Edgar Rice Burroughs

And

The Accreted Personality

Part VI

by

R.E. Prindle

Edgar Rice Burroughs

 On The Road To Success: 1911-1920

 The Porges wrote the most comprehensive biography of Ed: Edgar Rice Burroughs:  The Man Who Created Tarzan.  They were allowed to use the archives and to this date they are the only researchers who have.  Although give the freedom of the archives they were apparently denied  the freedom to write as they chose.  There were others who were selected to write the biography but as they found information that it was considered inappropriate to disclose they were dismissed.  The Porges were willing to write hagiography.

Bill And Sue On Hillman

As Ed’s work reflects his life both before and as the books were written one can compare Porges’ biography with the novels to get some idea about the banned material.  Some portions of this piece then will be guesswork from the biography and the novels.  Bill Hillman at ERBzine  has also unearthed details not in Porges on his ERBzine site.  ERBzine is one of the great internet sites not only as concerns Burroughs but as a site.  It is worthwhile to check out Bill’s  work if you’re not familiar with it.

By 1911 then Ed’s psychology, his memories that he would use in writing his novels was in place. He already had a multi-faceted personality and he would add facets to that personality.  He was quite extraordinary in being able to incorporate, seemingly, the whole of his memory banks.  The question is were his references more obvious to his readers at the time than they are today.  For instance the Dreyfus Affair in France of the 1890s gets a fairly comprehensive treatment in The Return Of Tarzan although today it would go unnoticed unless one were historically aware and then recognized what he was talking about.

The same goes with the Sky Pilot/Big Bill Haywood episode of The Oakdale Affair.  Of course Sky Pilot/ Haywood merger

Big Bill Haywood

into John the Bully.  (See my https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/pt-i-only-the-strong-survive/  ,  http://www.erbzine.com/mag14/1483a.html  )  With the proper historical background what he’s talking about becomes clear if you read between the lines.

The novels of 1912-1914 directly refer to events and reading, questions and cultural problems, surrounding his pre-1900 reading and his reading of current writers after 1900.  So far I have able to trace the contents of the novels back to that reading and those cultural questions.  Other references I have picked up from other writers but may not have read the volumes themselves.  I’m working at it.

In 1910 Ed was thirty-five years old.  He had had a life of, shall we say, limited success so that he was becoming anxious about his possibilities for the future.  As he approached the mid-life crisis that every man faces at forty the fear of failing self-realization gripped his soul.  His was now a do or die situation.  His only chance of success that he could see was to succeed as a writer and that was a million to one chance.  Ed was an inveterate gambler.

By the time Ed began to write he was dealing  with the problems of a world gone by.  Since his youth from 1875 to 1900 and young manhood of 1900-1912 worlds had slipped away beneath his feet.  There was a great difference between the world of his psychological and intellectual understanding of the world that had just passed away and the emerging world that would affect his future reputation.

Immigration had brought millions of Jews from Eastern Europe and millions of Italians from Southern Europe while the Negro revolt against Jim Crow would quickly gain momentum with the great Negro emigration North during the Great

Marcus Garvey

War the resistance to White rule was beginning organization by the Negro chief, Marcus Garvey.

Ed’s activities in those matters were rooted in a pre-1900 milieu.  While he himself was no bigot in any way, the mere accurate reporting of existing attitudes would be interpreted after 1950 as endorsement of them.  Thus in merely participating in the attitude of his day Ed has been interpreted as a bigot by the various members of the Liberal Coalition.   They have caused his books to be excised of any term or passage they deem offensive to their sensibilities.   In doing so, of course, they have destroyed any evidence while there is nothing today in his published book that could offend the most Liberal.  Hence, it never happened and  Liberals can’t prove it did.

In addition as an avowed anti-Communist his successors have to fight the obliteration of his reputation from that quarter.  The main threat is the TV and movie reformulation of Tarzan and John Carter into a Communist mold.

While Ed’s problems with accusations of anti-Semitism wouldn’t surface until 1919 after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, the groundwork was being laid as the second decade opened.  But a survey of that situation can wait to Book II and the years from 1920 to his death.

It may be sufficient for the present to note that the texts have been bowlderized to meet the prejudices of the current age.  Thus any references that Jews and Negroes might find ‘offensive’ have been excised  from the texts with the full compliance of ERB, Inc. since the sixties.

In the year or so before the acceptance of the Princess Of Mars Ed appears to have accepted the inevitable taking a job with Systems Magazine where he dispensed advice to readers on how to be a successful businessman.  Interesting occupation for a guy who failed at selling pencil sharpeners.

During this period Ed pleads extreme poverty even to the extent of pawning Emma’s jewelry.  I think the claim can be significantly discounted.  As Ed had thrown over a promising career at Sears then such poverty if it existed was self chosen.  In the second, his income at Systems, which seems to have been a profitable firm, must have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $3000 a year, well above the destitution level.  And then he had no sooner sold Tarzan Of The Apes to Munsey’s than he quit Systems to assume a fulltime career as a writer.

One admires his boldness but one is appalled at the huge risk he took.  As Emma, his friends and relations were shocked at the leap of faith Ed must have been thought of as foolish.  Now, not only did he quit his day job but he immediately made plans to take a nine month long vacation to San Diego.  This is without any money in the bank and no source of income other than the hope that whatever he wrote would sell.  His only source of income being from the relatively low paying pulps as compared to the slicks such as the Saturday Evening Post.

I doubt that there was anyone who didn’t think he was out of his mind.  If I’d been there I would have had to agree.  The act was at the very least premature.  Ed didn’t do anything on the cheap so he bought first class rail tickets including the freight for his second hand car and, I repeat, this is with only current cash in hand.  Any expenses in San Diego would have to be met by receipts from the sale of his stories.  This blows my mind whenever I think about it.

As it turned out he got along by the skin of his teeth leaving San Diego with about as much pocket money as he had when he arrived nine months earlier.  Now, this goes further: his income for 1913 was ten thousand dollars- a handsome income for the time- which he blew as fast as it came in.  One can only imagine the strain this placed on his marriage.  While Ed Undoubtedly thought the money would come rolling in forever, in which as it turned out he wasn’t wrong, Emma must have been distracted to the point of her endurance.

Why would Ed do this?  He obviously had a compelling psychological need:  His desire to reclaim the lost kingdom of his youth, the repressed life since then, found release in the merest glimmer of success.  He expressed his self-realization in the most extreme acts of the nouveau riche.

Once back in Chicago in the Spring of 1914 with the first efflorescence  of repressed self-expression over Ed now had to settle down into continued production.

A Writer’s Life

He still had no other outlet for his stories than Munsey’s and other pulp magazines.  While Tarzan had had a blockbuster effect within the small and despised universe of pulp readers, that smash was a mere ripple in the rest of the literary world.  Besides in realistic terms Ed’s stories were obviously derivative as well as preposterous.

As he himself later acknowledged his career was really jump started when the New York Evening World began the serialization of Tarzan Of The Apes in newspapers.  From the World the story was picked up by several other newspapers so that he earned another thousand dollars from that source while having the fame of the Tarzan story broadcast to a much larger audience than the pulps.

However, it was essential that Ed find a book publisher.  His writing was so outre that there was no publisher that would touch him regardless of the obvious popularity of  Tarzan.  He was turned down by all the major houses.  Ed was a literary pioneer.  To be a success in the pulps at that time was not a respectable achievement.  It would take another ten to fifteen years for publishers to recognize the market and that only after the phenomenal success of Bernarr Macfadden’s True Romance pulps that began after the War.   Ed had the proverbial million dollar idea with no way to get it to realization.

Ed was forced to attempt to get local publisher McClurg’s to publish his wildly successful novel in pulps and newspapers.  McClurg’s who after all had published Zane Grey’s The Short Stop who now in 1914 after The Riders Of The Purple Sage was wildly successful, would soon go on to publish some astoundingly stupid titles, stoutly rejected Tarzan Of The Apes.

It was only when Ed was making arrangements with a Cincinnati publisher that McClurg’s had a sudden change of mind.  Thus a very small press run was published in 1914.

This is where the elation of success ended and the drudgery of management began.  I haven’t seen the contract but I’m sure it’s interesting.  Apparently Ed gave the publishing rights to McClurg’s for everything for fifteen years.  Now, the prevailing opinion  was that Ed was writing indescribable trash that for some miraculous reason sold.  Even then Tarzan Of The Apes was received by the reprint house, A.L. Burt, with some trepidation.  They required McClurg’s to guarantee the run by agreeing to buy all unsold copies.  McClurg’s must have forced the book on them.

Contrary to reports of millions of copies having been sold when AL Burt turned the volume over to Grosset and Dunlap they reported somewhat less than seven hundred thousand copies sold.  Of course Burt may have fudged selling perhaps twice as many but reporting the lesser figure but we can’t know.

As the Burt figures covered the first rush and G&D discontinued publication of Tarzan Of The Apes within a few years it is perhaps doubtful that the first of the series even sold a million copies.  McClurg’s themselves contracted to print only 15,000 copies of the first edition of which there is doubt that they printed even that many copies.

So, by 1915 Ed had a pretty good backlog of titles available for publication of which McClurg’s published only one Tarzan title a year although later that decade they began to release the Mars books.

During all the decade Ed was hot in the pulp market.  His work was eagerly received by the pulp readership.  At the same time it wasn’t unusual for the popular writers at this time to issue two, three or even four books a year.  Why then as there was a proven market for Burroughs’ name McClurg’s policy was not to market a hot author aggressively requires some explanation.  Unfortunately that isn’t likely to be forthcoming.  All the principals are dead while the successor company to McClurg’s advised me that all those files were lost while seeming reluctant to even discuss the issue.

Even though sales were good McClurg’s refused to print much more than ten or fifteen thousand copies of new titles, turning the volumes immediately over to the reprint publisher who put a fifty cent price on the books refusing Ed’s pleas to sell them for at least a dollar.  This they steadfastly refused to do until 1948.  The appearance is that they even refused to satisfy the market finally allowing their titles to go out of print for a couple years after WWII.  When Ed published the titles under his control in 1948 at a dollar apiece G&D followed suit with theirs finally getting the price above fifty cents.   There’s a story there that needs to be investigated.

Late in second decade of the century Ed was pleading with McClurg’s to print at least forty thousand copies of the first edition which they stoutly refused to do.  This was important to Ed who received ten percent of the $1.30 retail price on the first edition and only 2 ½ cents on the reprint edition.

There was an ongoing struggle with McClurg’s for the length of the contract.  At the same time the movie industry was developing by leaps and bounds.  Merely a collection of one reelers at the beginning of the decade what were called seven and eight reel photo plays that actually told a story were being made.  Hollywood was about to become the movie making capitol of the country but there were still companies in New York and Chicago.  Ed hooked up with a Chicago company where he learned the woes of the fast and loose manner of the flickers.  Boy, you really had to read those contracts and even that didn’t help.  When I was in the record business in the seventies a major firm told me that a verbal contract was worthless and even if I had a written contract it wouldn’t be honored.  If I wanted to sue it would take me decades and big money and then I still wouldn’t win and if I did win they still wouldn’t pay.   Of course, by the seventies they had really developed their system.

Ed had an early success when The Oakdale Affair was filmed and a blockbuster when Tarzan Of The Apes was released.  Collecting your money from the producers then and now was and is no easy task.  I have other stories but this isn’t the place.  But, the movies were essentially out of Ed’s hands so they don’t particularly pertain to Ed’s writing.

However, having devoted his time more or less fully to his writing through mid-1914 Ed began to squander his attention into less productive areas than his writing.  I think this was a major mistake.

After the first gush was over in 1914 Ed had to search for his stories a little more.  Rather than blasting them out one after the other in writings of thirty to sixty days Ed settled down to two or three a year.

When Ed incorporated himself in 1923 many think this was an innovation but in fact writing factories existed that issued titles under the same name although written by various writers, hence all those series like The Motor Boys and Tom Swift.  Some writers were so prolific they wrote several stories a year using many different names.  Baum himself published under both male and female pseudonyms.

Rather than settling down and attending to his writing Ed began to try to write movie scenarios that weren’t successful thus being a total waste of time.  Perhaps antsy about getting his money Ed was a querulous presence on the movie lots making such a nuisance of himself that he was ultimately banned.

This was the beginning of a heady time for writers who could collect from several media: magazines, newspapers, books movies and even radio.  As O. Henry explained it to Ed’s editor, Bob Davis:

Under the influence O. Henry turned to philosophizing until finally his thoughts led him to the salability of the printed word.

“For example, here is a notebook,”  he said, taking the sheaf from his coat pocket.  “It contains a dozen sheets of blank, white paper.  With a lead pencil on these several sheets I write a tale three or four thousand words in length.  You buy the story and print it in one of the magazines you edit.  If it is a good story it gets into a book, or perhaps is dramatized and put on the stage.  Very well; that’s a beginning that has to do with its earning power.  I begin to get royalties on the volume, the serial rights, the drama and maybe some day a motion picture.  It goes on and on reaping profit and yet it is never anything put the figment of my imagination converted into words.  Is that clear.”

