ffb3ce2cb19b.html

https://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2016/06/ss-eastland.html

By contrast, Eastland was a modest steamboat that provided round-trip service across Lake Michigan covering a 77-mile route between the ports of Chicago and South Haven, Michigan. It had its own claim to fame: it was known as the Speed Queen of the Great Lakes.

 None of its passengers was famous or rich, however; every one of them worked for or was related to a worker for Western Electric Manufacturing, every one of them was on board for the trip across Lake Michigan to the company’s annual picnic in Michigan City, Indiana.

 The ship also was considered to be safe. After all, ships had learned a lesson from Titanic—make sure there are enough life boats to accommodate the passenger load. But the added weight of the life boats made Eastland unstable. (It slipped over on its side trapping hundreds of passengers below deck in an hour.)

  Sinking

 George W. Hilton, author of Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic, provides a minute-by-minute account.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=eastland+legacy+of+the+titanic&adgrpid=1343604908220444&hvadid=83975584137599&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=48792&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvtargid=kwd-83976348460121%3Aloc-190&hydadcr=20614_13322592&msclkid=b3118763e9a717211353e1c075b04446&tag=mh0b-20&ref=pd_sl_5sdxwlppdh_e

 Among them:

 6:00--passengers being loading, then within six to ten minutes, the ship lists 10 degrees starboard.

6:48—the ship steadies as water is sent to ballast tanks.

6:51—the ship is at even keel.

7:16—the ship lists 10-15 degrees.

7:20—the ship lists to port taking water on the deck.

7:23—the list is so severe, passengers are ordered to move to the starboard side.

7:25—the list eases but resumes two minutes later.

7:28—the ship is listing at 45 degrees and below decks, dishes fall off shelves, a piano and refrigerator slide across the floor, trapping two women underneath.

7:30—the ship settles, its bow is in 20 feet of water, the stern is 37 feet above the water, the hurricane deck is 24 feet below the water line.

 Rescue

 The first alarm call was sent just as the Eastland was settling, getting police call boats and the Coast Guard alongside the ship within ten minutes. From the streets along the river, sellers in produce and poultry markets threw wooden cases and crates, chicken coops and egg crates into the water so flailing passengers could grab hold of something and keep afloat.

 Nearby boats cast off lifeboats and lifelines, some vessels getting close enough for people on deck to climb onboard, and volunteers dove into the river and pulled people to safety. Some rescue efforts were delayed, however, because of fears that the ship’s boiler would explode. For that reason, a fireboat did not approach for more than ten minutes, and police did not climb onto the deck for about 30 minutes.  

Bodies continued to be pulled from the wreckage for days, and the dead were laid out in the make-shift morgue at the Second Regiment Armory until the bodies could be identified. The last victim, a seven-year-old boy was identified on July 30. Bearing the tag 396 and a name given by police and morgue attendants—“Little Feller”—the boy was identified by a next door neighbour, another seven-year-old who had just recently attended the boy’s birthday party. Little Feller was Willie Novotny. He and the rest of his immediate family—father, mother, and sister—died on the Eastland.  (Jay Bonansinga: The Sinking of the Eastland)

One of the deadliest shipwrecks in American history, the Eastland still is largely forgotten; according to some historians it’s because the ship capsized in only 20 feet of water. According to others, it’s been ignored because, unlike the Titanic and Lusitania, the dead were not among the wealthy class. Still others point to the lengthy legal battles that led to civil and criminal prosecutions that took years to decide in courts miles away from Chicago. (See the next Time Stamp.)

 Sources

Jay Bonansiga: The Sinking of the Eastland, Citadel Press, 2004.

George W. Hilton: Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic, Stanford University Press, 1995.

https://eastlanddisaster.org/

https://www.historyonthenet.com/the-titanic-why-did-people-believe-titanic-was-unsinkable

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/germany-gave-a-warning-so-why-was-lusitania-full/article_e8bc224e-d099-5b86-8894-ffb3ce2cb19b.html  

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Dust Thou Art

The days before one of the worst black blizzards to barrel across the Plains, an event song writer Woody Guthrie “watched…come up like the Red Sea closin’ in on the Israel children,” lead up to April 14, 1935, Black Sunday, the title and subject of Chicago-based TimeLine Theatre Company’s final production for the 2023-4 season. (https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/guthrie/black-sunday,)

As middle-aged Okie mother Ma is increasingly overcome by a compulsion to sketch the visions she sees in her dreams—menacing swirls of black and gray blotting out sky and land--TimeLine’s 27th theatrical production illuminates the challenges of the Depression-era Oklahoma panhandle through its characters:

Stubborn Pa, unwilling to give up on his land and homestead despite years of drought, locust and wild rabbit infestations.

Daughter Sunny, searching for a way out of the daily grind like thousands of other families who pack up wagons and head west to California.

Mexican laborer Jesús, an itinerant farmworker forced to move from homestead to homestead, harvest to harvest in literally back-breaking labor using the short handle hoe known as el cortito or el brazo del diablo (the devil’s arm) that requires him to stoop over as he thins and weeds crops for more than 12 hours a day. (https://timelinetheatre.com/events/black-sunday/

The 2018 novel Death of a Rainmaker sets a murder and its investigation against the backdrop of a 240-day drought that brings flamboyant Roland Coombs to Jackson, Oklahoma, on August 2, 1935.  Roland promises residents he will bring rain to parched fields with “a little old matchstick and a load of TNT.” Instead, Roland is found dead the next afternoon, bludgeoned to death and hidden beneath mounds of dirt and sand left after an hour-long duster pummeled the walls of the city’s Jewel Movie House.

Like Black Sunday, Death of a Rainmaker recalls the devastating, decades-long effects of environmental abuse across the Dust Bowl. It also factors in efforts to address the long-term droughts and their consequences, including the environmental restoration work of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the charlatans who guarantee they will “give the skies a healthy kick in the drawers” to bring down rain.

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Rainmaker-Dust-Bowl-Mystery/dp/1982628030

For this author’s review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/death-of-a-rainmaker-dustbowl-mystery/

The Dust Bowl

During the 1930s and early 1940s, waves of drought regularly passed over the Great Plains of the Southwest. Overall, precipitation was 15-20% less than normal almost every year of the decade, and in some years, it was more than 50% less than normal. Some areas had less than 10 inches per year for several years in a row. (https://www.weather.gov/ama/dust_bowl_versus_today) With little surface water or timber to serve as anchors, the Plains was also subject to high winds.

Nevertheless, the area became the target of agricultural development in the late 1800s. The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, gave individuals 160 acres of land to settle and “improve.” The Kirkland Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 encouraged even more settlement, leading to property claims that encompassed 270 million acres or 10% of the continental US. (https://timelinetheatre.com/events/black-sunday/

 To transform natural prairies into tillable acres, the new and inexperienced farmers pulled up grasses, in the process exposing and loosening soil by removing the roots that held the soil in place and trapped meager amounts of rainfall. Cattle and sheep on ranches also pulled up the natural grasses and shrubs that held onto soil, and over-farming depleted and dried it out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sunday_(storm)#:~:text=On%20the%2014th%20day%20of,that%20ever%20filled%20the%20sky

 Black Blizzards

Dust storms increased in number and intensified as soil conditions worsened. The yearly number of storms nearly tripled in one year, rising from 14 in 1932 to 38 in 1933. A storm on May 11, 1934 sent clouds of dust 2 miles high across the country, traveling over 2000 miles to dust buildings along the East Coast. https://footnote.wordpress.ncsu.edu/2020/07/23/black-blizzards-7-24-2020/

Along with high winds and dust, the Dust Bowl area was infested by insects and overrun by rabbits. A swarm of grasshoppers on July 26, 1931 was so thick it blocked out the sun, leaving mounds of carapaces that had to be removed with scoops and cornstalks that had been eaten to the ground. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/grasshoppers-bring-ruin-to-midwest

Black-tailed rabbits multiplied steadily, reaching a total population of nearly 8 million in 30 Kansas counties in 1935 and devouring not only corn stalks but their roots as well. https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/jackrabbit-drives/12097

https://ar.inspiredpencil.com/pictures-2023/dust-bowl-black-sunday-1935

Black Sunday

On the morning of April 14, 1935, a cold front from Canada collided with the warm air mass over the Dakotas, dropping the temperature 30 degrees and kicking up winds from 40 to 60 mph. The storm spanned 1000 miles and moved swiftly across the Plains, hitting northwest Oklahoma at 4:00 pm and Amarillo at 7:00 pm, with winds finally dying down at 7:30 pm. People huddled in their homes or cars while the storm lasted, kerchiefs over their faces.

