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.

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

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.

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.  

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.”

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

 

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Searching for Kurt Vonnegut

When he was a much younger man (“two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago”), Jonah started collecting information for a book he called The Day the World Ended, a recollection of the things Americans had done the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

First on Jonah’s list of Americans was Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the A-bomb. But Felix is already dead, his body found in a rocking chair after testing his potent scientific discovery--ice-nine.

Jonah consequently turns to Hoenikker’s three children--Newt, Franklin, and Angela--and associates such as Dr. Breed.

Jonah’s journey leads him to ponder basic questions of science, such as:

The secret of life--protein, a bartender tells him.

The single thing that stands in the way of military invincibility--mud, a Marine general says.

The “seed” crystal that causes atoms to freeze--ice-nine, says Dr. Breed.

Re-search--something scientists found once but have since lost and are now re-searching for it, an elevator operator says.

And to wonder about religion. Jonah quotes the first sentence in the books of the Bokonon religion: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

Jonah is the lead character in the Lifeline Theatre production of Cat’s Cradle, the latest in the theater’s efforts to create plays that explore, interpret, and reimagine books and other literary works.

Cat's Cradle - Lifeline Theatre

As a walk on the dark side of science and technology and America’s role as science and tech leader, the play couldn’t be more relevant. “Science and technology will always move forward, but humans must consider the consequences of progress. Challenging the American ego is still at the forefront of our discussions today in 2023,” said play director Heather Currie.

As irreverent burlesque and lampoon, the play lets laughter lead to insight. “Satire still helps us laugh when looking at the dark parts of being human. At the heart of this story is…who are we as humans, and how can we do better?” she added. Casting Announced For Lifeline Theatre's Adaptation Of Vonnegut's Classic CAT'S CRADLE (broadwayworld.com)

And it leads many of us to take a long look at Kurt Vonnegut. “The return of Cat's Cradle is an opportunity for us to revisit Vonnegut's story and explore its themes and relevance for a new generation,” said Lifeline Artistic Director Ilesa Duncan.  (Cat’s Cradle runs through September and into October. Cat's Cradle - Lifeline Theatre)

Kurt Vonnegut--Early Chicago Connections

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1922 and spent most of his life in New York City. He did, however, live in Chicago for two years just after he returned from fighting in Europe in WW II. Vonnegut was one of about 50 members of the 106th Infantry Division who fought in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge, were captured by German soldiers, and imprisoned in a POW camp near Dresden. During the fierce Allied bombing of the city in early 1945, Vonnegut survived by hiding in an underground meat locker. Days afterward, he and other POWs were forced to search the city ruins for survivors and remove dead bodies until they were evacuated and eventually released. https://www.nvam.org/

Vonnegut enrolled in the University of Chicago’s anthropology program in 1945 but left two years later without finishing his master’s degree thesis. In the 1960s he resumed work on the thesis, called Fluctuations between Good and Ill Fortune in Simple Tales, but still did not receive the degree. U of C professors rejected the thesis, saying that he “had not done any work that qualified as ‘anthropology.’ Interestingly, the university granted the master’s degree in 1970, accepting Cat’s Cradle as a substitute for a formal thesis.  Kurt Vonnegut in Chicago: Some Footnotes – Chicago Magazine

While in Chicago, Vonnegut wrote for the City News Bureau and chronicled the experience in Slaughterhouse Five, noting that he earned $28 a week as a police reporter and covered the courts, police stations, Fire Department and Coast Guard on Lake Michigan, connecting “to the institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran under the streets of Chicago.” (Slaughterhouse-Five)

Current Chicago Current Connections

Vonnegut was featured last year as one of the Chicago-based American Writers Museum’s American Voices exhibit and podcast.  The November, 2022, post explores Vonnegut’s perspective on war and the meaning of life, citing:

 “When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon,
‘It is done.’
People did not like it here.”--From “Requiem,” in A Man Without a Country (2005)

The museum also highlights Vonnegut’s ubiquitous “So it goes”: “They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes.”--From Slaughterhouse Five

In a recent AWM podcast The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five, author Tom Roston wonders whether Vonnegut had PTSD by looking at Vonnegut’s published writings as well as drafts of the novel Slaughterhouse Five and conducting interviews with those close to him--family and friends--and those who study his work. Episode 72: Tom Roston - The American Writers Museum