The term intellectual property began to have real cash value.  Even the writing style began to conform to a scenario format.  If one were fortunate to create a stellar character like Tarzan your fortune was made.  While Ed’s personality prevented the success he should have enjoyed others profited greatly.  With the advent of sound movies the Charlie Chan series released three and four movies a year for a decade or more.  The series made the phrase ‘Number One Son’ a household term but Ed languished at the rate of a movie every two or three years.  But, more on that later.

If ever someone’s past rose up to nip them from behind it was Ed’s.  In psychological terms Ed was severely emasculated while being hysterical in nature.  Just as memory constellates around its fixations so a type of writer constellates readers of the same type as himself.  It may not be pleasant to realize it but if you are a Burroughs reader you are hysterical and emasculated to some degree.

Thus in writing his stories Ed constellated around his fixations.  Having created his original characters, Tarzan, John Carter, and associated them with his mental fixations Ed then ransacked the literature he had read for incident and plot lines.  This was partly done because Ed really admired the books he ‘quoted’ and wanted to write stories like them.  If one is familiar with his reading then one can easily find the framework for his novels.

After 1912 when Ed quit his job to rely on his writing for an income he was confronted by new realities and temptations.  One key reality was that he had a wife he didn’t want.  Quite possibly he had never wanted Emma as a wife merely marrying her to spite Frank Martin.  When he told this to his long time friend Bert Weston, Weston scoffed but I believe it is true.

Ed said that he walked out on Emma three times.  While those times are not glaringly obvious one may have been somewhere between 1908-10 when he is reported calling her on the phone from East Bend, Indiana and a second may have been in 1918 before leaving Chicago.  Certainly Ed’s success created great turmoil in his mind.

Having been put down most of his life while knowing he had a great talent, the realization of that talent caused a great sense of elation and self-confidence.  However, because  of his emasculation he still retained, at least for the time, a semi-dependent personality.  He was easily influenced.  Thus, after the publication of A Princess Of Mars when I believe he had the Carter Trilogy blocked out in his mind, while having formed the Tarzan conception in his head, he allowed his editor, Metcalf, to persuade him to write a medieval Men In Iron type story that was popular at the time in stories such as those of Howard Pyle.

Ed complied writing The Outlaw Of Torn that might have been well received by the readership but would also have presented Ed as a conventional writer rather continuing the sensationalist departure of Princess.  In any event Metcalf rejected the story and rather than spend god knows how long tampering with the story for Metcalf’s satisfaction Ed wisely chose to shelve it and move on to Tarzan Of The Apes confirming his innovative status.

Metcalf accepted the story while running the entire novel in one issue.  But remember you’re only talking about a potential hundred thousand readers in a despised literature.  While Ed’s success was immediate it was like summer lightening, all flash and no thunder.  Still he was a flash in the pulp sky that caught the attention of other publishers.

Ed followed Tarzan Of The Apes with  The Return Of Tarzan that Metcalf also rejected.  Enraged Ed shopped the story around to other pulps where it was accepted.   In the pulp world Ed was already a commodity so Metcalf, who let the story and possibly the author, get away was axed as Ed’s editor and replaced by the irascible Bob Davis who remained his editor until 1920 when Davis departed for what he hoped were greener pastures.

Thus as 1914 closed Ed had a guaranteed income from Munsey’s , a more or less guaranteed income from book publishing and a soon to be realized erratic but potentially long term movie income.  As the decade closed he earned peak income of a hundred thousand dollars, equivalent to several million today while with the addition of post-war global royalties life for that brief moment might have been viewed with quiet satisfaction.  He had seemingly regained his princely status as prognosticated by his three favorite books.  In addition John Carter was Warlord Of Mars and Tarzan was King of the Jungle.  One big thorn on the rose bush appeared in far off Russia where the communistic Bolshevik Revolution had succeeded.  But, that’s for later.

Back in 1912 when Ed’s old problems disappeared new ones arose to replace them.  Ever since 1899 Ed had had problems with those excruciating headaches which still plagued him.  Back in 1893 at the Columbian Expo Ed had seen the proto-body builder, The Great Sandow.   Sandow was a legend in his own time and for some thereafter, at least into my childhood.  Even today the top prize in body building is called the Sandow.

If Tarzan had a beginning the seed was surely planted in Ed’s mind by Sandow.  Ed was awed by Sandow but objected to the bunchy muscles preferring those, as he put it, that flowed like molten metal beneath the skin.  Ed mentions one of Sandow’s feats in Tarzan Of The Apes and  in Tarzan And The City Of Gold a few years after Sandow’s death models a character on him. (see my review https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/a-review-tarzan-and-the-city-of-gold-pt-1/ .  In that story Tarzan defeats the Sandow clone thereby settling the issue of which muscles were best.

Also a nonentity in the Exposition audience was Bernie McFadden.  Bernie was not long to remain a non-entity.  He was soon to become the Father of American Body Building under the name of Bernarr Macfadden.  Within six years he had founded Physical Culture magazine and become active in the American pursuit of the perfect food of the gods.

He originally set up in the center of the health food fadists, Battle Creek, Michigan, home of that perfect food Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.  Along about 1908 Bernarr recognized the limited commercial possibilities of Battle Creek, removing to Chicago.  Here he began a highly successful chain of health food restaurants while developing his concept of the Juice Bar.  You cold go in and get a nice big glass of carrot juice for instance.  The discovery of vitamins in the 1920s was a ways in the future so while Bernarr didn’t know he was providing essential vitamins such as A and C he knew the juice did something for you.  Of course he was thought of as nut cake and was lucky to escape the asylum,

It hadn’t been too many years earlier that that fate had overtaken the discoverer of antisepsis Ignaz Semelweiss.  That poor guy after discovering that a simple washing of the hands could save the lives of several thousands of  women lost in childbirth, and demonstrated it, was rejected by the medical community who refused to believe the facts before their eyes.  Poor old Ignaz campaigned so violently for those lives that he was thrown in the loony bin where he died.   When Lister discovered germs giving the doctors a handle for belief Ignaz was of course exonerated but…dead.

A lot of water goes under the bridge in a few decades so that what would get you killed in ancient Athens, committed in nineteenth century Germany was dismissed as mere eccentricity in 1900 as Bernarr went on to a fortune.  That’s what’s called social progress.

So Bernie, pardon me, Bernarr like or not was a benefactor of the people.  If you followed his program of exercises and diet he would make you big and tough.  What he did for Charles Atlas he could do for you and me.  If we had the determination.  I never did.

Bernarr Macfadden

Now, Ed had been everywhere trying to find a cure for those headaches.  There are indications that he found his way to Bernarr’s door.  Whether or not Bernarr’s remedies were helpful by the mid-teens Ed’s headaches lessened or disappeared over the decade while if this picture isn’t a body building pose I don’t know what it.

Macfadden didn’t limit his activities to physical culture; he was a real game changer.  From Physical Culture Magazine he moved into pulps creating the Romance genre.  Among his many pulps were True Detective, True Story, True Romances, and moving into the paranormal, Dream World and Ghost Stories.  Dealing with the more mundane he founded the great movie magazine, Photo Play, that had a very long run.

Bernarr entered the newspaper field with the sensationalist New York Graphic.  It featured the despised journalistic innovation, the Composograph, in which actors enacted crime scenes and whatever.  Macfadden was a sensation for over thirty years.  Of course like Dr. Semmelweiss, his innovations far exceeded the imaginations of his peers and while escaping the gallows or the asylum his competitors  worked very hard to destroy his success in which they ultimately succeeded.  Fabulous story though.

Thus while probably not having the influence on the creation of Tarzan that the Great Sandow had, I’m sure that Physical Culture Magazine and the Juice Bars figured in there somewhere.  That magic food has yet to be discovered though.  Henry Ford thought maybe soybeans…

Along with his improving health in the decade Ed’s financial status, of course, bloomed like the fabled Century plant, it only blooms once in a hundred years but with spectacular result.  Unfortunately as Bob Dylan, who should know, says:  There’s no success like failure and failure is no success at all.  Everyone wants success but success is frequently the greatest challenge of all.

After imagining himself a slighted genius for thirty-five years Ed had his wildest fantasies realized in his fabulous year of 1913.  He had pulled the Big Carrot up by the root.  One imagines he was delirious with the sense of achievement and power.

If anything he would have been able to show his father that he was a good man, that he had amounted to something.  Unfortunately for his ego his father died in March of 1913 before he had plucked the big fruit from the tree.  He had sold Princess and Tarzan but an unforgiving father might easily have considered those flukes while being dismayed that Ed would give up his day job in the wild hope of continued literary success.

Ed himself had no misgivings.  Having pawned Emma’s jewelry a couple years earlier to buy coal he was in a position to turn those chunks of coal into diamonds as big as the Ritz.  He believed he had money to do all those things he’d always wanted to do and he went out and did them even before he had the check in the bank.  God almighty, he even bought himself a set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire and read it as one of his first acts.  How long had he been yearning for that wonderful history, I wonder.

Naturally an auto was top priority.  Ed was in such a rush for that that he bought a used car, a Vellie, possibly from the proceeds of Tarzan.  After he sold that car in 1913 in San Diego he bought a new car every year of the  decade.   Despising the poor man’s wheels, the Ford, he bought more expensive marques until he ended up with the royal Packard from the twenties till his death.

Ed just bought and bought and bought.  Old memories rose up and bit him.

The memory of the trip to NYC in Frank Martin’s private railroad car left the old indelible impression on him quite apart from Toronto.  It was the only way to travel, he said.  Thus at the first glimmer of future, not present, earnings Ed packed up wife and kids, dog and used Vellie and left for California a couple months after his father died.  They traveled first class, that is, Pullman.  It would have been possible to book a whole car for himself.  It would be interesting to know if he did which then would have been a simulation of a private car thus rectifying that memory.  As the private car was related to Emma the question would be was Ed showing Emma he could do anything that Martin could do?  The trip would also probably refer back to the guilt fixation Ed incurred when he gambled away their last forty dollars in Idaho.  While the couple was essentially traveling on empty pockets yet a substantial sum would be spent thus correcting the forty dollars while rather than taking Emma to the wilderness, to which she must have objected, he showed her the luxury of San Diego.

In his mind this probably wiped the slate clean making up to Emma his previous feelings.  The psychodynamic didn’t work quite that way.  One can only guess the humiliation and fear Emma felt when Ed announced he’d lost their stake.  Emma had put a lot of faith in Ed when she married him electing him over a suitable rich man.  To then learn the man she married was an irresponsible fool may have embittered her a great deal.

Now when she could hope for security here Ed is out spending extravagant sums before he earned them.  One can only guess at her mental state but I’m sure Ed’s success, that might very well be fleeting, alone could not restore her confidence without some demonstration of stability and responsibility from Ed.  Forget that; Ed would never live with both feet on the ground.

Thus Ed wrote his two pleas in the two stories of The Mad King.   Barney and the Mad King are twins just as Tarzan and Esteban Miranda will be twins in Ant Men.  Barney is the new competent breadwinner Ed while the Mad King is the old ‘inefficient’ Ed.  In this story the new Ed switches places with the old Ed with the Princess Emma as the prize.  But Emma was still too hurt by the past to forgive and forget.  It would take more wooing, more abasement but here Ed through in the sponge.

One can only guess at her mental state in San Diego but I’m sure Ed’s success, not yet confirmed, which might very well be fleeting, alone could not restore her confidence without some stability and responsibility from Ed.  Forget that.  Ed would live with both feet on the ground.

Thus Ed wrote his pleas to Emma in the two stories of The Mad King.  The implication there is that the two lookalike men, Barney and the King were both Ed in the guise of The Prince And The Pauper.  Ed felt restored to his lost kingdom but as this would have been while they were living hand to mouth in San Diego, albeit luxuriously, Emma was belieing and rejecting Ed’s fantasy.

Thus in the succeeding The Eternal Lover, Emma the faithless is replaced by Barney’s sister, Victoria.  The memory fixation remained unexorcised leaving Ed now greatly embittered as in his eyes he had done his part and made himself a man.  Soon as the Happy Hobo of the Return Of The Mucker he would be on the road looking for the perfect lover by the sea.  The seeds of divorce had been sown.  The path would now lead to Florence.

Back in Chicago in the Spring of ‘14 Ed had to deal with some problems.  He still had to find a book publisher.  When a Cincinatti publisher showed interest McClurg’s suddenly buckled and signed Ed to their disastrous contract.

Ed had every reason to expect the books to be a best seller.  By 1914 Tarzan was close to a household word, virtually the wonder of the age.  I have no doubt Ed built castles in air, yachts on the sea,  based on his expectations.  These were cruelly dashed when McClurg’s  failed to promote the book leaving him with virtual peanuts.