While none of the people in the area died directly during or immediately after the storm, most had long-term effects from inhaling dust—bronchitis, dust pneumonia or “brown plague” and shortness of breath. Wildlife did not fare as well. Birds tried to fly away from the storm but ended up falling from the sky, and jack rabbits suffocated to death.

Dust Busters

A New Deal program aimed at helping reduce the high rate of unemployment during the Great Depression by employing cadres of workers to conserve natural resources. One of its divisions—the Soil Conservation Service—worked directly with Dust Bowl farmers to ameliorate soil erosion and prevent the devastating consequences of the black blizzards.

Meanwhile, conmen roamed the prairies, advertising their own special techniques for making rain and bilking desperate farmers and townspeople in the process.

 Civilian Conservation Corps

To help reduce overall unemployment stemming from the stock market crash of 1929 and resulting Great Depression, US President Franklin Roosevelt on April 5, 1933, brought together the departments of War, Interior, Agriculture, and Labor to develop a program that would hire and pay young men to work on environmental conservation. In three months, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) created 1433 camps to accommodate 300,000 men. Two months later, CCC had 2900 camps and 500,000 CCCers. Between the years 1933 and 1942 when the corps was closed, the program employed 3 million men.

CCCers were generally between the ages of 18 and 25 years. They also included veterans of WW I, Native Americans, and craftsmen and skilled foresters as well as African Americans who served for at least six months in a CCC camp that followed military-style operation and rules.

CCC has been credited with replacing 3.5 million trees that were lost because of natural erosion, inappropriate farming practices, fires, and lumbering, accounting for half of all reforestation in the country’s history. (https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/civilian-conservation-corps)

 The Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture was formed in 1938 to oversee the work of 60,000 young men each year in 500 projects across 44 states. The men taught farmers how to conserve soil, worked with individual farmers on their own land, tested and researched techniques to control soil erosion. Among them were gullies to capture rainfall, fencing, trees planted on contours of land, and land terraces that prevented water runoff. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/ccc/salmond/chap7.htm

 Rainmakers

Real-life rainmaking conmen were fodder for almost mythical tales. Tex Thornton, known for arming torpedoes of explosives into hard rock to make way for oil wells, had plans for Dalhart, Texas, in 1935. He released balloons armed with nitroglycerine and time clocks set to explode at various altitudes. Winds carried the balloons away, however, with one dropping onto the roof and detonating a barn and another just missing a family driving east in their car. He left town with only the $300 town leaders paid in front money but did claim credit for the light dusting of snow that fell over the town a week a week later. https://www.oilystuff.com/single-post/rainmaker

Charley Hatfield in the late 1800s was a student of meteorological pluvicultre or rainmaking,

convincing towns desperate for rain that he could induce showers by building towers and blasting his own brand of rain-making substances into the air with dynamite and nitroglycerine.

In 1915 he had a special plan for San Diego. He wouldn’t charge for the first 30 or 40 inches of rain he caused to fall, but he expected $500-$1000 for every inch over and above 30 to 50.

His plan worked way too well. After his rainmaking on January 1, rain fell steadily between the 15th and the 20th. It rained again from the 22nd to the 27th, overflowing the reservoir, washing out bridges, toppling phone lines, flooding streets and eventually causing the dam to burst and washing away 20 people.

When San Diego city leaders refused to pay him, Hatfield threatened to sue. He reneged when he realized he would have to compensate the city for damages. Hatfield the Rainmaker, The Worst Hard Time]

Dust Thou Shalt Return?

Regular irrigation and improvements in agriculture and soil management, such as no-till farming, sustain land and vegetation during dry periods, protect exposed areas, and prevent the erosion of topsoil. But many sources of water are drying up. The Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates 30-46% of farmland in the Plains states, could be depleted by as much as 70% within 50 years. In the mid-2000s, water levels were already half of what they were 100 years before. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/dust-bowl-heat-wave-climate-change-twice-as-likely-study-says/

 Higher temperatures and protracted heat waves are up to 2.5 times more likely because of climate change. And the rising temperatures trigger a vicious cycle: High temperatures dry out the land. Drier land releases more energy, and the energy converts to heat. Periods of drought therefore fuel more severe heat waves, which lead to drier conditions. https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-the-climate-warms-could-the-u.s.-face-another-dust-bowl 

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and a day like Black Sunday, could very well come again.  

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Shell Shock Recognition and Treatment

Though war trauma was described as long ago as 490 BC and has taken many names—battle fatigue in the 1940s, gross stress reaction in the 1950s, post-traumatic stress disorder since the 1980s—shell shock is inextricably linked to WW I, and not only because the term was first used in 1915 by psychologist Charles Myers. The condition has been indelibly experienced in novels about WWI—Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Pat Barker’s Regeneration series, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and more recently Steve Stahl’s Shell Shock and Ben Elton’s The First Casualty.

 Shell shock is also a metaphor for the Great War, its apparent pointlessness, months-long stalemates trapping men in mud- and rat-filled trenches under barrages of exploding shells and clouds of poisonous gas while political leaders and military commanders ignored mounting casualties and rejected peace proposals for fear of losing strategic advantage. (Fiona Reid, Broken Men, David Stevenson, Cataclysm)

 Clinical terms for unexplained disorders among fighting men likewise have a long, pre-WW I history: disordered action of the heart (DAH) or palpitations were described during the Crimean War and irritable heart during the Civil War. The entity known as shell shock resides within WW I, coined by the men on the battlefield who saw or felt it themselves. (https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/06/shell-shocked)

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_psychiatry

The Mystery

Shell shock was a puzzle. There was no single set of characteristic symptoms but a range of unexplained disabilities and sometimes contrasting symptoms: long-term bouts of insomnia and nightmares, generalized fatigue and jumpiness; pain in the chest as well as joints and muscles and cardiac palpitations; loss of function of an arm or leg, loss of voice, hearing, or other sensations. (Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD)

There was no apparent direct cause. An early theory linked symptoms with damage to the brain, hypothesizing that forces from a nearby explosion caused hemorrhages in the blood vessels of the brain and the release of carbon monoxide poisoned brain tissue. But many of the shell-shocked had never been close to an explosion, and some had not even seen combat.  (Shell Shock to PTSD, p 23)

There also was suspicion. Some military leaders worried that the condition was used as an excuse by malingerers or cowards or caused by ingesting cordite or other drugs to quicken heart function and thereby avoid combat. (Shell Shock to PTSD)

The objectives of treatment conflicted as well. While some physicians sought to find a solution that would successfully treat shell shock, military leaders wanted quick action that would make soldiers well enough to return to the battlefield.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/somme-offensive.html