The Writer's Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five a book by Tom Roston (bookshop.org)

In 2016 the National Veterans Art Museum added 50 screen prints of Vonnegut sketches to its permanent exhibit collections. The exhibit includes sketches Vonnegut produced for books, such as Slaughterhouse Five, The Sirens of Titan, and Breakfast of Champions. Museum Curator Ash Kyrie writes on the museum’s website about Vonnegut and the exhibit, reflecting on his own war experience: “The complex and alienating experience I then had coming home from Iraq speaks largely the same as a Vietnam, Revolutionary, or Trojan war veteran had returning after their respective conflicts. Leave the dates out of it and the stories begin to look similar, from Homer's The Odyssey to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, to the experiences of contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

“Vonnegut's wit and deceptively simple line drawings breathe fresh life into these timeless narratives. His humor and artistic license reveal just as much as a battle tale redux. As the writer Isabel Allende once stated, “What's truer than the truth? The story.” https://www.nvam.org/vonnegut.html

https://www.nvam.org/vonnegut.html

Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle and His Own Words

As Jonah delves into Dr. Hoenikker’s last days, he learns that the theoretical solution to eliminate the bane of the Marine Corps--mud--actually exists. And he worries about it. If a Marine drops a seed of ice-nine into the nearest puddle, what happens? It would freeze.

And the pools and streams feeding the puddle? They would freeze.

And the rivers and lakes the streams fed? They would freeze.

And the oceans that…? They would freeze.

And the rain when it fell? It would freeze.

“And that would be the end of the world!” (Chapter 22)

Vonnegut’s views on nature and science were prescient and cautionary. In an imaginary letter to Earthlings of 2088, he wrote in 1988:

“The sort of leaders we need now are …those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appear to be Nature’s stern but reasonable terms:

1.       Reduce and stabilize your population

2.       Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

3.       Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

4.       Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

5.       Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

6.       Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean and stupid.

7.       And so on. Or else. (Vonnegut: Fates Worse than Death, G. P. Putnam, 1991.

 About that Cat’s Cradle

How to Play The Cat's Cradle Game (with Pictures) - wikiHow

The Cat’s Cradle string game is one of the oldest and most common games played by children around the world. It takes on many names. It is known in Africa as The Spider’s Web, in the Americas and Asia as Cat’s Cradle, and in Japan as Kapkap. It also takes on many different symbolic meanings. In Inuit culture, it represents the Northern lights, and in Asia, it represents life’s difficulties. Its most common themes are connectedness, power and control, and the cycle of life. (What Does the Cat’s Cradle Symbolize? Unraveling the Meaning Behind this Intricate Game, August 4, 2023 by Danis Taufiq)

 In Vonnegut’s novel, Felix Hoenikker fashions a cat’s cradle out of string and shows it to his son, singing “Rockabye catsy, in the tree top. When the wind blows, the cray-dull will rock. If the bough breaks, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come cray-dull, catsy and all.” (Chapter 7)

Later, observers are debating the significance of Newt’s painting of the cat’s cradle:

One says it’s hell.

Newt’s sister Angela thinks it’s ugly, but she notes, she doesn’t know anything about modern art.

Jonah suggests the picture represents the meaningless of it all.

Newt concludes: “It’s garbage--like everything else.”

The beauty of Vonnegut’s work and Cat’s Cradle, is meaning resides with the reader.

Sources:

Casting Announced For Lifeline Theatre's Adaptation Of Vonnegut's Classic CAT'S CRADLE (broadwayworld.com)

Cat's Cradle - Lifeline Theatre)

https://www.nvam.org/

Kurt Vonnegut in Chicago: Some Footnotes – Chicago Magazine

Episode 72: Tom Roston - The American Writers Museum

https://www.nvam.org/vonnegut.html

(What Does the Cat’s Cradle Symbolize? Unraveling the Meaning Behind this Intricate Game, August 4, 2023 by Danis Taufiq)

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

The Play’s the Thing

Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens visit Knebworth House in Hertfordshire as guests of playwright and author Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton in August, 1856. Other invited guests include literary figures and actresses, all of whom have roles, on or off stage, in one of Bulwer-Lytton’s plays to be performed as a charity event in the manor house. Uninvited is Bulwer-Lytton’s wife Lady Rosina, recently released from a lunatic asylum.