Ed was still at a different transitional point that even if he had realized it he was too inexperienced to take the appropriate actions.  One soon reaches a point having achieved success in which one finds oneself the key point in a broader enterprise.  As the artist one should concentrate on one’s art and begin to organize a corporate entity to handle the more mundane details.

One needs agents and managers.  It is necessary to entrust your earnings to these people to a very large extent.  History has shown that with rare exceptions these agents are dishonest men or women who fleece their clients.

H.G. Wells solved this problem by entrusting these details to his wife, Jane.  She was both competent and honest serving Wells’ interests ably.  Emma might certainly have been able to perform these functions for Ed if she had been willing and he had been so minded.  Ed however considered himself or wanted to be a businessman.  Repeated failures didn’t convince him he should remain an artist.

The artist and the businessman are two different roles.  Mark Twain to his chagrin learned that he should have stuck to his pen and let businessmen run businesses when he managed to bankrupt himself.  Ed very nearly bankrupted himself when he tried to run Tarzana as a business.  You may be sure Emma would never have done that although she might not have been able to maximize the finances, at least they wouldn’t have been broke.

Thus, Ed dissipated his talent in unfruitful endeavors.  His McClurg’s contract was a done deal however his movie contracts absorbed a great deal of his time and attention that might better have been handled by professionals.  It can be said for Ed that the relationship between authors and studios was a new phenomenon.  It was not clear to him that movies and novels were two different things with different requirements.  The complexities possible in a novel have to be simplified into a few scenes in movies.

Against Ed it may be said that while he hadn’t figured it out other authors had.  They were more successful in exploiting the movies.

The coming of the Great War disrupted the world and the country.  Ed’s European royalties were non-existent until the post war realities set in.  This included the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the rise of the Jews as a semi-autonomous power in the US in conflict with the mores of the Aryans while they were in control of the movies as a culture forming medium.  They could determine what would be filmed and how.

The worlds that Ed had known before 1919 then just slipped away and were seen no more.  Just as 1900 had been a transition into a new world of a larger scale so was 1919.  The scale of operations increased enormously.  But, that’s for the next installment.

Ed had barely settled down on return from the 1913-14 California adventure when he determined on another in 1916.  This began as a trip to New England possibly to show his success to the Phillips Academy from which he had been ejected but having gotten as far of Emma’s mother’s  summer home in Coldwater, Michigan the cavalcade turned around heading West for Los Angeles, California.

By this time Ed had achieved a certain level of prosperity so that his road show included his car and a Republic truck, a drive and a couple tons of possessions and a large blue striped tent.  While these expeditions shine in one’s imagination before leaving the reality is often too tedious to be endured.  This was one of the latter for Ed and Emma.   See my essay http://www.erbzine.com/mag23/2316.html  After a good start on pavement the trip turned into a nightmare on the dirt and mud roads.  The marriage did survive the trip though; the kids had a great time.

Upon the return from California within a very short time the US was embroiled in the world war.  This too took up Ed’s time as he tried to get a job as a war correspondent.  Failing that he secured an appointment as a Major in the Illinois National Guard.  He engaged in some embarrassing street antics that I am sure did his reputation no good.  By January of 1919 when he fled Chicago for LA I am sure that he was considered a bit more than eccentric.  Whether other scandals were concealed I can only speculate.  As that involves Ed’s sexual attitudes it is necessary to return to 1912.

An Author Searching For Love

     While Ed’s writing is highly autobiographical, still it was necessary for him to keep his eye on the tastes of his pulp readership.  As Woodrow Nichols, writing in the ERBzine, has emphasized, that audience appreciated titillating soft porn or at least a significant part of them did.  There is also a line where a certain type of reader’s tastes are emphasized by an author so that he expands that audience, creating it so to speak.  Nevertheless Ed’s writing is highly sexually charged although in a repressed way.  As a young boy reading Ed any sexual innuendo passed over my head although in a vaguely comprehending way it may have struck a response in my subconscious.  Nichols’ mother, however, got it and forbade Tarzan to him.  Still, Ed rather embarrassingly confessed that he was a ‘dirty’ writer.

At the same time his opinions were of the sexually tolerant sort.  He didn’t feel the need of marriage for sex; that was a minority opinion at that time.  He adopted a more libertine life style as time went on while after his divorce he seems to have adopted a more carefree sexual attitude.  The little book he did for the flapper Colleen Moore was quite a production of coy pornography.

I think it’s fair then to try to understand his sexual life in the times before he really began to spread his wings.

Now, Ed was sexually repressed.  That repression began on the street corner on the way to Brown School.    When John shamed  Ed he emasculated him to a high degree, while actually destroying Ed’s Anima.  Ed’s Anima became male in female clothing.  It apparently took him several years to assimilate the psychic changes.  When he had assumed his new personality at ages 12-14 he immediately began proposing to Emma who symbolically was the clothing John assumed.  Thus Emma was essential for Ed’s mental balance.

From that time forward Emma saved herself for Ed not even forsaking him when he had disappeared to Arizona without notice.  Indeed, she sent him a forget me not letter in September of ‘96.  So Ed needed her but didn’t necessarily want to marry her or anyone.  As he was knowledgeable in all the philosophical arguments of his day he probably always tended to the free love, free spirit side.

He was forced to change sides in 1900 in order to prevent Martin from possibly taking Emma.  He then destroyed Emma’s confidence  in him in 1904 when he gambled away their last forty dollars.  The marriage road was rocky from that point on especially given Ed’s employment record.

The key question is what happened to Frank Martin after Ed’s marriage?

I don’t know about your hometown but in my hometown and, indeed, any town I’ve ever lived in if you have competition for a woman that competition doesn’t go away just because you married the woman.  We know that Martin watched the couple closely because when they divorced Patchin showed up to question Ed for the details while on Ed’s death he sent a condolence letter to son John Coleman Burroughs reminding him of the Toronto bashing.  If it is to be believed John Coleman said he and his father had been talking about it just before Ed died.  If so, it was still green in Ed’s mind.

It seems probable then that Martin would have been interfering in the marriage to the best of his abilities.  Ed’s near pathological fixation on cars very likely was the result of not being able to compete with the millionaire Martin who probably tried to impress Emma with his own.  Parking out by the curb, whatever.  This does show up in Tarzan Of The Apes, the very first of the Tarzan novels begun in 1911 where Robert Canler/Martin, a competitor for Jane/Emma, using his money as a tool, has a large automobile.  Significantly Jane rejects Canler.  For whatever reason McClurg’s/G&D suppressed the novel after 1920 when it was never printed again until the revival in the sixties.

Lacking further evidence of Martin’s interference I, myself, accept that the man was unrelenting.

That very real external threat was added to Ed’s internal memory conflicts that he was desperate to resolve.  Like many another author he attempted to write them out.

The early struggle between he and Emma was worked out in the early burst of stories and completed in the Mucker Trilogy with its supplement of Marcia Of The Doorstep.

Ed intended Billy Byrne, the Mucker, to be a continuing series like Tarzan but centered around the ‘three musketeers’ Bridge, Byrne and Burke but his memories arose to abort that plan.

Byrne was intended as another Tarzan figure that represented the more uncouth, low brow aspect of Ed’s personality.  While he had no aspirations to be high brow yet he wished to become more sophisticated.  Thus, his alter ego Byrne begins as a hoodlum boxer from the amazing slum of Maxwell Street.

Implicated in a murder Byrne has to get out of town.  In a rather amazing series of adventures beginning with his shanghai in San Francisco he ended up on a Pacific Island with a crew of murderers and ‘Lady’ Barbara, reminiscent of Stevenson’s Treasure Island of Long John Silver and the Wooded Island with the Japanese Pavilion of the Chicago Exposition.

The relationship between the low brow Byrne and the high brow Barbara seems to reflect that of Ed and Emma.  In the first novel of the trilogy Byrne and Barbara part as Byrne realizes the cultural gap between them is something he can’t surmount.  By the way, notice all those Bs.  Bridge, Byrne, Burke, Barbara.    What does that mean?

Between the 1913 novel and its 1915 sequel, The Return Of The Mucker, Ed seems to have acquired some polish.  He no longer thinks of himself as Byrne thus splitting off the character of The Happy Hobo, Bridge as his new alter ego.  So by 1915 he is multiplying his personalities at a pretty good rate as he seeks to realize his own ultimate vision of himself.  Thus the name Bridge symbolically represents the transition from Byrne to a return to his original identity as the child Prince.

At story’s end Ed surrenders Barbara/Emma to Byrne while going in search of his ideal woman.  At that point then Ed rejected Emma seeking solace in other quarters.  Of course he does have three children so it is not as easy as walking away although he did say that he had walked out on Emma three times.  The first time was circa 1908 and the next might have been 1918 when he began Tarzan the Untamed followed by Tarzan The Terrible and Tarzan And The Golden Lion with Tarzan And The Ant Men for a quartet.

The first novel tells of the separation, the second the effort to reconcile, and the reconciliation while the fourth, the ultimate rejection.

The third novel of The Mucker Trilogy, The Oakdale Affair has Bridge on the road where he hooks up with the boy/girl Gail Prim.  That story may signify an actual extra-marital romance that in turn led to the 1916 trip to California and something similar to the exit from Chicago in 1919.

The question here then, is did Ed have an affair or more between 1913 and 1919?  Ed did have libertine tendencies.  He and Emma appear to have been living a sort of Bohemian existence in the first decade of the century.  Ed stated he didn’t feel marriage necessary for sexual relations while when he created his subdivision of Tarzan in the twenties he advertised that he wanted to appeal to Bohemian tastes.  Somewhat of a social scandal actually.

As a down and outer before the teens Ed may have had difficulties in attracting women but certainly by 1915 his reputation would have attracted literary groupies and the woman looking for the main chance.  The groupie is usually associated with rock and roll but there are sports groupies, literary groupies, and woman attracted to men of any well paying profession.  So one has to assume that sexual conquests  were easier for Ed as his reputation grew.  Any woman reading the Tarzan books would have had to have seen the sexual longing evident on nearly every page and realized the possibilities.

Let us assume then that long before Florence turned up Ed was searching, a la Bridge, for the woman who wasn’t Emma.

ERBzine contributor Woodrow Nichols who is very sensitive to the sexual implications of the novels, probably because his mother denied them to him because of their sexual implications, has extrapolated advanced conclusions from the stories and Ed’s biography.  While I’m not sure Ed, Florence and Ashton Dearholt where as sexually abandoned as Woodrow represents, I’m positive Ed would have like to have been.

Woodrow posits some possibilities that Ed knew Florence long before their putative first meeting in 1927.  I can find no clear evidence that this is so yet I can’t dismiss the possibility out of hand without further research.

Woodrow thinks it possible that Ed knew Florence as early as 1918 in Chicago.  Florence was a Chicago native born in 1904, who would have been fourteen in 1918.  At first glance one dismisses the possibility out of hand.  It seems incredible, yet….  Ed makes three references in the Tarzan series to fourteen year girls while the last experience in 1930’s Tarzan the Invincible can be directly associated with Florence.  I have always found the references to fourteen year olds puzzling dismissing them as appeals to the prurient interests of his readership.  But if one relates the incidents to one another they tell a story.

If Ed fixated on Emma at fourteen then he was likely open to a relationship with a fourteen year old girl.  Just as Emma stopped his sexual development at fourteen in reaction to John the Bully, a relationship with a fourteen year old girl would free him from the past and allow him to go forward as though beginning a new life.

The problem is how would Ed meet a fourteen year old Florence in Chicago.  Probably a lot of possible ways but Woodrow feels that The Girl From Hollywood holds the key.  I consider Woodrow an acute analyst so I seldom wish to contradict him outright, in that novel Shannon Burke and her mother move in up the road from Rancho Ganado.  Her mother dies shortly thereafter.  In this scenario the mother is the key.  She was a stage mother eager to get her daughter in the movies.  A great many of these early movie heroines began careers at the putative age of sixteen or possibly younger.  It will be remembered that Ed became associated with the movies in 1917 or ‘18 while being the author of a household word.  Tarzan was a rage before the first movie was released and a phenomenon after.  Who better to choose to get her daughter into the movies?

To cite an example:  The mother of Natalie Wood also wished to get her daughter in the movies.  She thought Frank Sinatra could be of assistance.  The mother then gave the sixteen year old Natalie to Frank as a sex toy.  Frank and Natalie then had a sexual relationship that was broken up because it would have been so dangerous for his career if discovered.

Now, Shannon’s mother in Girl From Hollywood is treated very tenderly by Ed in the story as if he had something to be grateful for.  This is fairly obvious.

I don’t say it is so but it is possible that Florence’s mother offered Ed Florence in the same manner.  If so this would have been sometime in 1918 when Ed was particularly vulnerable.  Florence and her mother left Chicago for Hollywood late in 1918 followed by Ed at the beginning of 1919.  It is possible that his departure was necessitated while somewhere in this period Ed and Emma were separated requiring three novels to reconcile them.  Also the trip to Opar in Tarzan and the Golden Lion was the longest of the oeuvre while Tarzan and La leave Opar together to spend some time in one of the beehive houses in the Valley of Diamonds.  Diamonds being a sex symbol for Ed also associated with Balza/Florence in Tarzan And The Lion Man as Ed and Emma divorced.