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/madness-of-war-somme-offensive.html/amp?prebid_ab=enabled

Physical Treatment

As increasing numbers of infantrymen were felled by unusual symptoms, the British Expeditionary Force assigned Charles S. Myers, a medically trained psychologist, to study and try to decipher the cause of the unexplained phenomenon. His first cases exhibited similar symptoms—loss of the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell as well as tremors, headaches, fatigue, and loss of balance. While the first three men had been near or affected by exploding shells, most later diagnosed as shell-shocked developed symptoms even if they were some distance away from explosions. ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-shock-of-war-55376701/#:~:text=The%20official%20Report%20of%20the,of%20concussion%20shock%2C%20following%20a)

Myers and his associate William MacDougal concluded that the condition was the result of repressed trauma, the body’s and mind’s efforts to manage the traumatic experience by repressing its memory and the resulting physical manifestations of the struggle to keep hiding that memory. (https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/06/shell-shocked

Myers’ plan for treatment built on that conclusion: “Myers and McDougall believed a patient could only be cured if his memory were revived and integrated within his consciousness, a process that might require a number of sessions.”  Treatment therefore should be prompt, in a suitable environment, and psychotherapeutic. “Myers argued that the military should set up specialist units ‘as remote from the sounds of warfare as is compatible with the preservation of the ‘atmosphere' of the front.’ Myers and McDougall believed a patient could only be cured if his memory were revived and integrated within his consciousness, a process that might require a number of sessions.” (https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/06/shell-shocked)

Not all forward units followed this treatment strategy, however.  Several of the forward units, known as NYDN (not yet diagnosed nervous), relied on a regimen of rest, graduated exercises, route marches, with or without vigorous massage in an environment of respite and reassurance. American forward units added occupational therapy involving farming, road construction, and wood working and art therapy. (Shell Shock and PTSD)  

Discipline also played a role. Both inside the military and outside in the overall British culture, “weak nerves” were shameful, especially during wartime, and the result of an individual’s lack of self-control and will power or outright fraud. The remedy? A personal commitment to recovery and the development of “nervous strength.” (Broken Men)  

Faradism or electric shock therapy was one way to strengthen a weak will. Lewis Yealland, a Canadian neurologist, claimed to have removed the “hysterical disorders of warfare” by applying an electrical current to parts of the body. In his treatments at National Hospital for Paralysed and Epileptic, London, Yealland “bathed” patients in electricity by placing them on a wooden stool that was set on a platform with glass legs and charging them with static electricity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bath_(electrotherapy), using clamps or machines to mechanically force frozen limbs out of their static position, and apply other stimuli. To one patient, Yealland applied electricity to his neck and throat for periods of 20 minutes, lighted cigarettes to the man’s tongue, and hot plates to the back of his mouth. Treatment lasted four hours until the patient “was cured.” (Broken Men, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-shock-of-war-55376701/#:~:text=The%20official%20Report%20of%20the,of%20concussion%20shock%2C%20following%20a)

Psychological Therapy

A few forward shell shock treatment units followed the psychological approach of abreaction or talk therapy to release pent-up emotions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abreaction). Psychological treatment was more commonly used in base hospitals in the UK, such as Craiglockhart Military Hospital in Slateford, and its physicians, including W. H. R. Rivers (profiled in Pat Barker’s Regeneration series).

Abreaction often began with hypnosis to guide shell-shocked soldiers into the past so they could recover memories and emotions associated with a traumatic event, and it followed a step-by-step process of reliving the traumatic event so it would no longer be suppressed but recognized and integrated into the conscious mind. (Shell Shock and PTSD)

Little apparently was learned about psychological therapy from the experiences of the shell-shocked and the doctors who treated them in WW I. The War Office Committee of Enquiry into Causation and Prevention of ‘Shell Shock,’ 1920-22 concluded that:

“In Forward Areas – No soldier should be allowed to think that loss of nervous or mental control provides an honourable avenue to escape from the battlefield, and every endeavour should be made to prevent slight cases leaving the battalion or divisional area, where treatment should be confined to provision of rest and comfort for those who need it and to heartening them for return to the front line.” (Extracts from a report from the War Office Committee of Enquiry into Causation and Prevention of `Shell-Shock’, (Catalogue ref: WO 32/4748)

The condition was not even discussed in post-WW I military training manuals, and many original military and medical treatment records were lost. The Blitz of WW II destroyed nearly 60 percent of British military records from WW I, and a fire at the National Personnel Records Office in St. Louis, MO, destroyed 80 percent of U.S. Army service records from 1912 to 1960. (Broken Men, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-shock-of-war-5376701/#:~:text=The%20official%20Report%20of%20the,of%20concussion%20shock%2C%20following%20a)

Remembering Shell Shock in Fiction

Some of the best known novels chronicling WW I include descriptions of the actual treatment of shell shock. The first in Pat Barker’s trilogy Regeneration (1993) takes readers into the treatment theater at Craiglockhart War Hospital and recreates psychotherapeutic sessions with Siegfried Sassoon by W. H. R. Rivers, the first military physician to advocate for cathartic abreaction, talk therapy to bring subconscious fears to the forefront, faced, and resolved.

Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) looks at the other side of therapy—forcing the shell-shocked to overcome their shame and cowardice and exhibit proper behaviors through physical shocks, punishment, and discipline.

A couple of recent works reveal the chaos faced by frontline medical staff. Sisters of the Great War by Suzanne Feldman (2021) describes the “unexploded bombs, artillery noise, strafing planes, fire and damage from exploding shells, constant tension, wild rumors, dearth of necessary supplies, constant poor nutrition, lack of fresh water, and possible impending death” in hospitals and aid stations. (https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/sisters-of-the-great-war/

The Shadow of the Mole details the “chamber pot of France” in the Argonne as Dr. Michel Denis makes his way to sickbay, walking in the trenches to the semi-underground medical way station located within crates of medical supplies, food, and ammunition as shells explode overhead, shake the walls, and flicker the light from candles in their lanterns. (https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-shadow-of-the-mole/)

A psychological murder mystery links treatment of American vets from Iraq and Afghanistan to planned killings of Allied soldiers in psychiatric hospitals during WW I. (Shell Shock, 2024)

Both Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington illustrate the devastating consequences of ignoring or improperly treating shell shock (“suggesting an out-of-doors game” because there is “nothing seriously the matter”) and the importance of communication so the shell shocked and others can listen and learn. 

Sources

Trevor Dodman: Shell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I, Cambridge University Press, 2015

Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, Psychology Press, 2015

Austin Riede, Transatlantic Shell Shock, University of North Georgia, 2019

Fiona Reid, Broken Men, Continuum Books, 2010

David Stevenson, Cataclysm, Basic Books, 2004

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Shell Shock in World War I Literature

He stopped and looked across the field. The distance had vanished in a veil of rain. He didn’t know where he was going, or why, but he thought he ought to take shelter, and began to run clumsily along the brow of a hill towards a distance clump of trees. The mud dragged at him, he had to slow to a walk. Every step was a separate effort, hauling his mud-clogged boots out of the sucking earth. His mind was incapable of making comparisons, but his aching things remembered, and he listened for the whine of shells….

Something brushed against his cheek, and he raised his hand to push it away. His fingers touched slime, and he snatched them back. He turned and saw a dead mole, suspended, apparently, in the air, its black fur spiked with blood, its small pink hands folded on its chest.

Looking up, he saw that the tree he stood under was laden with dead animals. Bore them like fruit. A whole branch of moles in various stages of decay, a ferret, a weasel, three magpies, a fox, the fox hanging quite close, its lips curled back from bloodied teeth.