While actors are reciting their lines in dress rehearsal of the play, a shot rings out, and a man is killed. Bearing the costume assigned to Bulwer-Lytton, the dead body at first is thought to be the lord himself. But it turns out to be his secretary, Tom Maguire.  (For the rest of this author’s review for the Historical Novel Society, see: Summer of Secrets (A Gaslight Mystery 3) - Historical Novel Society.)

https://www.amazon.com/Summer-Secrets-Gaslight-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B08T1W6BGB

 Summer of Secrets is the third (and the first read by this author) in the Gaslight Mysteries series by Cora Harrison that follows Dickens and Collins as amateur sleuths who gather together and analyze clues to crimes. The most recent in the five-book series appears this November; the first was published in 2019. (THE GASLIGHT MYSTERIES – Cora Harrison).

Harrison has authored other mystery series: Reverend Mother, set in 1920s Cork; Burren Mysteries, in medieval Ireland; and the Victorian-era London Murder Mysteries for children. (http://coraharrison.com/tag/irish-fiction/)

The Gaslight series builds on historical and literary fact. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins not only were writing associates, they were close friends. After the two were introduced by a mutual friend in 1851, Collins began to contribute to Dickens’ weekly magazine Household Words, formally joining the staff in 1856. From 1959 to 1861, he wrote regularly for Dickens’ subsequent periodical All the Year Round. (Wilkie Collins - Wikipedia)

Dickens supported Collins and his work, publishing Collins’ first story, A Terribly Strange Bed, for Household Words in 1852, collaborating with Collins and other writers on the story A House to Let in 1858, and serializing the novel that would make Collins famous--The Woman in White-- from November 1859 to August 1860 in All the Year Round. Dickens also may have been inspired to write A Tale of Two Cities by the Collins’ 1855 story Sister Rose set during the French Revolution. (WILKIE COLLINS AND CHARLES DICKENS (wilkie-collins.info)

The two most often collaborated on theatrical productions.

Dickens’ Amateur Theatrical Productions

From the time he was presented with a toy theater as a young boy, Charles Dickens was captivated by the theatrical world. While attending Wellington House Academy at age 12, Dickens and other boys staged several plays, including The Dog of Montargis, Cherry and Fair Star, and The Miller and His Men, a production that so realistically crashed the onstage mill to pieces with firecrackers police were once called to the schoolhouse door. (Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph, Edgar Johnson, 1952, https://archive.org/details/charlesdickenshi01john/page/26/mode/2up. )

Dickens’ formal amateur theatrical productions began in 1842 after the success of three productions he led in Montreal. Dickens’ portrayal of Captain Bobadill in Ben Johnson’s Every Man in His Humour in London that same year led to one, perhaps apocryphal, anecdote: "Ah, what an actor you would have made, Mr. Dickens, if it just hadn't been for them books." (http://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/dickens/)

Soon after Dickens and Collins met, they began acting in or co-writing high-end plays. In May, 1851, the two acted in Not So Bad as We Seem, written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and staged before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.  

Dickens and Collins collaborated on The Frozen Deep, a play based on the expedition by Sir John Franklin that was last seen in the Arctic in July, 1845. In addition to serving as manager of the production, Dickens assumed the role of Richard Wardour, one of a small crew of shipmates sent in search of help after their sailing ship was immobilized by ice. Also on that crew was Frank Aldersley, played by Collins, a romantic rival and object of Wardour’s revenge.  

https://picnicwit.com/timeline/18001899/garden-party-picnic-in-london-chgarles-dickens-and-richard-albert-smith-1857/

The Frozen Deep was a hit. Dickens got rave reviews for his performance; the run of the play was extended for six months; and Queen Victoria requested a private performance for the royal family on July 4, 1857.  Three benefit performances were staged at New Free Trade Hall in Manchester with professional actors, including the actress Ellen Ternan, the woman Dickens is said to have loved for the rest of his life. (Charles Dickens on Stage: Amateur Acting and Public Readings (charlesdickenspage.com)

Collins’ own first play, The Lighthouse, was enthusiastically received by Dickens and produced by his Tavistock House theatrical company in 1855. Based on the 1853 short story Gabriel’s Marriage, the play was set in December, 1748 at Eddystone Lighthouse and starred Dickens as head light keeper. After running for four nights at Tavistock House, the play was then staged at Royal Olympic Theatre. An American version opened in New York in January, 1858. Revivals were performed at Boscombe Theatre in the 1870s and 1880s. The play also was translated into French.