In Tarzan And The Ant Men Esteban Miranda takes up with a fourteen year old Negro girl with whom he sleeps but like Tarzan and La in Jewels of Opar no sex is involved.  In this case Miranda is the weak pre-success Ed while the ‘real’ Tarzan is post-success Ed.

And then in 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible Wayne Colt, the pre-success Burroughs is imprisoned in Opar from which the fourteen year old Oah releases him.  Burroughs, the author, casts her to her fate with the Oparians without a backward look.  This reinforces the transition from 14 year old Emma to 14 year Florence with whom he had reconnected in 1927.  The connection would have been reestablished now that she was twenty-six and the fourteen year old would no longer be needed.  Bear in mind this is speculation but Ed lived vicariously through Tarzan as The-Man-Who-Would-Be-Tarzan melding his own activities into his Tarzan surrogate.

Florence left Chicago in 1918 at fourteen which means that in 1920 she was sixteen and eighteen in 1922 when she was in a Western film with Ashton Dearholt.  She and he married four years later in 1926.  Thus, also immediately after bearing her own little Eddie she insinuated herself into Joan Burroughs’ good graces bringing about her supposed first introduction to Ed when he ‘fell in love at first sight.’

After Tarzan The Magnificent both La and Opar disappear from the oeuvre while a few years hence La/Florence and Ed would be married.  Opar and La  first appeared in 1913’s Return Of Tarzan when Ed was feeling rejected and ended in 1930 when Ed effectively rejected Emma.  So in 1913 he must have created his dream girl in La thinking he had found her in 1918 while not realizing his desires until 1927-34.

In the interim Florence at sixteen in 1920 would still have been too young for Ed to have exchanged Emma for her.  At eighteen in 1922 Florence met Ashton Dearholt marrying him in 1926 while somewhen between 1920 and 1926 marrying and divorcing this fellow named Smith of whom apparently nothing is known.

Ed then would have referred to Florence as being in the arms of Esteban Miranda in 1923’s Tarzan And The Ant Men and possibly he also referred to her in 1922’s The Girl From Hollywood.

I’ve always had difficulty understanding why a young mother would have set her sights on a sixty year old author to the extent that she insinuated herself into daughter Joan’s company in order to meet and seduce this perfect stranger.

While there is no definite proof that Ed knew Florence before 1927 the literary evidence and the improbability of Florence hoping to catch Ed through Joan lends credibility to the possibility.

Certainly the dismissed biographers before Porges agreed to censor his findings must have come up with something that was thought better to conceal.

Well, no matter, I do think Woodrow Nichols is on to something although he has his own analysis.

With nineteen-nineteen Ed’s life as well as the course of world civilization takes a turn.  Book II, Part VII then will commence The New Era, as it was known.

Only The Strong Survive

Part I

An Examination Of Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid

(The Oakdale Affair)

As Created By Edgar Rice Burroughs

 by

R.E. Prindle

 

Part I

Background And Sources

 

Texts:

E.R. Burroughs: Out There Somewhere (The Return Of The Mucker), 1916

Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid (The Oakdale Affair) 1917

David A. Adams: ERB/London Connection, ERBzine #1298, 2005

Philip R. Burger: Whatever It Is, Gets You And Me, ERBzine 1412, 2005

R.E. Prindle: Only A Hobo, ERBzine #1329-34, 2004

(a).

 

Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid, published as The Oakdale Affair was written shortly after Burroughs posed for the famous picture of himself standing on the rock above the sea in Santa Monica in 1916.

Let’s take a moment to put these titles into perspective with Burroughs’ career. Let’s try to identify some of the changes he’s going through. It is safe to assume that in 1911 at 36 years of age when he sat down to write A Princess Of Mars he was in a state of terror that life had passed him by, that he had failed the big test from which there is no recovering. If he says that he considered writing to be an unmanly occupation then he was desperately grasping at the last straw. If he failed as a writer then he would have had an excuse as it was a sissy occupation but he still would have been psychologically destroyed.

But Princess sold and then too did Tarzan Of The Apes. Buoyed by these successes he continued to write achieving during the year 1913 a pinnacle of success achieved by few writers. Most importantly Burroughs could for the first time in his adult live perceive himself as a somebody, as the man he always thought he was or should be.

The miracle of 1913 continued and with the confidence of a seemingly inexhaustible pen promised to continue. Burroughs indulged his whims during those fantastic years between 1913 and 1916. He apparently bought everything that he had ever wanted. When he left on that fabled drive from Chicago to L.A. in addition to a car, a truck and a driver he had 2 1/2 tons of, pardon the expression, junk.

He was living in a dream. I envision the surreal picture of this caravan pulling to the side of the road away out there on the road to anywhere with Burroughs pitching his white and blue striped circus tent while the kids aged about eight, seven and three cranked up the record player. They didn’t need electricity in those days, you would wind the record player up. Then as the horn blared out ‘Are You From Dixie’ singing lustily the family danced in the moonlight. Place the picture against a rising full moon.

Imagine a country rube happening along on Old Dobbin to see such a scene. It’s just like Toad and his caravan from Wind In The Willows, isn’t it? What Memories the children must have had.

And all the time Burroughs’ personality was unraveling as he metamorphosed into a new persona.

Let’s take a look at that picture by the seashore closely. It is revealing. There is no reason not to believe that this picture was carefully thought out and posed by ERB. The photo is frequently cropped so as to put Burroughs in the center but in its uncropped state the sea stretches far to the left making the subjects of the photo both ERB and the feminine sea. Burroughs is standing on the right on a rock high above the water. Let us believe that was his intent. In his novel Somewhere Out There written from January to March 1916 the theme is the poem by H.H. Knibbs also titled Out There Somewhere in which the dream lover is waiting in the South by the sea. Obviously ERB has an idea fixed in his mind.

As he finished the novel he began his tramp South to San Diego and the sea. Thus the sea, the waters of the subconscious, the fructifying water of the female represents both the destructive and constructive aspects of the female. Standing on the rock, as opposed to the shifting sands, high above the waters represents Burroughs’ hopeful reunion with and dominance of the Anima.

Burroughs’ persona itself, his Animus is equally interesting. He is very expensively dressed. That overcoat is a very new one, either a Kuppenheimer or a Hart, Shaffner and Marx, as Burroughs combines the two names in a reference in Bridge And The Kid. It is also unnecessary in California at any time of the year. His shoes are shined, top quality also, probably Florsheim. His hat is pulled low over his face as he stands above the photographer looking down on him or her with a wry, bemused hint of a smile with which he endows his creations. His hands are in his pockets with the thumbs, the sexual symbol exposed. Thumbs are a sexual symbol of potency, as in ‘under my thumb’ so he is feeling confident in his success if not cocky. He is the Mysterious Stranger. The Shadow. The lurker in every mind. He is at the very height of his success and yet facing the problems his success has brought. This photo represents the high summer of his life. It is never going to be this good again.

Out There Somewhere pointed to a resolution of his psychological problems while Bridge And The Kid apparently resolved them, at least, for the moment.

There is an interesting numerical relationship in Burroughs’ visits to the coast. His first was in 1913, the second visit was in 1916 and he would move permanently to California in 1919- three year intervals, and each time he stayed about nine months- time to be born again. These are stress points. One wonders at what time in his life he began his California dreaming.

Thus Burroughs began Bridge And The Kid in a state of exhilaration. It took him nearly six months to finish it which for him was a long time.

His period of extreme fecundity was also over. In the future he would be driven to work because he needed the money but his psychological release was finished with these two novels.

(b).

 

Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid is one of Burroughs most finely crafted novels. It is extremely rich in content. Because of the apparent ease with which Burroughs writes one disregards the components of the tale and there are many in what I consider the most detailed and intriguing novel.

ERB began the hobo theme in vol. 1 of this trilogy, The Mucker, developed it in the sequel Out There Somewhere (The

Jack London

Return Of The Mucker) and continues it not only in the character of Bridge and the Kid but in the criminal gang and throughout the novel. The hobo obviously intrigued ERB and why not? Rather than just discuss the hobo theme as elements of the story let’s look more closely at the subject.

Just as today the so-called homeless occupy an amazing amount of social attention so in Burroughs’ time the hobo was an inescapable phenomenon. He was ubiquitous, he was everywhere as a reading of Out there Somewhere and Bridge and The Kid indicate. Burroughs found the hobo fascinating and even to a degree identified with him.

Every town of any size had a Main Stem on which the Hoboes congregated. Chicago itself with most rail lines converging on it from all directions was the Main Stem of hoboing while Madison was the Main Stem of Chicago. As it chances the offices of the American Battery Company were on Madison Street thus the young Burroughs would have had plenty of opportunity to observe and study the hobo.

As a yard policeman in Salt Lake City in 1904 he would have had further opportunity to familiarize himself with the species. His first writing effort- Minidoka- in 1908 or so gives the Hobo a prominent place actually siting Chicago as the Hobo capital of the country.

In both these novels he give a very unflattering picture of the Hobo. In both novels the Hoboes figure as criminals, even murderous criminals. In Bridge And The Kid they are responsible for the crime wave in normally placid Oakdale.

When the Kid stumbles upon a lair of six hoboes all are willing to rob her while an actual cold blooded attempt on her life was made by Dopey Charlie.

Burroughs associates one, the General, with Coxey’s Army of 1894. Eighteen-ninety-three was the beginning of a severe depression perhaps equal to the depression of the thirties. In 1994 Jacob Coxey organized a march on Washington of the unemployed seeking relief. The host was known as Coxey’s Army.

Burroughs who was frequently unemployed and hard up yet always found jobs to scrape by, exhibited all the pride of the resourceful by condemning the ‘soldiers’ of Coxey’s Army as bums who wouldn’t work, hence the General had never held a job and never would. He preferred to rob and kill rather than work.

One of the more memorable episodes of the book is when morning dawns on Jeb Case’s farm and the hoboes come streaming out of the barn and haystacks as Case takes up a shotgun to make sure they move on.

Burroughs who had no use for the IWW- the Industrial Workers Of The World- or Wobblies, introduces them also in the character of Sky Pilot. As the Wobblies were composed almost entirely of the hobo class they might easily have been classed as hoboes pure and simple. The Sky Pilot is I believe based on Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, the WFM, and then when he was expelled from that organization for being too aggressive, of the IWW where you couldn’t be too aggressive.

Big Bill is one of the great figures of the era, he has a great autobiography, and he figures indirectly in the history of the Burroughs Boys so ERB would have concentrated on his career. The battles of the hard rock miners in Colorado, Idaho and the West in general with the mine owners were ferocious. The resistance to their just demands by the mine owners forms one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history.

Big Bill was at the center of the dispute. In Idaho the governor who resisted the WFM was Frank Steunenberg. He had appointed Harry and George Burroughs as delegates to a mining conference so the Burroughs had an association with him.

When Steunenberg left the governor’s chair in 1905 he was blown to bits by a bomb placed in his mailbox. Big Bill didn’t place the bomb but it does seem likely that he planned the bombing. ERB thought so. In one of the most famous trials of the era Haywood was defended by Clarence Darrow who got him off with lamest defense ever.

Governor Frank Steunenberg

Thus Burroughs describes the Sky Pilot as the man who planned the crimes but was always somewhere else when they were committed. He made people ‘disappear’ in the manner in which Steunenberg disappeared.

From the WFM Big Bill went on to be the leader of the Wobblies. There can be no doubt that Burroughs was opposed to the Wobblies. In book after book in this period he denounces the outfit. After the Great War broke out in 1914 the IWW became especially active leading to the speculation that their activities were funded by the Kaiser’s gold. This was never proven at the time but it seems very probable as the Germans wanted to disrupt American productivity while Big Bill and the Wobblies wanted to take over industry and the government on behalf of the ‘working’ man, who had nothing to do with them. The crime wave of Oakdale caused by the hoboes may have been a fictionalization of a wave of IWW activity which resulted in a large number of violent strikes in 1916 shortly before this book was written. Thus Burroughs wove Big Bill Haywood, Coxey’s Army, The Western Federation of Miners and the ‘16 Wobbly actions into the story in ‘a highly fictionized’ manner.

If fact Burroughs may have been recapitulating several decades of labor history as he introduces the great Chicago

Big Bill Haywood

detective Burton. Obviously based on one level on Allan Pinkerton of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency which was employed to control labor unrest. In fact the Pinkertons had kidnapped Big Bill as operatives against the WFM turning him over to Idaho after Steunenberg was murdered. One of their operatives, Charlie Siringo, was instrumental in breaking up the miners in the Coeur D’Alene area. Wonderful story he tells in his A Cowboy Detective.