Chapter 4, Regeneration.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/regeneration-trilogy-pat-barker/dp/0141030933

I see a great blazing arc of flashes in the sky. At my right, a shadow scampers over the torn duckboards. A blackened face, huge eyes. He disappears. The ground has swallowed him….

I strain to clear my vision.

The shelling stops. My ears are ringing.

I hear a faint cry. A child’s whimpering?

I see it. A soldier has fallen into a shell-hole, filled with mud as thick as porridge, slimy and viscous like the starfish that fascinated me as a kid.

He is already submerged up to his shoulder.

Already? How much time has passed?

I break loose from my body, hover over the scene.

Is it really true that I crawl to the deep hole, murmuring some long forgotten song, and extend my hand?

A cry of agonizing fear.

Is it really true that everything on the front goes suddenly quiet?

I see myself extending my right arm, trying to pull the sinking soldier out of the mud.

Burbling at the corners of the mouth now.

I don’t have any power in my right arm.

I am too dazed.

The mud is as cold and clingy as the slush we used for snowballs, my childhood friend Leon and I.

I don’t have a grip on his body.

Am I pulling him by his hair now?

He’s gone.                                                               

The mud whispers: your fault, your fault…

Chapter Twenty-Seven, The Shadow of the Mole.

https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Mole-Bob-Van-Laerhoven/dp/4824126436 (For this author’s book review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-shadow-of-the-mole/)

Descriptions of shell shock appear as early as 490 BC when Herodotus tells of a soldier in the Battle of Marathon who was blind despite having no signs of physical injury. Shell shock was called Nostalgia in 1678 and Windage during the Civil War when otherwise healthy veterans of battle became weak and showed a “soldier’s” or an “irritable heart.”  (Anthony Babington: Shell-Shock, A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis).

Shell shock became a widespread phenomenon among soldiers in WW I because of the nature of the conflict: trench warfare that kept soldiers in confined spaces while bombardments rained down and the dead bodies of their comrades lay next to them and exposed them to new types of lethal weapons—machine guns, artillery, gas and chemical attacks.  (David Stevenson: Cataclysm; Austin Riede: Transatlantic Shell Shock)

Shell shock was first described as a medical condition by the physician Charles Myers in the British journal Lancet in 1915. Myers linked soldiers’ bouts of paralysis and the sudden inability to speak to “changes in atmosphere pressure under bombardment.” The condition was not considered to be a psychological response to combat experiences until the battle of the Somme, July-November, 1916, when casualties among British and French troops topped 600,000, (Cataclysm) and front-line physicians had little understanding of the condition, its symptoms and disabilities, nor clear ways to address it. (Transatlantic Shell Shock)

Novelists approached WWI shell shock in a variety of ways. Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf gave voice to women who observe the sequelae of shell shock in traumatized young men: the suicidal Septimus Smith in West’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and the amnesiac Chris Baldry in Woolf’s The Return of the Soldier (1918). Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison illuminated the experiences of shell-shocked African Americans in Invisible Man (1952) and Sula (1973). Veterans recalled some of their own experiences in works of fiction: Richard Aldington in his story of the once outgoing painter George Winterbourne who withdraws from the world after the war in Death of a Hero (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon in the recollections of a fictionalized infantry officer in The Memoirs of George Sherston 1928-1936).

The two authors cited in this blog post introduce readers to men who are living with the effects of shell shock and the physicians who treat them.

Pat Barker, Regeneration

The first of the three novels in Pat Barker’s Regeneration series, was published in 1993. (The second, The Eye in the Door, followed soon after, and the third, The Ghost Road, appeared in 1995, winning that year’s Booker Prize.)

Regeneration tracks the paths of real life and fictional WW I veterans as they are being treated in Craigslockhart Hospital, Edinburgh, in 1917. The patients include writers Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen, both known for their poems and other writings about shell shock, as well as the imaginary patients Prior and Burns. The novel centers on treatments and the physicians who administer them. In addition to the fictional Dr. Brock, Regeneration features W.H.R. Rivers, a neurologist, social anthropologist, and army captain, and Lewis Yealland and contrasts the two schools of thought about clinical interventions that would address shell shock and quickly return fighting men to the front.

https://litfl.com/william-halse-rivers/

Rivers led patients to explore their feelings, reconsider their notions of what it means to be a man, and recount their painful recollections of combat to restore emotional health. Barker relies on Rivers’ own descriptions of treatment methods: His report “The Repression of War Experience” was published in Lancet in 1918, and his book Conflict and Dream, which refers to Sassoon at “Patient B,” was published after his death in 1923. Yealland made use of external shock therapies, such as applying electrodes until a mute patient was able to speak again, and explained the techniques in his own book Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, published in 1918. (Regeneration Authors Note)

Bob van Laerhoven, The Shadow of the Mole

Finalist for the 2022 Best Thriller Book Award in the Historical Fiction category, The Shadow of the Mole also melds fiction with facts about the recognition and treatment of shell shock. Psychiatrist-in-training Michel Denis is working with a patient nicknamed the Mole, a man discovered by French sappers in a tunnel in the Argonne in 1916. The Mole has no recollection of his present or his past life and believes he himself has died and been replaced by the Other who presses him to write the Other’s complex history, a history that includes interactions with the physician and physiologist acknowledged by Sigmund Freud and others as the progenitor of psychoanalysis—Dr. Josef Breuer.

Breuer reported on the results of his treatment of a patient he had diagnosed with hysteria in 1880. The patient, identified as Anna O., was social worker and writer Bertha Pappenheim. Breuer was able to relieve Anna O.’s symptoms of neurosis by using hypnosis to guide her as she remembered the unpleasant experiences she had suppressed. Freud characterized Breuer’s case study as the impetus for his method of exploring the unconscious minds of patients and bringing to light the unconscious causes of their symptoms.  (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Josef-Breuer)

http://www.ecured.cu/index.php/Josef_Breuer

Both Regeneration and The Shadow of the Mole highlight the lack of understanding of the widespread presence of shell shock in military veterans that existed not only during WW I but continued through WW II and other major conflicts. The phenomenon was not fully recognized until the 1980s when medical professionals and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs labeled the condition post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The next post in the Time Stamp blog will provide a brief history of the ways the recognition and treatment of shell shock evolved over the decades.

Sources

Austin Reade, Transatlantic Shell Shock, University of Georgia Press, 2019

David Stevenson, Cataclysm, The First World War as Political Tragedy, Basic Books, 2004

Pat Barker, Regeneration, Plume, 1991

Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Penguin Books, 1930

Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier, Penguin Classics, 1918

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Everyman’s Library, 1928

(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Josef-Breuer

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

World War I in Literature

Jean Dumoulin, one of the diggers sent into a series of tunnels in the Argonne known as Satan’s Lair in February, 1916, is clearing rubble along the entry to an old mine shaft when he finds what he considers to be “another stiff.” Minutes later in the Meurisson Alley Field Hospital, Dr. Michel Denis examines the body, and the man opens his eyes.

With no memory of who he is or what has happened to him, the man becomes known as the Mole, and Denis and others try to piece together his story. Captain Réviron thinks the man is a deserter and should be court martialed. Denis believes he has lost his memory and maybe even his mind because of shell shock. The Mole himself insists he is irrevocably dead and an Other is pulling his strings when he writes in a gray journal details about a French diplomat, spies in the Prussian empire, and scientists who are just beginning to understand the workings of the human mind.

https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Mole-Bob-Van-Laerhoven/dp/4824126436

For this author’s book review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-shadow-of-the-mole/

The Shadow of the Mole is an award-winning novel by Belgian/Flemish author Bob Van Laerhoven, who writes regularly about conflict or political and societal unrest. With The Shadow of the Mole and the subsequent Firehand Files, Van Laerhoven explores what has come to be known as the Forgotten War—World War I.