The play No Thoroughfare, written by both Collins and Dickens, was presented at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End in 1867. After 200 performances there, the play went on tour. (Wilkie Collins - Wikipedia, WILKIE COLLINS AND CHARLES DICKENS (wilkie-collins.info)Top of Form

·Merely Players

Joining Dickens and Collins on stage were many notable writers and artists, including:

Mark Lemon, known for launching and editing the satirical weekly Punch, was also a well-regarded actor who, with Dickens, performed Bulwer-Lytton’s Not So Bad as We Seem in 1851. (Mark Lemon - Wikipedia)

Augustus Egg, an actor and costume designer. He played ship’s cook John Want in Dickens’ 1857 production of The Frozen Deep. With Dickens, he formed the Guild of Literature and Art to support struggling artists and writers. He also filled the lead role in Bulwer-Lytton’s Not So Bad as We Seem. (Augustus Leopold Egg - Wikipedia)

John Leech, a caricaturist, most notable for Punch, and illustrator of Dickens 1843 A Christmas Carol.  (John Leech (caricaturist) - Wikipedia)

Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, a prominent painter particularly of sea- and landscapes, and scene painter at the Royalty Theatre in London as well as the Colburg theatre in Lambeth, Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, and Charles Dickens’ theatrical playhouse at Tavistock. (Clarkson Frederick Stanfield - Wikipedia)

John Forster, literary and dramatic critic, friend and member of Dickens’ literary circle. (John Forster (biographer) - Wikipedia)

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, writer and politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 1831 to 1866 and Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1858 to 1859. As a writer, he is credited with such phrases as “the almighty dollar” and “the great unwashed” as well as convincing Dickens to change the original ending of Great Expectations. (Edward Bulwer-Lytton - Wikipedia)

Rosina Doyle Wheeler who married Bulwer-Lytton in 1827 and separated from him four years later. She later wrote and published Cheveley, or the Man of Honour (1839), a scandalous work of fiction that satirized her husband and what she considered to be his hypocrisy. She also wrote A Blighted Life, about her incarceration by her husband in an asylum for weeks. (A Blighted Life - Wikipedia)

Ellen Ternan, an English actress who, at the age of 18, became Dickens’ love interest as his marriage to his wife Catherine was disintegrating. Called by Dickens as his “magic circle of one,” she remained with Dickens until his death. (Ellen Ternan - Wikipedia)

Summer of Secrets: Folding Fact into Fiction

A week after arriving at grand Gothic Knebworth House with Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins is bored, at least until Lady Rosina Bulwer-Lytton bursts onto the scene.

knebworth house photos - Search (bing.com)

He has joined other Dickens’ friends--Punch editor Mark Lemon, journalist John Forster, and artists Clarkson Stanfield, Augustus Egg, and John Leech--and a mother-daughter pair of professional actresses at the home of Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton to present Bulwer-Lytton’s latest play, The Lady of Lyon, and raise money for the widow and children of an actor who recently died.

Lady Rosina storms into the library where the men have gathered, stage-whispering: “My goodness. What has he done to this library? Who, on earth, chose that carpet? And the books, the lovely books that belonged to his grandfather, they are smothered by all of those vulgar books.” Noting the volumes written by her husband, Lady Rosina, raises her voice: “What a lot of rubbish that man has written!” (page 5).

In the days that follow, Lady Rosina threatens her husband, brandishing a pistol; Bulwer-Lytton’s secretary, Tom Maguire, is assaulted by guests and later he assaults an actress, a play rehearsal is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot and the discovery of the secretary’s dead body on the dimly lit stage.

Summer of Secrets highlights the theatrical work of Dickens and Collins and friends. It also plants the seeds for Collins’ future works: The Moonstone, recognized as the first detective story and police procedural:

“It would be something quite unique, wouldn’t it?” Collins speaks about writing a fictional account of the murder at Knebworth. “Not just telling a story, but engaging with the reader, going hand in hand with him. Coaxing him to guess who did the deed” (page 78).

Author Harrison adds a twist on history, wondering whether Ellen Ternan was Dickens’ daughter, not his mistress. She notes that Dickens became incensed when hearing others impute that he was having an affair with Ellen. He also set up her as well as her mother in houses in England and France, and a biographer came to the conclusion that the relationship between Ellen and Dickens was not consummated.