Not only does Burton represent the Pinkertons but after withholding his first name throughout the story, as an inside joke, Bridge who knows Burton hails him as Dick. Of course slang for detective was a ‘dick’ as in Dick Tracy but also Dick is short for Richard. So Burton was Richard Burton. Richard Francis Burton was the famous African explorer so Burroughs weaves in another historical reference.

By the time the book was finished on 6/12/17 the United States was involved in the war with Germany so at that point the activities of the IWW were treasonous.

(c).

The Incomparable Charlie Siringo

 

Burroughs’s novels are always more complex than they seem on the surface. Like any novelist he has to have a story to tell but that story arises from conscious and subconscious motives. Some of the conscious motives are in the relation of his disguised feelings about unskilled labor, the hoboes and the IWW. The subconscious motives emerge in his depiction of his heroine, Abigail Prim and the hero, the Happy Hobo, Bridge. As this is an Anima/Animus story it should be clear that Abigail Prim represent ERB’s Anima and Bridge represents his Animus. The two characters are not original to this story but a variation on all his heroines and heroes whose adventures are a variation of the adventures of all his heroes and heroines.

The Great Detective 1862 Allan Pinkerton

Burroughs entered the hobo theme in the first novel of this trilogy, The Mucker, then developed the theme in the middle volume, Out There Somewhere, which introduces his stellar character Bridge, the Happy Hobo.

As it chances one of Burroughs’ literary heroes was Jack London. London (1876-1918) was an exact contemporary, Burroughs being born in September, London in the following January. He was actually born eleven days after Emma.

It has been suggested that the death of London in 1916 influenced Burroughs’ writing of Out There Somewhere. As the book was written between January and March and London died in November of that year the connection seems unlikely.

It does seem likely that Burroughs read everything he came across of London’s. He seems to have thought he knew enough about London’s life to write a biography of him. If he was that familiar with London that is an interesting detail. It is impossible to know for certain what he read of London’s as there are no London titles in the Library as published on the ERBzine. While ERB seems to have made little attempt to fill in his library with titles that he read before he came into money it would seem likely that between 1913 and 1916 he would have picked up some London titles.

London was a very prolific writer penning dozens of novels, some few volumes of non-fiction and hundreds of short stories that appeared in dozens of magazines. It would seem highly probable that Burroughs would have read as much as he could find.

While London made a circuit of the United States and Canada in 1894 as a knight of the road not a great deal of his hobo writing had made it to print by 1916. The most significant of his hobo writing was a volume titled The Road of 1908. It would seem probable that Burroughs read at least this if he associated London with the road.

Perhaps more importantly London was uppermost in his mind in 1916 since W.R. Hearst had hired London to cover the Mexican Revolution in 1914. Bridge is introduced in Out There Somewhere on his way to Mexico. So that if Bridge is to be associated with London his despatches from Mexico were probably the immediate reason.

Even though Burroughs admired London as a writer they were at opposite poles politically. London claimed to be a confirmed socialist although he doesn’t write like one. As a revolutionist which he claimed to be he was in opposition to ERB.

Their views of the hobo were also in opposition so one wonders exactly what Burroughs was thinking. Burroughs makes Bridge the only honest hobo on the road while all others are depicted as violent criminals. In the first hobo scene in Out There Somewhere Bridge and Byrne are accosted by murderous hoboes who are defeated by the pugilist Byrne. The whole cast of hoboes in Bridge And The Kid are hardened criminals of the first water.

London on the other hand apologizes for his hoboes. When not victims of society they are philosophers who can astonish college professors with their learning. Thus London tends to whitewash the criminal aspects of the hobo. So, the question might arise as to whether Burroughs was correcting the image presented by his hero attempting to give him his take on the tribe. Remember London was still alive when Out There Somewhere was written and published in magazine form. It could have been meant for his eyes.

London was only eighteen when he made his tour of the country. He had already shipped out on a tour of the orient when seventeen. His moniker was Sailor Jack. He enlisted as a recruit in a clone of Coxey’s Army known as Kelly’s Army which left for DC from California.

As Burroughs mentions Coxey’s Army in Bridge And The Kid while he associates the Army with the IWW, then Wobbly activities may have called to mind London’s hobo experience. Obviously all these elements are interconnected.

If George Mc Whorter of the BB and Philip Berger are right and the L. in Bridge’s name refers to London Bridge that would be in keeping with the punning on the name Dick Burton.

London could be an element in the character of Bridge but not necessarily the dominant one while Byrne would also represent Jack London. It seems clear that Burroughs had been fascinated by the character of the hobo from an early age. As noted, the hobo appears as a significant character in his very first attempt at writing, Minidoka.

Burroughs may have affectionately joined his persona with that of London as Bridge is a declassed aristocrat which is almost a necessity for a Burroughs hero. In this case Bridge is a ‘Virginian’, a natural gentleman as well as a cultivated one. The Virginian in American history is the antithesis of the Puritan.

The Virginian was thought to be an innate gentleman, one of the ‘quality’ as opposed to the ‘equality’. The prototype of the manly man. Nearly all of Burroughs’ heroes are Virginians. Jack London didn’t have that distinction so in my opinion he represented Burroughs in his declassed state.

As a Virginian gentleman Bridge, apparently an unconventional sort, ‘volunteered’ to be a hobo because he rejected the settled life but he can reenter the aristocracy at will as he does at the end of the book. Hence while all other ‘boes are criminals or at least suspect Bridge is honest and above board. He’s known far and wide to the authorities as the only honest hobo. He’s the hobo who has Burton’s confidence.

In Out There Somewhere he is in search of the woman of his dreams. In Bridge And The Kid he finds her.

‘She’ is obviously Abigail Prim. Gail is a Cinderella figure. Her mother died. Jonas Prim, her father, remarried. Her stepmother, Pudgy Prim, while not conventionally wicked nevertheless does not wish the best for her step-daughter.

As the story opens, this is kind of hard to follow, Pudgy has sent her daughter to live with the man she has chosen as Gail’s future husband to see if she couldn’t learn to like him a little better. I’m sure I must have missed a connection somewhere but that is how I read it.

The man Pudgy has chosen for her is more than twice Gail’s nineteen years with the attendant infirmities. They used to age rapidly in those bygone days. ERB doesn’t tell us how old Gail was when her mother died but it seems strange that her father wouldn’t do more than grumble about this odd plan of his second wife.

While Gail appears to accept her step-mother’s decision to the extent of getting on a train bound for her suitor’s town she gets off early returning to Oakdale where she disguises herself as a boy then burgles her own property to take up a life on the road as a hobo. Of course ERB conceals from us that the girl Gail and boy burglar are one and the same.

Having looted herself of a fairly good sized fortune, a necklace alone was appraised by the General, a hobo, at fifty thousand dollars while she was carrying at least two thick wads of bills worth thousands as mixed in with the greenbacks, few of which were ones, were many yellow backs. There’s some currency information for you. Researching currency on the web it appears that yellow backs were hundred dollar bills while other denominations were all greenbacks. Completing the burglary she heads on down the road as night falls. After a couple misadventures with a dog and a bull Gail falls in with six criminal ‘boes in an abandoned shed.

A true innocent she flashes her fortune in front of the startled eyes of the ‘boes, hardened criminals every one. Mocking her naiveté one of the ’boes claims to know her as the Oskaloosa Kid who is out robbing and murdering at that very moment. Gail doesn’t know this, misses the joke and assumes the character of the Oskaloosa Kid.

After a failed robbery attempt by the ’boes Gail runs down the road in a gathering storm with the hoboes in pursuit. As she comes to a fork in the road she encounters the Happy Hobo, Bridge, who is apparently oblivious of the coming storm. He is merrily tramping along reciting some of his favorite poetry- out loud. The meter comes through better that way although the practice might raise comment from casual observers.

Bridge and the Kid join destinies.

So what is Burroughs talking about here in the psychological sense? He is following the same scheme he follows in all his Anima stories. Usually a sudden storm takes place on a yacht at sea and the survivors find themselves on a desert island. The plot develops that ERB used in the Outlaw Of Torn also. In that plot the little Prince’s nurse was murdered by a fencing instructor who then dressed as a woman to serve as the little Prince’s Anima. The Prince in Outlaw Of Torn was torn from his secure position in the world as Burroughs was in his.

In this story Gail has a wicked step-mother who wants to marry her off to an undesirable man. Gail voluntarily dresses and poses as a boy so that fencing master and boy serve the same function with the sexes reversed so that Gail is prepared to reveal herself and assume the role of Burroughs’ Anima returned to female form.

In Outlaw the Prince who becomes an outlaw, or outcast, Norman, is torn from his high station where he is declassed as an outlaw. In this story Bridge voluntarily declasses himself because he ’prefers’ life on the road among the criminals.

This book was written four years after Outlaw so Burroughs psychology has evolved. The emotional problem centers on Burroughs’ confrontation when he was eight or nine years old with a bully on the way to Brown school. ERB was so terrorized by the incident that his Animus was emasculated and his Anima was nearly annihilated. (The fencing master kills the nurse Maud and assumes the identity of the Anima.) As I have pointed out this means that Burroughs in his terror was hypnotized into accepting certain beliefs about himself. These are prime psychological facts which control one’s behavior. While under the influence of the hypnotist (John the Bully in this case) certain suggestions (Burroughs subconscious interpretation of the terror, his psychotic response) were fixated in his subconscious. These suggestions then influence or control the actions of the subject so long as they are active. They may be exorcised in the course of time, resolved in some manner, or they may control one’s actions for life as improbable as that seems to some people.

The purpose of analysis should be to locate these suggestions and resolve them. Freud called this ’the talking cure.’ Burroughs is doing the same thing in his writing, discussing the fixation (embedded suggestion) from many angles in an attempt to resolve it thus freeing himself from its control. All of his writings from 1911 to this novel contributed to its solution. In the Bridge Trilogy ERB succeeded in understanding his fixation but apparently lacked the follow through to eliminate it as a spirit of malaise followed him throughout his life.

In meeting his reconstituted Anima in boy’s disguise at the fork in the road or street corner, the crossroads in Outlaw, the original scene of hypnosis, he has recreated the original hypnotic incident. The hoboes pursuing Gail represent the bully. Symbolically they will all be joined in the haunted house during the storm. In this case the house takes the place of the desert island.

Thus Bridge leaves the broad, well-traveled road of happiness, (the yacht sinks) to join his destiny with the Kid on the less traveled hazardous road.

They enter the abandoned farm house which represents Burroughs’ self after the confrontation with John the Bully. Thus ERB’s Animus and Anima are once again together in his self or house although his Anima is disguised as a male and he doesn’t recognize her.

In this unresolved state the real Oskaloosa Kid drives by. He throws a woman from an open tonneau in a driving rain storm no less, firing a shot after her. The shot misses, the girl is stunned but otherwise uninjured. Thus ERB’s previous Anima is returned to him but unlike Maud she is unconscious but alive. The three are joined by the dual aspects of the bully spending the night together with them in a room of the farmhouse. So that is the set and setting.

2.

 

ERB is accused of being unduly influenced by his readings. This may be true. As a dependent personality as a result of his encounter he is highly influenced by those he admires. He has a high level of suggestibility as a result of his hypnosis. He seems to have been very willing to accept suggestions from his publishers such as Metcalf at All Story who suggested a medieval story which ERB undertook against his better judgment as Outlaw Of Torn.

However imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. ERB was a very flattering sort of guy. In this book he mentions several influences whose manner he imitates to some degree. But he always has a very original story.

The first issue is that of why a hobo hero. The hobo was an unacceptable topic for literature at that time, still is. In fact Burroughs’ two hobo novels are rather daring departures from tradition. There may be a genre of hobo novels, if so these two stories are bedrock of the genre. They may have been the first hobo novels published.

They were certainly intended as a tribute to Jack London. Although Burroughs acknowledges deep respect for London none of his volumes are found in Burroughs’ existing library. The library seems to consist of childhood books and volumes Burroughs purchased after he came into money. He doesn’t seem to have gone back and picked up old favorites. In such case we can’t know for sure how much of London’s Burroughs actually read.

London was prolific writing dozens of novels and collections of short stories along with some few non-fiction titles. Among the last was a record of his hoboing experience entitled: The Road. Published in 1908 there is a good chance Burroughs may have read it. An indirect proof might possibly be found in the sobriquet the Oskaloosa Kid. There is an Oskaloosa in both Kansas and Iowa. When London took his hobo trip from Oakland across the US and back by way of Canada in 1894 as part of Kelly’s Industrial Army he makes mention of incidents in Oskaloosa Iowa. If Burroughs read The Road the name Oskaloosa may have stuck in him memory.

London himself had difficulty getting The Road published as his publishers didn’t believe the hobo a suitable subject for treatment. If London ever intended a hobo novel he never wrote it. He did author several hobo related short stories. One can’t be certain which of the short stories, if any, Burroughs read. Certainly he couldn’t have read them all.

London was also sent to Mexico by the Hearst papers to cover the Mexican Revolution in 1914 so it is very possible that Out There Somewhere deals with the Mexican Revolution. Burroughs may have been more directly inspired by London’s Mexican dispatches.