 The Forgotten War

It was called the Great War, the Good War, the War to End All Wars.

World War I was the first conflict to span the European continent and involve North America and the Far East—pitting the Central Powers of Germany (Austria Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey) against the Allied Powers (Britain, France, Italy, Romania, Russia, Japan, and the United States).

It also was the first to use advanced mechanized weapons—tanks, airplanes, machine guns.

From its beginning in June, 1914, to its end on November 11, 1918, World War I cost 16 million lives--9 million military men and 7 million civilians--permanently disabled 7 million fighting men, and caused 37 million casualties https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/world-war-i-history

 The war precipitated the collapse of four monarchies—Austria Hungary, Germany, Russia, and Turkey—sparked the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and fascism in Italy and Germany, and forever changed industrial production and women’s place in the workforce.

 Yet it is largely forgotten. Many can’t name a single battle, recognize the names of heroes of the time—flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker (highlighted in the 1945 film Captain Eddie) starring Fred McMurray https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037575/) and infantryman Alvin York (memorialized in Sgt. York, the film starring Gary Cooper https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034167/).

Recent films have shown a spotlight on the conflict. Sam Mendes’ tribute to his grandfather’s WW I war stories—1917—followed the path of two British lance corporals as they race to deliver a message that will call off a planned attack by the Devonshire regiment and protect 1600 British infantry lives. The film grossed $384 million and was voted one of the best films of 2020. The 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front reimagined the 1929 novel by Erich Maria Remarche that trailed a 17-year-old German soldier across battlefields and in trenches while armistice talks ensued. The film was voted won of the top five foreign films by the National Board of Review and won the San Diego Film Critics’ Society Best International Film award.

 The number of portrayals of WW I nevertheless pales in comparison with those of WW II.  While about 130 films have been made about WW I, more than ten times that number have been made about WW II, including 250 before war’s end. In 2023 45 novels about WW I were listed on Goodreads compared to 100 about WW II on Amazon. Twenty-eight TV series have focused on the First World War. The same number of series on the Second World War were produced in one decade—2010.

 The lack of interest is perhaps understandable. The precipitating action and reasons for going to war in 1914 were murky, especially for the US: an assassination of the heir to the Austria Hungary Empire by a Serbian nationalist. The morality and presence of villains Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as well as the direct attack in Pearl Harbor made entry into war by the US a clear cut necessity little more than 30 years later.

The nature of the battles themselves is also a factor. WW I was a step-by-step grind over mud-soaked territory from deeply dug trenches up and overland and toward barbed-wire frontlines.

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/battle-somme-centenary-soldiers-letters-photos-reveal-horrors-first-world-war-1568107

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/unpublished-photos-of-world-war-one-2014-5

WW 2 spanned the air and the seas, the dessert of North Africa and blacked out streets of London, the bitterly cold steppe near Stalingrad and the jungle heat of Iwo Jima.  

 https://www.archives.gov/research/military/ww2/photos

https://www.archives.gov/research/military/ww2/photos

World War I and Literature

 What’s known as the modernist revolution in literature predates WWI. In 1908 poets and authors began experimenting with radical and utopian themes, newer forms of expression that focused on inner thoughts rather than outward actions, paid more attention to mood than sentiment, and opted for free verse instead of standard rhyming patterns.

 WW I introduced particularly dark themes and methods of expression. Chaos replaced idealism as writers broke from the past to respond to a changing world and explore the characteristics and failings of modern society. Works during the war years were often anxious, angry, and cynical, bleak and pessimistic.

 Perhaps most telling was the shift inward. Points of view were introspective, characters spoke through streams of consciousness or interior monologues, thoughts were expressed as they passed through the mind, beliefs about absolute truth were replaced by disillusionment and distrust of the channels of power—both government and religion.

Modernist Authors

Among the authors most often cited as WW I modernists are:

 Richard Aldington. His Death of a Hero (1929) reveals a soldier’s post-war struggles with daily life. “The casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the Armistice - last spasms of Europe's severed arteries.” https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/94230.Richard_Aldington

T. S. Eliot. Wasteland (1922) stuns in its description of the devastation of war—

                                April is the cruelest month, breeding

                                Lilacs out of dead land, mixing

                                Memory and desire, stirring

                                Dull roots with spring rain

 Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms (1929) recalls his own experience fighting for the Italian army. “I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord and there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was.” https://www.litcharts.com/lit/a-farewell-to-arms/themes/war

 Wilfred Owen. Anthem for Doomed Youth (1917) portrays the horrors of war where men “die as cattle” amid the “monstrous anger of guns” and corpses lie “face downward in the sucking mud, wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled.”

 Siegfried Sassoon. Memories of an Infantry Officer (1930) humbles the distant observers of war--

                                You smug-faced crowds with kindling eyes

                                Who cheer when soldier lads march by

                                Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

                                The hell where youth and laughter go

 Rebecca West. The Return of the Soldier (1918) emphasizes the persistence of traumatic memory. “He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier’s hard tread upon the heel. It recalled to me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No Man’s Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead.” https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-return-of-the-soldier/quotes

Authors of Today

Some of the most recent novels set during WW I shed light on previously untold aspects of the conflict. The Porcelain Moon tells of the 140,000 Chinese people who were brought to Europe to serve as laborers in farms and factories.

Canary Girls recalls the Thornshire Canaries Ladies’ Football Club and the Football Battalion of the war years.

In Memoriam tells of young boarding school men’s involvement in the war and the love they shared with one another.

Almost a paean to the works of the early 1900s is The Shadow of the Mole. Named the best literary historical novel of 2022 by the Historical Fiction Company, the novel conveys the brutality and traumatic effects of war on mind and body. As author Van Laerhoven observes: “Delusions, shell shock, neurasthenia, constitutional fragility…are those names and theories, just to hide the naked fact that war was an all-consuming and putrefying disease in itself devouring its young, a gangrene of the mind.”

World War I literature and shell shock—next time on Time Stamp.

Sources:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Bad_Moon_Rising.html?id=tJw6EAAAQBAJ&source=kp_author_description 

 https://www.history.com/news/how-world-war-i-changed-literature 

 https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/english-literature/literary-devices/first-world-war-fiction/#:~:text=Impact%20of%20the%20First%20World%20War%20on%20English%20fiction,-In%20English%20fiction&text=Many%20authors%20and%20poets%20who,the%20internal%20struggles%20during%20warfare. 

 https://www.history.com/news/how-world-war-i-changed-literature

Out of the wasteland: the First World War and modernism. The evolution of modernist literature was intimately bound up with the shock and devastation of the war

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/out-of-the-wasteland-the-first-world-war-and-modernism-1.2190829

HomeLiteratureLiteratures of the World

https://humanities.byu.edu/writing-the-war-to-end-the-war-literary-modernism-and-wwi/

How World War I Changed Literature, by AMANDA ONION, UPDATED: MARCH 27, 2023 | ORIGINAL: APRIL 26, 2018     

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Forensics in a Nutshell

Theresa Ryan is worried about her sister Maggie. She’s seen neither hide nor hair of Maggie for weeks. So she’s come to the boarding house where her sister is living on Copp’s Hill, Boston. Hearing no response to her call from the front door of the building, Theresa rushes up the stairway, only to come to a dead stop. The door to Maggie’s room is open, two empty chairs sit at the foot of the mussed but empty bed, dirty glasses lie on the floor. Attracted by the sound of running water, Theresa enters the bathroom, stumbling over an empty bottle, and shivers when she sees Maggie in the bathtub, fully dressed while water from the faucet falls onto her open blue eyes. Theresa shudders as the floor rattles and cracks open, the building shakes, and the room falls apart under the weight of a wave of thick, sticky liquid that smells like baked beans.