Harrison also points to A Tale of Two Cities, which focuses on the love between a father and a daughter, a daughter and a heroine who physically resembles Ellen Ternan, and invites readers to weigh in at: www.coraharrison.com.

 

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Learning about Robert Oppenheimer

 The young grad student in physics, J. Robert Oppenheimer, is angry. He’s been held back by his professor, relegated to cleaning up the glassware he’s broken in the lab and therefore prevented from attending the lecture he’s been anticipating, a lecture by scientific luminary Niels Bohr. His reaction? Inject lethal potassium chloride into the shiny green apple that sits on his professor’s desk.

From there, the 2023 magnum opus film by Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer traverses four decades, hopscotching between classroom discussions about quantum mechanics with students at Cal Tech and Berkeley, work that transforms scientific theory into actual, threatening reality at the desert compound in Los Alamos, NM, fierce interrogation and damning witness testimonies gathered by an investigator in a narrow, windowless room, episodes of consuming passion and shattering grief, and all the while intensely focusing on the eyes, face, and profile of its subject: the Father of the Atomic Bomb.

Watch: Oppenheimer — on Directors' Library (directorslibrary.com)

The film is a welcome alternative to flash and dazzle film adventures that move from fight scene to fight scene with little or no storyline in between or set up mindless (for this audience of one, anyway) scenarios. That’s not to say these types of films are not enjoyable or at times flat-out LOL funny.

But Oppenheimer engages the mind, presenting complex philosophical and political historical realities as well as multi-layered relationships. Instead of leaving the theatre remembering snippets of filmed stunts, viewers leave Oppenheimer with questions about the man, the times, the science, the ramifications, the truths, and the lies.

While massive in scope and an often visual and auditory assault, Oppenheimer pays deeply personal, almost claustrophobic attention to Oppenheimer and his stoicism. He appears impassive while he watches the towering mushroom cloud, uncertain or confused by thunderous applause from Los Alamos Project colleagues days later, composed and almost quizzical while former friends provide damning testimony against him.

The historical novel Trinity takes the opposite approach. It presents seven different views of Oppenheimer through the eyes of seven different narrators:

An Army intelligence officer who trails Oppenheimer as he slips away from Los Alamos to San Francisco, where he meets, dines, dances, and spends the night with a dark-haired young woman.

A WAC at the Trinity test site who stands with Oppenheimer and sees the sky go completely white before “the earth under our feet lurched toward the mountains and the mountains tilted a foot to the right, and the trees leaped off the sides of the mountains.”

A friend who relives past memories with Oppenheimer only to learn later that he’s forgotten the unpleasant and painful ones.

A secretary at the Institute for Advanced Study who walks behind and takes dictation from Oppenheimer as he walks across campus and one day hears him tell what he considers to be his whole story.

A one-time neighbor who orders and reviews transcripts of the security hearings that asked witness after witness whether Oppenheimer could be trusted.

A student who hears Oppenheimer lecture about the connection between power and privilege and wonders what he has not yet comprehended.

A journalist who comes to believe that, in the days before his death, Oppenheimer still does not understand what little power he had over the processes he unleashed. ( Amazon.com: TRINITY: 9780062851970: Hall, Louisa: Books. For this author’s review of Trinity and other books, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviewer/k-m-sandrick/

The film and the novel lead to the same place: the desire to find out more about Oppenheimer and his times.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 2006 NY Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Bird, Kai, Sherwin, Martin J.: 9780375726262: Amazon.com: Books

The biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin explores Oppenheimer and his role during the Cold War. It has been praised for its scholarship and insights, “unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature.... It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.” —The New York Times

The film has been vetted on its own for accuracy, by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear technology and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Wellerstein notes, for example, that Oppenheimer did indeed try to poison his professor by injecting chemicals into the man’s apple while attending Cambridge in the 1920s, but Niels Bohr was not there or fingering the fruit at the time.  (After the incident, Oppenheimer was placed on probation and required to meet with a psychiatrist.)

Other facts: a thunder storm did delay the first test of an atom bomb in the New Mexico desert, and the explosion was at first silent--an intense blast of light, fierce wind and mushroom cloud appeared before any sound was heard. (For more about fact vs. fiction in the movie, see: 'Oppenheimer' fact v. fiction: A nuclear historian breaks down what the movie got right and wrong, Story by jmcgrath@insider.com (Jenny McGrath). 