In any event these two volumes are generally agreed to have a direct reference to Jack London with which conclusion I agree.

I did discuss the Bridge Trilogy in my Only A Hobo which elicited the response from fellow writer David Adams that I should have read Martin Eden if I wanted to understand Burroughs’ The Mucker. I had read it. I read it again. Unfortunately David failed to refer to the passages that would have enlightened me.

Reinforcing the hobo image of the two books is Burroughs use of hobo poetry throughout Out There Somewhere and the first half of Bridge And The Kid. Central to the first volume is HH Knibbs poem Out There Somewhere after which ERB’s story is named. The theme of that poem most important to Burroughs is that his dream woman or Anima awaits him in the South down by the sea. Weaving through these images and through Bridge And The Kid is Robert Service’s The Road To Anywhere. It doesn’t hurt to be familiar with these two poems.

If writing a hobo novel was avant garde, building one work around the work of another writer was no less daring. One can only say that ERB was fearless.

There is a possibility that Burroughs may have intended Out There Somewhere as an introduction to both Knibbs and London. He left for an extended stay in California shortly after completing the novel during which he may possibly have intended a trip North to Sonoma to visit London but his favorite author chose this unpropitious moment to cash in. November 22 is also the death date of John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley although forty-seven years later. If Jack hadn’t been in such a hurry he might easily have made it a three way termination.

It is noteworthy that Burroughs did extend an invitation to HH Knibbs who wrote the poem around which the novel was built and who did accept the invitation.

The hobo theme may also have been suggested by an increasing feeling of restlessness which resulted in the familial hoboing across the country after Out There Somewhere was completed in 1916.

Assuming the hobo influences of the IWW, London, Knibbs and Service, it would not seem necessary to look for others but Burroughs was able to cram more into a hundred fifty pages than any author I have read. On page one of Bridge And The Kid he mentions Sherlockian which refers to Conan Doyle, Raffleian which refers to the Raffles of Doyle’s son-in-law E.W. Hornung and the Alienist which refers to psychologists of some type.

Doyle was an ever present influence on Burroughs. His admiration for Doyle’s detective, Sherlock Holmes, permeates his work. He is forever trying to write a good detective story of which Bridge And The Kid is an excellent example if not the most perfect example of his Holmsian stories. A great many of his other novels have detective stories concealed within them.

Bridge And The Kid is one of the best. I’m sure everyone is able to guess that the Kid is a girl in disguise before the story ends but the question is how early? I don’t know exactly when I did but by the time the Kid went out to ‘rustle grub’ his relationship with Willie Case gave it away for sure. Still, even knowing did not diminish enjoyment of the rest of the story. Both Bridge and the Kid are excellent characters as was Burroughs’ detective Burton. Loved all three. Actually I loved all the characters including Beppo which were all drawn vividly.

One wonders if Burroughs knew that Hornung was Doyle’s son-in-law. If so the union of the two in one story is clever and piquant. Hornung and Raffles are probably not so well known now but Raffles was a very popular character for a long time. Whereas Doyle created the master detective his son-in-law created a mirror image master thief. Doyle didn’t take kindly to Hornung’s character, Arthur J. Raffles, for that was his name. Raffles was a gentleman thief or ‘amateur cracksman’ who stole from his hosts on country weekends. His sidekick was named ‘Bunny’. The Kid, Gail in disguise, is of course a counterpart to Holmes’ Watson and Raffle’s Bunny.

As a further inspiration then we have Holmes and Watson and Raffles and Bunny for Bridge and the Kid. Pretty amazing, huh? You can see why Philip Farmer got carried away in Tarzan Alive.

Then later in the book in a fit of exuberance Burroughs mentions H. Rider Haggard and Jules Verne although I can’t find references to their work in this story. Just ERB liked their stuff.

Finally we have to mention the Alienist. This certainly implies that Burroughs took more than a passing interest in psychology. As wide ranging as his interests were one is forced to believe that he knew who Freud and Jung were by 1917. What he knew of their work is open to conjecture although the story Tarzan’s First Nightmare of this period follows Freud’s dream theory pretty closely.

I would imagine he knew something of William James and I am convinced of FWH Myers. Beyond that I can’t say. It seems clear to me that Burroughs is attempting some careful psychological portrayals in this book.

Having discussed the preliminaries let’s see how Burroughs develops set and setting in this very delightful story of times, places and landscapes that will never be seen again.

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

A Review

Thuvia, Maid Of Mars

Part III-B

by

R.E. Prindle

     ERB was born in 1875 before education had been affected by the ideologies of either the Communists or Dewey.  He was given a Classical versus scientific education in his critical Jr. High years.  Thus he must have known Latin reasonably well.

     The current High School system of the US came to fruition only during the twentieth century.  Universal literacy only became realizable a very short time ago.  Child labor didn’t disappear until after the Second World War.  Thus ERB really had a favored childhood.  ERB must have been familiar with memorization and drill; methods of education now highly discouraged.  Therefore his education was directed toward a full consciousness than sink into the inherently criminal unconscious which Communist method prevails today.  As there was no audio-visual culture at that time his was a print mentality through say 1910 when the movies began to have significance.  By 1920, at least, he was fully involved in a print-movie culture hence a more unconscious mode of thinking.  Still, his early training led him to a conscious approach to experiencing and analyzing.

     One can’t know for sure which year he became aware but it is safe to assume 1888-90.  Thus his immediate past extended back to about 1850 just as for me the twenties and thirties form my immediate past.  Yours can be computed as about twenty years before you were born.  As we grow up these years form the topic of discussion we overhear from our elders.

     ERB’s near past then can be calculated as about 1800 so that dying in 1950 as he did his life straddled, as it were, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The nineteenth century was quite stunning in its diversity.  As a boy and young man ERB was alive at the time of ‘the winning of the West.’  His early life was lived in the high tide of ‘Western world supremacy.’  His heroes such as Teddy Roosevelt and Owen Wister epitomized the high tide.  The ‘Scramble For Africa’  of the last quarter of the nineteenth century formed the centerpiece of his literary corpus, that of Tarzan Of The Apes.  Also a key to his world outlook was the American Civil War that ended only ten years before he was born.  While I have found no direct evidence of the San Domingo Moment that occurred at the very beginning of the nineteenth century it is possible that he conflated San Domingo with the Civil War in the Martian series when the First Born, or Negroes, defeated the White Holy Therns nearly exterminating them.  Thus while ERB’s works are ‘pure entertainment’ if you look closely you’ll find some serious historical and social commentary.  If it weren’t there you wouldn’t have the Liberal Coalition condemning him as a bigot.  They do.

     For the purposes of this essay I will use a professor from Case-Western Reserve by the name of Richard Slotkin as a representative of the Liberal Coalition or Communist school.  In his essay Gunfighter Nation he lays the blame for everything he dislikes at the feet of Burroughs and two other writers- Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.  We will get there soon enough but first lets consider the ‘humanitarian’ record of the Coalition.  In one form or another the Coalition and its constituents date back to the French Revolution and hence San Domingo.  Thus the Coalition was born in blood and murder.  Murder on a grand scale, genocide in fact.   The ideology of the Coalition is that of the Communists.  The men Slotkin so roundly condemns are all anti-Communists so the ideological differences are clear.

     Over the two centuries plus since the Revolution over a hundred million people have been murdered by units of the Coalition with hundreds of millions more projected for the near future.  Yet Mr. Slotkin proposes to represent our trio as indescribably evil because he attributes the My Lai Massacre in Viet Nam not to them personally but as a direct result of their writings.

     So there we have the basic issues.  The hypocrisy of Mr. Slotkin should be self-evident.

     What was the opinions of Messers Burroughts, Grant and Stoddard that so inflame Mr. Slotkin?

     Quite simply they are conscious, objective scholars as opposed to the unconscious method of Liberal writers.  Liberal views are products of the unconscious and cannot stand up to critical analysis.  The unconscious is selfish and criminal hence wishful.  The attitude is not what is but what I want.

     The high tide of Western world supremacy was ending as it was cresting.  This was noticeable to more acute intellects as early as 1900 and perhaps a decade earlier.  Burroughs hints at this when he describes the Lotharians as an ancient auburn haired White race who ruled a thalassocracy or a maritime empire.  Thus in his hierarchy of Martian races there was an earlier White race than the Therns.

     The Lotharians sailed forth to win Mars for the city at home much as European mariners won the world for Europe beginning with the Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth century,  Columbus and all the sea captains of the glorious age of discovery.  The seamen were only defeated by the stay-at-homes who sabotaged their efforts.

     Burroughs gives a valid interpretation of the age of European exploration and conquest from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries.  Thus the story of the Lotharians, now shadows of their former selves, is a very poetic rendering of that history.

     The period ended with the 1899-1900 enunciation of the Open Door Policy in China by the American SecretaryOf State, John Hay.  China was in the process of being acquired by the European States at the time which the Open Door prevented thus guaranteeing China’s integrity.  This was a sea change in world politics.  the conquered peoples now began their counter offensive against the West.

      This change was noted by Burroughs, Grant and Stoddard.

      Madison Grant was of the earlier generation of TR while Burroughs and Stoddard were near contemporaries.  Burroughs born in 1875, Stoddard in 1883.  They both died in the same year, 1950.

     None of the three applauded the sea change but lamented it, running counter to Liberal ideology which applauded the change and latterly aroused the ire of Prof. Slotkin.  Thus he and his Coalition fellows demonize the three.

     They were only writers..  Until recently Grant and Stoddard had been all but forgotten.  Grant’s two best known works are The Passing Of The Great Race of 1915 and Conquest Of A Continent of 1933.  His main offence in the eyes of the coalition is that the Great Race is the Nordic race, which implies superiority, and his use of the term Nordic.  There was a tremendous effort at the time to ridicule and deny Nordics and Anglo-Saxons.  This is most notable in the vitriolic work of the bigot H.L. Mencken.  Nordic is a curse word within the Coalition.

     The Great Race is an interesting period piece but seems obsolete in its science.  Conquest is still usable as a guide for the Nordic migrations within the US.  I think it questionable that Burroughs was influenced by Grant who wrote after ERB had already committed himself although as Great Race made a splash it isn’t improbable that he read it.

     Lothrop Stoddard is a different story.  Here is a scholar done a great injury by the likes of Slotkin and the Coalition.  Stoddard wrote several books that might even be considered prophetic.  As noted he was eight years younger than ERB while graduating from Harvard.  Unlike Grant I think Slotkin is right that he was an influence on Burroughs but only after 1920 when Burroughs was fully formed.  It is possible that ERB accessed his research for his own purposes.

     Stoddard’s first book in 1914 was a terrific examination of the San Domingo Moment titled The French Revolution in San Domingo.  while the book was issued too late to affect ERB’s knowledge for use in Thuvia in 1914 events were transpiring that would have put Haiti, San Domingo’s later name, in his mind’s eye.  Beginning in January of 1914 several US warships landed troops in a very disorderly Haiti.  The bankers had precipitated yet another financial crisis by imprudent lending practices.  As was to become customary they called on the US government to bail them out.  In order to insure their loans the taxpayers were called upon to foot the bill.  The occupation of Haiti by the Marines began the next year and that lasted until well into the thirties before the troops were withdrawn.  Having gotten Haiti into trouble the bankers than looted the country for a couple decades.

     Another interesting sidelight in Haiti and the Caribbean was that 1914 was the year that McClurg’s released Tarzan Of The Apes.  Now, Ogden McClurg the ostensible owner of McClurg’s was only a figurehead.  The company had become employee owned after the last fire about 1900.  Ogden McClurg was living ERB’s fantasy life.  He was an officer in the Navy having spent the decade or so previous to 1914 as an operative in the Caribbean during a period when the US was famous for gunboat diplomacy among the Banana Republics.  It’s possible that he often worked undercover as a secret agent.

     ERB’s contact was Joe Bray who actually ran the day to day operations of the firm.  I’ve been told that McClurg had little to or no contact with the authors and indeed, it seems unlikely he could have being out of the country so much, yet ERB seems to have formed a jealous relationship with McClurg speaking of him as though he did know him.  That could only have been between 1914 and 1917.  Ogden was in Europe for three years or so during the war and after while ERB left for LA in 1919.  Deserves investigation.

     Back to Stoddard.  In 1920, 21 and 22 he issued his three most important books, the ones that so infuriate the volatile Liberal Coalition.  The titles were The Rising Tide Of Color Against White World Supremacy of 1920,  The New World Of Islam of 1921 and 1922’s The Revolt Against Civilization- The Menace Of The Underman.

     All three were prophetic and indeed, as of today, the prophecies have come to pass.  The first volume, The Rising Tide Of Color needs no explanation for the violent reaction of the Coalition.  By this time their agencies of the ADL, AJC and NAACP operating under the umbrella of the Communist Party were well able to defame anyone they chose with immunity from prosecution.