Dr. George Burgess “Jake” Magrath, medical examiner for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, hurries to Commercial Street at the base of Copp’s Hill. A massive industrial accident has released tons of molasses onto city streets, crashing buildings to the ground, burying men, women, and children, and leading to “unexplained deaths” he has the responsibility to explain. With him is a woman determined to provide help—his long-time friend Mrs. Frances Glessner Lee.

Together, Jake and Fanny pull together the details of the accident—The Great Molasses Flood of 1919—the crime scene around Maggie’s death and the identity of the killer in Molasses Murder in a Nutshell. Molasses is the first in a new mystery series by Frances McNamara, known for her Emily Cabot books. The book recalls the actual Molasses Flood and introduces readers to the important forensic work conducted by Glessner Lee and Magrath. The book and the mystery series build on a quote from Lee about forensics: “The investigator must bear in mind that he has a two-fold responsibility—to clear the innocent as well as to expose the guilty. He is seeking only facts—the Truth in a Nutshell.”

For this author’s book review, see: Molasses Murder in a Nutshell (A Nutshell Murder Mystery) - Historical Novel Society

 The Flood

1919: the Boston Molasses Flood and the Year of Violence and Disillusion - U.S. Studies Online | U.S. Studies Online (usso.uk)

 At about half-past noon on January 15, 1919, sounds of disaster reverberated down Commercial Street opposite Copp’s Hill in Boston’s North End—a sharp, metallic roar followed by rumbling, hissing, and finally the boom of an explosion that sent a 15-foot-high wall of molasses speeding at 35 miles an hour into commercial buildings, houses, the local firehouse. The thick sticky liquid snapped electric poles and the solid steel supports beneath the elevated train platform, knocked some buildings off their foundations, trapped, swallowed, and drowned pedestrians, residents, and horses. Though the wave of liquid quickly receded, it took days for rescue workers to find the missing and weeks to clean out the muck. In the end, the incident killed 21 people and injured 150.

The molasses, destined eventually for the manufacture of munitions, had been stored in a massive 50-foot-high, 90-foot-wide steel tank built and operated by Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of U. S. Industrial Alcohol. The accident, initially blamed on anarchists by USIA, was the result of negligence. Experts in court cases proved the tank’s steel walls were too thin, rivets were faulty and cracked under pressure, and warnings were ignored. One of those experts was Dr. George Burgess Magrath, medical examiner of Suffolk County, Massachusetts. He had been among the first responders on the scene and set up a field hospital and temporary morgue. He later testified about the causes of death: bodies crushed by debris, suffocation or drowning from molasses in their lungs.

Forensics Failures

At the time of the Molasses Flood, the individual responsible for investigating suspicious deaths in most jurisdictions was a coroner. But an extensive study of New York City coroners from the inception of the coroner system in 1898 to 1915 found that not a single one was qualified or trained to perform his duties. Only 19 of 65 coroners had been physicians, 18 were undertakers, seven were politicians, six were real estate dealers, two were plumbers, and two were saloon keepers. Among the rest were an auctioneer, butcher, musician, milkman, and wood carver. (Bruce Goldfarb, 18 Tiny Deaths, Sourcebooks, Naperville, IL, 2020)

Most conducted a superficial examination, if they did any at all. Many certified causes of death were patently absurd: The cause of death of one man was certified by a coroner as a thoracic aneurysm despite the fact that he had been holding a revolver and had a bullet wound in his mouth. (18 Tiny Deaths)

Police were not only untrained for forensic investigations, they often destroyed evidence at the scene—walking through blood, moving the body, handling the supposed weapon. Detectives were not much better: Nearly 25 percent of the detectives in Cleveland were considered to have the mentality of boys no older than 13. (18 Tiny Deaths)

Boston was the first city to establish a formal medical examiner’s office in 1877. The first person to hold the job of medical examiner was a physician, Dr. Francis A. Harris. The second was Dr. George Burgess Magrath, a specialist in pathology and instructor in legal medicine at Harvard Medical School who incorporated the latest and most advanced systems of death investigation after spending a year in London and Paris. (18 Tiny Deaths)

Gathering, interpreting, and presenting evidence from crime scenes were still highly problematic. A landmark 1928 study, The Coroner and the Medical Examiner, faulted legal medical education, noting “In not a single school is there a course in which the student [of legal medicine] may be systematically instructed in the duties…which may arise as the result of crime or accident.” (18 Tiny Deaths)

Glessner Lee and Magrath changed all that. Glessner Lee endowed the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard and supported the professor of legal medicine, Dr. George Magrath, beginning in 1932. In 1937, Dr. Alan Richard Moritz was named chair of the department.

The Nutshell Studies

In 1944, Glessner Lee decided to develop an intensive one-week seminar in the medical aspects of crime detection for the individuals most often called to crime scenes first—state troopers. The problem? Providing first-hand experience of crime scenes or tools that mimicked what they would see in the field.

Glessner Lee’s solution? 18- by 18-inch, doll-house-like wooden boxes or dioramas that presented crime-scene details in three dimensions. The first was based on an actual case—a man repeatedly had threatened to commit suicide by placing a noose over his neck, mounting a crate or box, and waiting for his wife to convince him to step down. Then, one day, the crate broke, and he hanged himself.

Glessner Lee created 18 dioramas, known as the Nutshell Case Studies. One called Kitchen. The corpse of a woman in front of a gas stove, gas jets open, doors locked, newspapers stuffed around the door frames. But: half-peeled potatoes indicated the woman was preparing dinner, a can of soda on the table and ice trays on the floor suggested the woman was preparing a drink for a visitor. Suicide? Maybe not.

Nutshell Studies: This amazing woman changed forensics with her miniature crime scenes (mookychick.co.uk)

 Directly related to McNamara’s Molasses Murder is the Dark Bathroom diorama, inspired by a series of bathroom murders in England. A woman’s fully dressed body lies face-up in a bathtub, water streaming onto her face.

Nutshell Studies: the extraordinary miniature crime scenes US police use to train detectives (telegraph.co.uk)

(Photos of the Nutshell Studies and details about their construction may be found in: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, by Corrine May Botz, The Monacellli Press, New York, 2004.}

In the seminars, police attended lectures about causes of death and the difference between blunt and penetrating injuries and an autopsy and interacted with the dioramas. Each police officer had 90 minutes to observe two of the dioramas and develop reports on them. As Glessner Lee explained, the diorama were not meant to serve as cases that needed to be solved. Rather, they were “exercises in observing, interpreting, evaluating and reporting,” illustrating the most basic requirement of crime scene investigation—resisting the temptation to jump to conclusions. (18 Tiny Deaths)

Outside of the seminar classroom, the dioramas have been featured in national magazines, beginning with an article in Life magazine in 1946 and The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom by Perry Mason author Erle Stanley Gardner. The Nutshell Studies themselves are still used to train police officers.

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Great-Molasses-Flood 

https://www.history.com/news/the-great-molasses-flood-of-1919 

https://www.boston-discovery-guide.com/great-molasses-flood.html 

https://time.com/5500592/boston-great-molasses-flood-100/ 

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/15/685154620/a-deadly-tsunami-of-molasses-in-bostons-north-end 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Great-Molasses-Flood 

htts://www.history.com/news/great-molasses-flood-science 

 Goldfarb, Bruce: 18 Tiny Deaths, Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2020.

Botz, Corinne May: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2004.