Also true: the setting and nature of the hearings held in 1954 related to Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The FBI had, indeed, been tapping Oppenheimer’s phone yet refused to share tape recordings with him or his attorney, called him out repeatedly and humiliated him during the questioning, and revealed details about his affair with a former girlfriend while his wife was in the room, according to the hearing’s transcripts. (slate.com/culture/2023/07/oppenheimer-movie-historical-accuracy-communist-manhattan-project.html)

Louisa Hall’s Trinity

Author Louis Hall also was drawn to Oppenheimer by American Prometheus. In an interview with journalist Jennifer Croft in January, 2019, Hall notes that she “wanted to write a book about the difficulty of knowing other people, especially when the stakes are high: when we feel we have to understand someone ...but I was still looking for a form that would allow me to explore that difficulty…”

While reading about the hearings related to Oppenheimer’s security clearance, Hall was struck: “when his colleagues and friends and family members were called to testify on his behalf, or against him, and almost universally ended up admitting that they didn’t entirely understand the decisions he’d made, that despite years of friendship, even years of intimacy, they couldn’t be sure that they’d ever known him — I started to think that perhaps this was my form: a series of testimonials on the nature of a man who seemed to hold the keys to the most frightening new technology on the planet.” (On Oppenheimer: A Conversation with Louisa Hall on Her Novel, “Trinity” (lareviewofbooks.org)


A Journey of Discovery

With both film and novel leading to more questions than answers about Oppenheimer the man and the scientist, this author has begun a literary search, and the first few explorations reveal, certainly not surprisingly, complexity.

Biographies have characterized Oppenheimer as:

“A man who was put together of many bright shining splinters…[one who] never got to be an integrated personality." (Robert Oppenheimer. A Life Inside the Center)

“A dilettante [who] would not take his coat off and really get stuck in. He’d got the ability, but he hadn’t got the staying power.” (Robert Oppenheimer. Dark Prince)

A left-wanderer, if not a full-blown member of the Communist party (several sources)

Perhaps the only physicist who could have led the Los Alamos Project: “Oppie knew [what the staff’s] relationships with one another were and what made them tick. He knew how to organize, cajole, humor, smoothe feelings--how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so.” (Dark Prince)

And then there are Oppenheimer’s own words. Two books gathered a number of Oppenheimer’s addresses and lectures. Uncommon Sense presented material written by Oppenheimer between 1948 and 1966, some of which had not been published before. Atom and Void includes two sets of lectures, one series given in 1953, the other, nine years later. In them, Oppenheimer writes about:

The wealth and variety of physics, the natural sciences, and the life of the human spirit: “they are the elements of man’s sorrow and his splendor, his frailty and his power, his death, his passing, and his undying deeds.” (Atom and Void)

Science and scientists: “We understand, as we hope others understand, that … there is a harmony between knowledge in the sense of science, that specialized and general knowledge which it is our purpose to uncover, and the community of man. We, like all men, are among those who bring a little light to the vast unending darkness of man’s life and world. For us as for all men, change and eternity, specialization and unity, instrument and final purpose, community and individual man alone, complementary each to the other, both require and define our bonds and our freedom. (Uncommon Sense)

Scientific advancements: “we think the future will be only more radical and not less, only more strange and not more familiar, and that it will have its own new insights for the inquiring human spirit.” (Atom and Void)

The overall intellectual community: “We need to be open to other and complementary lives, not intimidated by them and not contemptuous of them (as so many are today of the natural and mathematical sciences). As a start, we must learn again, without contempt and with great patience, to talk to one another; and we must learn.” (Uncommon Sense)

If you’ve begun your own journey, please get in touch: kmsandrick@kmsandrick.com.

For this author, the journey precipitated by Oppenheimer and Trinity continues.

 

Sources:

Atom and Void, Essays on Science and Community, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Princeton University Press, 1989.

Uncommon Sense, J. Robert Oppenheimer. N. Metropolis, Gian-Carlo Rota, and David Sharp, Editors, Birkhauser, 1984.

Robert Oppenheimer Dark Prince, Jack Rummel, Facts On File, 1992.

Robert Oppenheimer, A Life Inside the Center. Ray Monk, Doubleday, 2012.