     The mere mention of White Supremacy was enough to make them foam at the mouth.  The reasons are clear and they were already formulated by the Revolution of 1792,  Now, we do have the problem of slavery which casts a pall over all discussions.  There is no justification for slavery although the institution still survives having now spread to America and Europe and it will flower everywhere once again before the century is half over.  So, really, the slavery issue is irrelevant.  ERB himself accepted the practice as a universal fact of life; the practice exists in all his stories.  

     Stoddard:  This analysis applies to the US of today as aptly as that of San Domingo in 1792.  “These men’ are the proto-Communist Jacobins of the French Revolution:

     “If you (the San Domingan Whites) are sufficiently united to follow my counsel, I guarantee the salvation of San Domingo.  But, in any case, let no one cherish the hope of mercy from these men, let no one be deluded by their sly tricks of policy; the negroes alone find room in their affections, and all the whites without distinction, all the mulattoes as well, are doomed; all whites are dangerous to their projects, all alike will be sacrificed as soon as these men shall have disposed of the officers, gotten rid of the troops of the line, and become at last the undisputed masters.”

      As San Domingo in 1792, so Euroamerica in 2010.  We were promised change but none has or will ocuur.  Two hundred years later same words, same tune.  So, Slotkin would have us believe that decent self-respecing scholars and writers such as Burroughs, Grant and Stoddard were responsible for My Lai rather than Robespierre,Danton and Murat.  Well, you can fool some of the people all the time….

     Just as his first of this trio of books prophesied the coming race wars, so Stoddard’s World Of Islam prophesied the current invasion of Euroamerica and the religious wars, for that is what ‘terrorism’ is.  The third book The Revolt Against Civilization has also come to pass as the asault on Western culture, which is to say, civilization continues on an accelerated pace.

     It was this book that had the greatest influence on ERB that would surface in 1934s Tarzan And The Lion Man.  Stoddard is much influenced by the evolutionary theory of Auguste Weis.  Especially the notion of body and germ cells that ERB embraced so enthusiastically  in 1934.  ERB’s interpretation was certainly pure entertainment but based on current scientific knowledge nonetheless.

     As for ERB’s notions he was expressing developed opinions on the social scene under cover of entertainment long before he could have been influenced by either Grant or Stoddard so Richard Slotkin is quite wrong in his prejudicial interpretation of ERB as in ignorant spouter of bigotry based on the other two.

     In fact Slotkin ignores the content of all three men to denounce them as ignorant, uninformed bigots who were nevertheless taken so seriously by gunslinging Americans that by Slotkins own words they caused the My Lai Massacre.   But enough of Slotkin who sabotages his own thesis by confessing to inadequate research.  A much more interesting topic is The Revolt Against Civilization of which it can truly be said that revoltagainst civilization applies to ERB as well as his arch enemies- the Liberal Coalition.

Part III-C will involve civilization and its malcontents.

 

 

 

A Review

The Myth Of The Twentieth Century

by

Alfred Rosenberg

Part III

Rosenberg, Alfred, The Myth Of The Twentieth Century, Noontide Press, 1982

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/03/16/hello-world/

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/men-like-gods-tarzan-pays-homage-to-heracles/

 

     In contrasting the spiritual and intellectual attributes of the Semites and Nordics Rosenberg seems to confuse tenacity with will.  The Semites pursue their goal so tenaciously because they don’t have the intellgence to compare different intellectual and spiritual views.  There is really no intellectual progression of evaluation in the Semitic psyche.

     Contrast for instance the approach taken by the Hebrew predecessors of the jews with the Greeks in this primary problem of the evolution of society and the human psyche;  that of the change from human sacrifice to that of animal and then vegetable sacrifice.   The Semitic Bible tells the story under the title of Cain and Abel.

     At one time we are led to believe the standard approach to appeasing the gods was human sacrifice. If the Cain and Abel story had been written down c. -2000 to -1000 the content would have been about human sacrifice rather than animal sacrifice.  By c. -500 to -400 when the story was written human sacrifice, except under extraordinary circumstances had been abandoned.  Animal sacrifice was still retained by the Abelites while the Cainites had abandoned animal sacrifice for an offering of the fruits of the earth.

     As the Bible tells it the Abelites offered animal sacrifice to the god Shamash,  while the Cainites offered vegetable produce.  As the Abelites are telling the story their god being as conservative as the Abelites preferred the flesh sacrifice to the vegetable rewarding the Abelites and rejecting the Cainites.  The Abelites then lorded it over the Cainites who retaliated by killing the Abelites.

     In the Greek version as recounted by the late nineteenth century A.B. Cook in his magnum opus, Zeus, the story is told quite differently.  It doesn’t appear that Cook understood the Greek story to be their version of Cain and Abel or, in other words, the evolution of sacrifice to the gods.

     Zeus was always known as the god of the sky.  In this story he is called Zeus Lykaios thus seemingly associated with the wolf; as Cook supposes, a wolf god.

     I don’t think this is the case.  I think the tale should be something like Zeus vs. Human Sacrifice or Zeus against the wolfish practice of man eating that might be supposed a habit of wolves.  In the myth a tribesman as scapegoat is singled out, stripped naked, compelled to swim across a body of water then live for ten years in this primitive or wolfish condition.  If he passes the ten years without eating human flesh he is allowed back into the community.  One may assume that during this probationary period the community itself is forbidden human sacrifice thus ending the practice. 

     An offering is then made to the gods of a wheaten wafer.

     One can compare that story to that of the Christ who offers a glass of wine in substituion of his blood and a wafer for his body but is still a human sacrifice on the cross.

     The messages seem quite clear.  Zeus disapproves of human sacrifice and cannibalism of the human sacrifice.  The above way is the Greek way of demonstrating disapproval of the practice while the acceptance of the wafer is an example of what is considered appropriate. Semitic development is halted at animal sacrifice.

     Thus one is able to compare and contrast the psychological attitudes of the Semites and the Aryans.  Ye shall be judged by your acts.  On the one hand the Semitic story is extrememly dogmatic while the Aryan story shows more science and intelligence.

     The two attitudes remain constant down through history.

     Thus the unyielding dogmatic or bigoted approach has the advantage over a more yeilding or understanding attitude.  It is the former attitude to which Rosenberg is actually objecting.

     When developed in the religious sphere the hatred of the opposing point of view is translated into an inquisition in which the holders of the opposing viewpoint are tortured to death or burned at the stake.  Put on the cross.  The temporal authorities are called in as in the cases of the Waldenses, Cathars, and Huguenots to exterminate the entire body of the dissidents.  Whether done by Catholics, Jews or Moslems extermination of unbelievers is the inevitable result whether a single individual, tens of thousands or in the case of the current crusade, a billion of Whites.

     In Rosenberg’s case his scientific Nordics have nothing like the insane Semitic god.  Thus in the religious sphere the Whites have never had an alternative to the Semitic god hence being at a disadvantage.

     A certain type of mind prefers a storming Yahweh figure to an intelligent Zeus.  No intelligent person can accept the notion of a supernatural diety whether Yahweh or Zeus.  Thus, to some extent Hitler himself was ofered a a version of a man-god.  As no flesh and blood man can successfully pose as a god what was and is needed is an idealized man-god not as a supernatural person but as an ideal toward which one can strive.

     Perhaps it is time to create one.  Actually this has already been done.  The American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs of the first half of the twentieth century created the only acceptable version of the ideal man-god, Tarzan Of The Apes.

     Burroughs is seldom taken seriously and yet a careful reading in any  of the novels of the Tarzan series is seen to be drenched with explorations on religious themes.  Not the least important position is the need to abandon supernatural deities for a realistic man-god.

     This is not to say that any living man should be accorded the status of a god but that a god like ideal would replace the supernatural psychological projections.  After all any notion of god is merely an intellectual projection of a given people in their own image.  Thus the Greek pantheon is a reflection of the Greek psyche, Yahweh is the projection of the Jewish psyche and its god.  So with Buddha, he is merely the aspirations of the Indian psyche.

     Tarzan, it follows is a projection of Burroughs’ psyche and one might add satisfactory to millions around the world as a god like projection.  The Tarzan religion is already in place.  It remains only to develop and codify it.  Further as an ideal he is attainable to the dedicated aspirant.  When Burroughs wrote the ability to build bodies of ideal proportions  was in its infancy but has been perfected over the years to such magnificent specimens as Charles Atlas and Arnold Schwarzenegger in their primes. These two men realized the physical perfection of Tarzan.  My essay Men Like Gods looks into this aspect more closely.

     Psychological perfection can be attanined but may be more restricted than physical perfection and take longer to achieve but refined methods may be able to break the crust sooner.  As Burroughs portrays Tarzan he seems to have the essential integrated personality; that is his conscious and subconscious minds are unified.  To achieve this goal one must have an accurate idea of how the subconscious functions in relation to the conscious.  Freud’s notion of the ‘unconscious’ is completely erroneous.  I examine that problem and offer a solution in my essay on Freud a link for which is provided at the head of this essay that for some reason is titled Hello World.

     And finally in the area of intelligence we have the means to prepare the mind with accurate scientific knowledge.  Because of varying intellectual capacities that are unavoidable success in education will depend on the innate intelligence of the individual.

     Yet with the proper guidance and the ideal of the man-god before him the youth will be ale to see that to which he is to strive.  Of course, the physical is the most easily attained by nearly all healthy men; psychology and education will depend on the individual.

     The old gods are dead; they are no longer viable.  Each represented a stage in the psychology of human evolution.  It is now time to evolve into scientific man and leave the religious mind behind.

     If Rosenberg didn’t explcitly state the goal it was implied.  Edgar Rice Burroughs did state the goal and gave an example of the ideal.  The time has come for the man-god.  It remains only to set up the ideal as a beacon to draw people to it.

     In so doing an acceptable and soul satisfying ideal can be supplied to heal and anneal the troubled soul of man that so disturbed Rosenberg, troubled Burroughs and plagues the world.

     The old gods, almost dead, must go.

  Part IV to follow.

 

    

 

 

A Review

The Low Brow And The High Brow

An In Depth Study Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’

The Mucker And Marcia Of The Door Step

Part III

by

R.E. Prindle

Background Of the Second Decade Social And Political

 

     1.

     I have been criticized for discussing material that seems to bear no relationship to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  The social milieu in which a man lives and works directly affect what and how he writes.  He will react within that milieu whether he can understand and articulate it or not.

     ERB understood much.  He understood the main conflict of his times- that between the Religious and Scientific Consciousnesses.  How he understood it is one thing, its exact nature is another.  The battle was not necessarily put into the terms of science versus religion.  On the objective level science had more prestige while on the subjective level religion had the upper hand creating a dualistic conflict.  As Voltaire said:  No one ever willed himself an athiest.  The same can said of Science.  The usual terms employed in the conflict was that of  spirtiualism versus materialism.  So those two words were supercharged masking the real conflict.

     While religion retained great strength in this period science was so strong that religions had to adapt to science, thus one had the ecumenical Congress Of Religions in Chicago in 1893 during which a common plan of resistance was discussed.

     One reaction to Science was American Liberalism.  Liberalism is in fact a religion founded on beliefs rather than facts.  American Liberalism developed out of the Puritan faith of New England.  The Puritans believed themselves  to be the successor of the Hebrews of the Old Testament as the Chosen People of God.

     Two very interesting studies have appeared in the last couple decades which illuminate the English background of the United States.  One is David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed; the other is Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins Wars.  Both illustrate the continuity of behavior of the colonists between England and the Colonies.  That continuity began with the Norman invasion of England in 1066 and continues through the strange Liberal mentality of today.  Burroughs who was of the ‘Conservative’ mentality had to struggle with the forces of Liberalism in his day.

     When the Normans invaded England they enslaved the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants.  Anyone who has read Ivanhoe by Walter Scott has the image of Gurth with his iron colar inscribed on his memory.  This piece of arrogance was to have serious consequences in both England and America.

     The Normans occupied the Southern counties of England which Thomas Hardy caled Wessex, while the brunt of slavery fell on the East Anglian counties.  The insult of slavery was burned into East Anglian memories along with a desire for revenge made more savage by the the religious certitude that they were the Chosen People of God.

     The East Anglians, of course, revolted against the Norman Church Of England, emigrating to North America where they settled in the States of New England.  New England = New Anglia.  In England they fought the English Civil War against the Normans.  Puritan Roundheads against Norman Cavaliers.  It then became the turn of the defeated Cavaliers to emigrate to North America.  They chose to go to Virginia where they gave the colony its Norman Cavalier character and nickname.  The ancient enemies were now divided North and South.

     As Fischer points out, slavery by the Norman descendents in England had disappeared only about a hundred years before the English Civil War.  The Cavaliers now revived slavery in their Southern colonies.  First they brought indentured servants from England who were slaves subject to the whims of their masters for a stated period of years that could easily be extended.  Then African slavery was introduced.  For a period of time both White and Black slaves worked side by side in the fields with the Blacks gradually displacing the Whites.