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

A Noir Classic Revisited

Self-appointed “Preacher” Harry Powell comes to Cresap’s Landing, West Virginia in 1932, where he ingratiates himself, characterizing the battle between good and evil by enfolding and twisting the fingers of his left hand labeled with the letters H A T E against those of his right hand labeled L O V E. He soon woos and weds the recently widowed Willa Harper and moves into her home with her two children—ten-year-old John and five-year-old Pearl.

But he is not the god-fearing man he claims to be. He shared a jail cell with Willa’s husband Ben before the man was executed for killing two security guards during a robbery and is hell-bent on finding the $10,000 in stolen money that was never recovered, aiming to kill anyone who gets in his way.

The chase that sends John and Pearl fleeing down the Ohio River with Preacher not far behind is the focus of the world premiere stage adaptation of The Night of the Hunter presented by Chicago’s City Lit Theatre, a 35-year-old theatre company with a rich history of stage adaptations. At the time it was formed, City Lit was the only theatre in the county devoted to staging adaptations of literary material. Its latest production recalls the iconic film that ironically was a box-office bomb when released in 1955. City Lit Theater Company

The Night of the Hunter

The Night of the Hunter is ranked among the top ten noir films of the 1950s, trailing the likes of A Touch of Evil, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Heat, The Sweet Smell of Success, D.O.A., and The Asphalt Jungle. https://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/the-15-best-noir-films-of-the-1950s/ It has been rated as one of the greatest movies of all time by Empire magazine in 2008 and Sight and Sound magazine in 2012, finishing in the top 100 films in both those years and then rising to the 25th best film in 2022. The American Film Institute places the film at number 34 on its list of 100 year…100 Thrills and its villain, Harry Powell, as number 29.

It’s been cited for beauty as well as terror, rated as number 2 among the 100 Most Beautiful Films by Carhiers du cinéma in 2007 and as number 90 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments. (The Night of the Hunter (film) - Wikipedia) And The US Library of Congress in 1992 selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry because it is considered to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” (The Night of the Hunter A Biography of a Film, Jeffrey Couchman)

Yet the film failed miserably at the box office. Its premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Des Moines filled all 1700 seats on July 26, 1955, but openings in other cities attracted fewer than 20 people and it “ground to a standstill” after that, soon ending up on twin bills with a B-grade Westerns (The Night of the Hunter A Biography of a Film, Jeffrey Couchman)

The film is just out of sync, Jeffrey Couchman points out. It was released at a time when moviegoers were getting used to spectacular, glossy, big-screen film productions the likes of The Robe, Oklahoma, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Even though some smaller scale, black and white films were popular at the time, The Night of the Hunter didn’t fit into any conventional category. It has elements of a thriller, horror film, and noir, but at the same time it is stunningly beautiful and poignant, as shown in scenes of Willa’s dead body trapped in the family vehicle while river currents drive waves of sea weed.

But its perceived weaknesses at the time of its release turn out to make it a universal work of art. As Roger Ebert wrote in 1996, "what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films of the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, [director Charles] Laughton gave it a timelessness... It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores, it holds up... well after four decades." (Ebert, Roger, November 24, 1996; "The Night of the Hunter (1955)". Chicago Sun-Times. 

From Book to Film

The Night of the Hunter is based on the book of the same name, written by Davis Grubb and published in 1953. The book fictionalizes the life of Harry Powers, a Depression-era serial killer who used lonely hearts advertisements to meet women so he could steal their money and later kill them. After his arrest in 1931 in West Virginia, police found four rooms under Powers’ garage that contained bloody clothing, strands of hair, and singed pages from a burned bankbook. A ditch behind his house uncovered the bodies of two women and two children. (Harry Powers - Wikipedia (bing.com)

Author Grubb created the itinerant character Harry ‘Preacher’ Powell whose fingers bear the tattooed letters L O V E and H A T E, who travels to Cresap’s Landing to find the missing $10,000 his cellmate Ben Harper told him about, kills Willa and stalks her children John and Pearl.  (Reverend Harry Powell - Wikipedia) The book made The New York Times bestseller list in March, 1954, was condensed for Reader’s Digest, and sold to independent film producer Paul Gregory.

Grubb’s novel had many of the scenes that would become iconic in the film—Preacher’s tattooed fingers, Willa’s submerged corpse in the family Model T, the children running to the river and escaping on a skiff. (The Night of the Hunter A Biography of a Film, Jeffrey Couchman)

In the hands of director Charles Laughton and producer Gregory, The Night of the Hunter became even more nourish.

Noir …

The immensely popular noir class of Hollywood films was first categorized as black film or black cinema by a French critic in 1946. These films capitalized on over-the-top post WW I German expressionism and stories from gritty crime novelists of the time like Dashiell Hammett (known for the PI Sam Spade) and Cornell Woolrich (known for the idea behind Hitchcock’s Rear Window).

Noir is distinguished by film techniques. Noir films are black and white with low, dramatic lighting creating sharp and harsh shadows, camera angles that tilt, sharpen, or distort images, and props, such as mirrors, that magnify or intensify shadowy effects. The films are shot in cities and zero in on alleyways, narrow lanes, slick pavements. They have dark moods (mystery, paranoia, disillusionment) and certain character types (the flawed man with a past anti-hero, the manipulative villain, the femme fatale) and themes (murder, morality, suspense). (The Art of Film Noir, Updated: Dec 18, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/art/film-noir)

 … or Not?

The Night of the Hunter is and is not noir. It has the same noirish looks: a shaft of light illuminating John and Pearl in the basement of their home with Preacher hovering a few steps overhead, a close up of Preacher’s tattooed hands on a railing, a bed lamp’s rays highlighting churchlike eaves, an outline of young John in a darkened barn as he peers at Preacher’s silhouette on a horse in the distance. And the mood is darkly relentless as Preacher stalks the children.

But there is no anti-hero or femme fatale or ambiguity about what has happened, who did it, and why and no moral ambiguity. Unlike the choice between his love and the duty Sam Spade owes his dead partner Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon, the plot in The Night of the Hunter is clear—flee from the predator. It’s a simple story of good and evil, not a complex one that challenges conventional values. (The Night of the Hunter (1955): Not Noir – FilmsNoir.Net (art.blog)

The Night of the Hunter just doesn’t fit in any one category. It reveres those of good faith who abide and endure, yet it was highly criticized at the time of its release by the Catholic Legion of Decency who listed it as one of the films that were Morally Objectionable in Part for All in 1955, and the Protestant Motion Picture Council concluded it would be offensive to most religious people. It was considered too horrifying for children yet youngsters are often mesmerized by the sights and sounds.

Noir, not noir. Thriller, not thriller. Horror, not horror. That may be the strength of The Night of the Hunter--its uniqueness. As Dave Kehr wrote in 1985: "Charles Laughton's first and only film as a director is an enduring masterpiece—dark, deep, beautiful, aglow... The source of its style and power is mysterious—it is a film without precedent and without any real equals." Kehr, Dave, October 26, 1985: "The Night of the Hunter". Chicago Reader  

Sources:

The Night of the Hunter A Biography of a Film, Jeffrey Couchman)

https://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/the-15-best-noir-films-of-the-1950s/

Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments. (The Night of the Hunter (film) - Wikipedia)

(Ebert, Roger, November 24, 1996; "The Night of the Hunter (1955)". Chicago Sun-Times. 

(Harry Powers - Wikipedia (bing.com)

(Reverend Harry Powell - Wikipedia

The Art of Film Noir, Updated: Dec 18, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/art/film-noir)

(The Night of the Hunter (1955): Not Noir – FilmsNoir.Net (art.blog)

Kehr, Dave, October 26, 1985: "The Night of the Hunter". Chicago Reader  

The Original Hillbilly Horror Movie: The Night of the Hunter - expatalachians

Night of the Hunter Photo Gallery 20 (morethings.com)

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Hunter-Biography-Film/dp/0810125420

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

New England Gothic--Today and Yesterday

In the summer of 1947 a “trespasser” in Cairy Hollow approaches the vestiges of the cottage that once belonged to seamstress Bess Dalby. His eyes track flickers of candlelight as an old woman moves through the house, his feet stumble as the door opens, his wish to learn the story behind the demise of the nearby Cairy Hollow mansion falters, yet he enters the cottage and hears about the power that destroyed the house and the wild souls that possess it now.

That story begins and ends on a single day--October 31, 1925--the day Civette Middleton and her beau Richard Marlow will announce their engagement and plans for marriage. At Bess Dalby’s cottage, a pair of ravens drop from the roof to the earth and take the form of the Raven Ladies known as Mirth and Sorrow. A spiraling weathervane joins them as a small man dressed in the manner of a strolling player and calling himself Captain Balefire.

Angry that they will be losing the shelter of the mansion and determined to keep Cairy Hollow to themselves, the three hatch a plot--to transform Bess’ pumpkin-headed scarecrow into the handsome, charming Sir Adrian Bramwell, sweep Civette off her feet, and spirit her away so she cannot take possession of the household. Their actions and the consequences are revealed in the recently published Nothing Gold Can Stay, a reimagining of “Feathertop,”a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and an example of what author Mary J. Carter calls New England Gothic.   

Nothing Gold Can Stay: Carter, Mary J: 9781509250653: Amazon.com: Books

For this author’s review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/nothing-gold-can-stay/

 Gothic Literature

Mystery, terror, the presence of the supernatural, hauntings from the past, demons, demonic possession, ghosts, evil spirits--the things Gothic fictional dreams are made of--are even more vividly alive today than when they first appeared in fiction in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s tale of the discovery of a medieval manuscript in The Castle of Otranto. (Gothic fiction - Wikipedia)

It may be hard for modern aficionados to believe, but Gothic fiction was so pervasive in the 1790s that Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained: “I am almost weary of the Terrible” after reviewing novels “in which dungeons and old castles and solitary houses by the sea side and caverns and woods and extraordinary characters and all the tribe of horror and mystery have crowded in on me.” (Gothic fiction - Wikipedia)

Yet renowned authors of the past such as Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Edgar Alan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson are now joined by modern masters of the Gothic--Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison. (Intro to New England Gothic - The Gothic Library)

Early on, Gothic’s roots sprouted in Europe among imposing English medieval castles, French opera house phantasms, remote Irish aristocrats, and Spanish legends and soon spread to the environs of Imperial Russia. In the US, the genre took two paths: Southern Gothic--a deep dive into the corruption behind the facade of respectability; and New England Gothic--a walk through a foreboding backwoods environment that carries the detritus and sordid history of the Salem witch trials. (Gothic fiction - Wikipedia)

 Nathaniel Hawthorne

 Nathaniel Hawthorne is considered to be the father of New England Gothic. (Intro to New England Gothic - The Gothic Library) Born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804, Hawthorne had direct connections to both sides of the Salem Witch Trials; he was the great-great grandson of the trial judge John Hathorne and was related to two of the accused witches and one of the accusers.

Haunted and ashamed by these relationships, Hawthorne wrote: “I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth removed.” (The Custom-House, an introductory sketch to the Scarlet Letter)

 It’s also been said that Hawthorne added the w to his last name to distance himself from these ancestors in 1830. (The Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne ( Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, September 15, 2011 )  

 https://www.nocloo.com/nathaniel-hawthorne-biography/

 Hawthorne began writing short stories while at Bowdoin College, Maine, in 1821, and self-published his first novel, Fanshawe, in 1825. Twenty-five years later, his most enduring works were published: The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter.  (Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert McNamara, Updated on January 22, 2018)

Hawthorne wrote nearly 50 short stories, including “The Great Stone Face” and other tales from his visits to New Hampshire’s White Hills. Among his writings are “Young Goodman Brown,” considered to be “as deep as Dante” by Herman Melville in its exploration of human nature’s dark side. “The Birthmark” and “The Minister’s Black Veil” explore two sides of the human face--one with a blemish a woman’s husband insists must be removed and one inexplicably and suddenly hidden behind a mask (https://interestingliterature.com/2021/04/best-nathaniel-hawthorne-novels-and-stories/).

It was difficult for Hawthorne to get his stories published early on. It wasn’t until 1850 with the publication of The Scarlet Letter that his writing was recognized. Though his writing style was considered “old-fashioned” even in his day, Hawthorne’s work deeply influenced Herman Melville as he was writing Moby Dick, and when he died in 1864, The New York Times described him as “the most charming of American novelists and one of the foremost descriptive writers in the language.” Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Feathertop

Hawthorne’s “Feathertop” short story, published in 1852, describes Mother Rigby’s transformation of a scarecrow into a man who will woo the daughter of Judge Gookin, Polly. (Feathertop)

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/feathertop-nathaniel-hawthorne/1014392212

https://www.amazon.com/Feathertop-Nathaniel-Hawthorne/dp/1499616139

 Though only 24 pages in length, “Feathertop” has sparked many iterations. The story was turned into silent films in 1912 and 1916 and television programs in 1955 and 1961. The first television production starred Natalie Wood, the second was a musical with Jane Powell, Hugh O’Brien, and Hans Conried. An expanded version of the story, including additional characters and motivations, was turned into the play called The Scarecrow in 1908. A movie version, called Puritan Passions, was released in 1923, and the play starring Gene Wilder and Blythe Danner was again aired in 1972. The story was set to music as an opera in 1945 and more recently in 2006, and a video musical, also called The Scarecrow, was released in 2000. (Feathertop)

Listopia ranks other scary scarecrow stories: Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge, The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight, by R. L. Stine, The Wide Game by Michael West, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World by Thomas Ligotti, and Tatterdemon by Steve Vernon among them.

 Nothing Gold and Feathertop

Nothing Gold Can Stay is far more layered and complex than its inspiration “Feathertop.” Fantastical creatures Mirth, Sorrow, and Captain Balefire are multidimensional--cunning, calculating, often merciless in their determination. Human characters are flawed and regretful, lamenting past actions and, even more important, inaction.

But in the end, the stories are similar. They employ witchcraft and sorcery to set their characters’ plans in motion and manipulate people, places, and things to advance objectives. They highlight cupidity and the ease with which individuals may be fooled by appearances and trappings.  While playing upon fears of a human-like figure meant to fool and scare animals away from cornfields, the two stories end up poignantly, eliminating frippery so the unsuspecting as well as the implicated must strip away the make-believe and leading readers to marvel at the innovation and mourn the loss of innocence.

As Mother Rigby rues at the end of “Feathertop,” “My poor, dear, pretty Feathertop! There are thousands upon thousands of coxcombs and charlatans in the world, made up of just such a jumble of wornout, forgotten, and good-for-nothing trash as he was! Yet they live in fair repute, and never see themselves for what they are. And why should my poor puppet be the only one to know himself and perish for it?” (“Feathertop”)

Sources:

History of Massachusetts Blog: The Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, September 15, 2011  

 Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, New England's Most Prominent Novelist Focused on Dark Themes

Robert McNamara, updated on January 22, 2018

Fantastic Facts About Nathaniel Hawthorne, Karin Crompton | Sep 22, 2022

Feathertop

OnlineLiterature.com

Feathertop: A Moralized Legend

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), From Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales & Sketches