     The New Englanders looked with fear and loathing on the Norman Virginians, who as they saw it, now resumed their old habits.  It was here that the American Civil War was conceived.  The Puritan New Englanders after having first rejected the king in the American Revolution which their East Anglian forebearers  had failed to do in England then turned to agitating a war against the Norman Cavaliers of the South, whose ancestors had enslaved them, on the basis of an anti-slavery abolitionist program.

     Just as they had succeeded against the Crown where their forebearers had failed they succeeded in absolutely crushing the descendents of the Normans.  This punishment of the Cavaliers was the most severe of any since 1066.  Thus subsequent US history with its notion of unconditional surrender was formed.  This was a vicious attitude formed from the same feeling of defeat.

     To return to the East Anglians in England to explain the American Liberal mindset.  Shortly after printed books became readily available  the East Anglians bought Bibles adopting the Old Testament notion of the Chosen People by substituting themselves for the Hebrew Children.  A British Israelite group formed calling the English people the new Chosen People.  Indeed, the British throne is believed to be in lineal descent from that of King David of Old Israel.

     Thus there were at least three Chosen Peoples in existence from the fifteenth century on- Jews, the English and the Puritan New Englanders.  New England became Greater New England as the Puritans multiplied spreading across the Northern tier of States.

     A psychological characteristic of Chosen Peoples is that they upload their needs and wishes to an imaginary god in the sky then download the same needs and wishes back to themselves as the Will Of God.  Thus they say not my will but they will be done, O Lord.  The faithful thus become justified sinners.  Any criminal act can be justified as the Will of God which it is the duty of the faithful to perform  This also creates a double standard because what is right for themselves in the eyes of the Lord is forbidden to others.  The children of Israel can exterminate other peoples with impunity, but it is wrong for other peoples to even defend themselves against the children of the Lord.  Serious stuff.

     These ends and desires are accepted then as a messianic or utopian goal.  It is the duty of the Chosen People to impose God’s Will on the rest of the world.  To resist that Will is evil making the non-believer a dastard, a heretic, an infidel, an anti-Semite or whatever.

     In the United States the Will of the god of the Puritans was transformed into Manifest Destiny, which in turn metamorphosed into the triumph of Democracy as defined by the Chosen People of America, who in turn metamorphosed from Puritans into Liberals.

     As a chosen people and as a result of the Civil War the Liberals identified with the victims who needed their help.  Thus the Civil War was fought in their minds by a virtuous people acting out the Will of God to rescue unfortunate victims from a malevolent White minority.  In the case of the Civil War it was the Negro slaves.  As the century and Liberalism developed the umbrella of help was extended to all the ‘enslaved’ or colonial peoples of Europe which is to say all the colored peoples of the world.  It was not enough that injustice as perceived by the Liberals should be corrected, but that the perpetrators should be condignly and brutally punished unconditionally in the name of and by the Will of their God, which is to say the projected desires and wishes of a self-appointed Chosen People.

     Utopian literature which flourished after the Civil War is the direct result of this Messianic fervor.  Utopian literature abounds in England, Greater New England and with the jews.

     Having then succeeded in crushing the Cavaliers of the South the Liberals attempted to demean, belittle and abuse the White South in the most draconian manner.  The period of Reconstruction is the blackest hour in American history.  The Whites were stripped of civil rights having the Negroes placed over them as masters.  The Whites, so far as possible, were expropriated of all property through taxation when not stolen outright.  The Whites, of course, reacted by forming the first Ku Klux Klan to protect their lives and interests.   Reconstruction lasted until 1877 well nigh into the twentieth century.  The South was impoverished and set back for at least a century and may still be recovering today if such is possible under the present Liberal regime.

     All factual references to Reconstruction have been obscured by references to the KKK but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries memories of Liberal crimes in the South were fresh and bleeding wounds.  As is well known Jim Crow was the inevitable result of the attempt to crush and bury the White South.

     As the nineteenth century progressed and utopian literature flourished the Puritans, now Liberals, identified with all the ‘oppressed’ which is to say colored peoples of the world against the European conquerors.  Everywhere America sided with the natives against Europeans.  In a feeling of total frustration Charles De Gaulle would remark:  America is a White country, but it acts like a colored country.

     At about mid-nineteenth century Jewish utopian messianists under the direction of Karl Marx formed the Communist Party.  Thus Jewish utopian messianism spread from England- Marx was based in London- throughout Europe to the world.  As Communism also opposed Western colonialism, although not Communist colonialism, these two powerful agencies worked to upset the Western hegemony of the world.  As someone will always have hegemony of the world what appears on the surface as ‘justice’ is merely the transfer of power to another agency and hence new ‘injustice.’  As of this writing it appears that the beneficiary of American and Communist efforts will be the Chinese.  This shift has already happened but has not yet been officially acknowledged.  Thus the result of the Liberal and Communist quest for ‘social justice’ will be merely to place Europe and America’s neck under a Chinese yoke rather than the other way around.  Obviously the Chinese god is not the same as the Utopian God.

     During the period of Reconstruction as the Liberals were punishing the Southern Whites and rewarding the Negroes immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe began in earnest.  While the Irish and Germans had created their own set of problems yet culturally they were close enough to the original Anglo-Saxon colonists to be, after a fashion, readily assimilated.

     But with the congeries of nationalities from East and Southern Europe came many and diverse customs and languages.  Assimilating them into Anglo-Celtic-Teutonic America was not so easy.  Thus groups of Americans resisting immigration arose.  The Know Nothings fought the Irish but this was different.

     The Liberals could then pathologize the anti-immigration people as ‘nativists’, later White Supremacists and other derogatory terms.  They could afirm their own virtue against these people as they had against the Southern Whites.  When the power base of restrictionists took form in the South as the second Ku Klux Klan this only served to show the perfidy of Southern Whites in a new shade.

     The Liberals then allied themselves not only with the interests of Negroes but with the immigrants to form the Liberal Coalition which was to dominate American society from the Second Decade to the present.

     Already British and Puritan utopianists, they were now joined by the Jews who from 1870 to 1914 represented the largest nationality of immigrants.  Both the Liberals and the Jews were Bible based.  Liberals considered Jews as the successors to the Biblical Hebrews if not Hebrews themselves.  While Roman Catholics distanced themselves from Hebrewism the Protestant sects derived directly from the Old Testament considered themselves neo-Hebrews so they were quite willing to defer to what they considered paleo-Hebrews.  Thus the two versions of utopianism were joined.  Both forms of Hebrewism accepted anti-Semitism as the greatest vice.  The foregoing discussion has been a good account of what Semitism is:  that is a belief in one’s own divinely appointed role as the arbiter of the world’s fate.

     So far as I know neithr Semitism or anti-Semitism have ever been adequately defined so for the purposes of this paper anti-Semitism will be defined quite simply as the denial of the Semitist’s self-appointed role as the agent of God on earth.

     As one of a Scientific Consciousness  such a denial seems hardly necessary but as most people are of a Religious Consciousness there it stands.

     Needless to say Burroughs was of the Scientific Consciousness therefore per force an anti-Semitist although he would never have understood his position in those terms.

     As can be seen Judeo/Liberal/Utopianism is a religious matter that will defy reason.  It is a matter dependent upon a subjective, spiritual belief system.  It is beyond the reach of logic.  Never argue with them.  The adherents cannot be argued with, they must humored.  Reigions are revealed not thought out.

2.

     The nineteenth century also saw the rise of Science which is an objective materialistic sysem, conscious not subconscious, based on facts and reality.  It doesn’t take a genius to spot that the religious systems and the scientific systems are incompatible; one must subordinate or destroy the other.  Now, seriously folks, this is war to the knife.

     Knowledge is hard won and built up slowly while revealed religion is complete and entire at conception.  While the former is subject to trial and error the latter is seemingly pat- it is God’s own Word.

     As Freud pointed out the religious consciousness received three main blows.  The first was that the Universe was heliocentric rather than terracentric; the third was the malleable construction of the human mind as defined by psychoanalysis.  These two could be religiously managed; nothing had been revealed that couldn’t be manipulated to religion’s use.  The middle blow could not.  That was the concept of Evolution as enunciated by Charles Darwin.  Thus it was clear except to the most entrenched religionist that the world was not created by God in 4004 BC as Bishop Ussher stated but evolved beginning somewhat over four billion years ago.  There’s an incompatibility there that cannot be swept under the carpet or even ignored.

     Make no mistake: science and religion are at odds in the struggle for the human mind.  Writing in 1829 the incomparable Edgar Allen Poe expressed the problem in his brilliant poem:

Sonnet – To Science

Science! true daughteer of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Who preyest thus on this poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

     How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Has thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

     In addition to driving the Hamadryad from the wood, science also pulled God down from the heavens and exposed the fraud.  Freud showed God to be merely a projection of human desires.   How could religion counter the claims of Science?

     I do not single out any specific religion whether Christian, Jewish, Moslem or whatever.  All religions evolved in human consciousness and represent a phase of development in that evolution.  A phase of evolution but not its end.  Dig it!

     It then became necessary for religionists to absolutely deny Evolution.  In their favor was the fact that Darwin not merely but only enunciated the concept, but had no infallible proofs of the process.  Thus relgionists could say silly things like:  Do you really believe human being, you, actually descended from an ape? and be fairly convincing.  Most people were ashamed of such an ancestry.  Nobody asked the monkeys how they felt about the comparison.

     Inherent in Evolution is the idea of speciation.  Thus every time a species evolved there was a chance that it was an improvement on previous manifestations.  Between the Chimp and Homo Sapiens I are innumberable steps which have since disappeared.  If that were true then religious concepts which insisted that God created Man whole and entire without evolving were false.  If Creation was false than Religion was false.  There were many who empowered by the concept of Evolution and reasoning from appearances made the claim that was called ‘race’ rather than species.  The genetic differences between the ‘races’ were not yet clear.

     Until fairly recent times and the rise of genetics there was no infallible evidence to indicate speciation.  Today there is.  From 1859 when Darwin enunciated Evolution through the period under examination here, the second decade of the twentieth century, anyone asserting speciation could be ridiculed and destroyed as a bigot by the religionist.  Evolution itself was attacked and undermined in the thirties by the Boasian school of Anthropology which is still vital today.  (See Kevin MacDonald, The Culture Of Critique, 1998, 2002).

     In this period the Evolutionist was in a minority position.  Thus when Burroughs came down so strongly on the side of Evolution in his Tarzan series it is very surprising he created no uproar and there is no evidence the series was noticed on that account.

     It appears that Burroughs took the broad approach to these social problems.  He could see both sides of the issue deciding on the merits of the case rather than the ideology of the situation.  As has been noted he was quite capable of changing his mind on vital issues when presented with convincing evidence, i.e. life on Mars.  He was a true scientist.

3.

      Perhaps around 1910 it began to dawn on a significant number or people for the first time that unlimited and unrestricted immigration was causing unexpected and irreversible changes in the social fabric.  The war on Anglo-Saxon ideals, institutions and customs was well underway.  Such reactions had been a recurring feature of American society but now there was no West to escape to.   In addition industry had reshaped the cities.  Farm machinery was reshaping farming practices reducing the need for farmhands so that country boys migrated to the cities. By mid-decade for the first time more people lived in the cities than on the land.

     These changes were unwelcome and uncomfortable to a lot of people creating a malaise.  Those who viewed Reconstruction for the horror it was as well as those who considered themselves Old Stock were pathologized by the Liberals but their views found expression in books and articles but usually on the defensive side as with Jack London’s Valley Of The Moon and not on the aggressive side which would be visited by condign punishment as heresy.

     If one mentioned immigrants at all it was possible to discuss only positive attributes.  The Liberal turned a blind eye to the aggression of home countries preferring to see these home places too as victims who needed their protection.  As Chosen People the Liberal sees himself as naturally superior to the ‘victims’ but does not perceive his supposed superiority as ‘racism.’

     An honest and well meaning writer like Homer Lea who had actually been in the Orient and learned of Japanese plans first hand was pathologized and dismissed as a crank although his prognostications were based in fact as Pearl Harbor was to show.

     Some feelings are vague and can’t be articulated.  Even as a child I was disquieted by the notion that everyone came to america to escape oppression or to seek religious freedom.  I saw but couldn’t articulate the two facedness of this notion.  Only in the last decade or so have I found the means to acquire the necessary knowledge and developed modes to express it.

     Quite frankly the US was used as a haven for many, many revolutionary groups.  Perhaps the American Revolution  caused most Americans to look upon all revolutions as beneficent.  I couldn’t and can’t see it tht way.

     American ‘malcontents’ were told to shut up while a malcontent could come from anywhere else in the world and be honored for resisting repression.  I mean, criminals, murderers, mere disturbers of the peace in their own countries.  Cranks.  East Indian malcontents gathered in San Francisco to plot against the British Raj.  Sun Yat Sen lived in LA where he raised funds and was lionized.  Homer Lea was recruited by Sun Yat Sen to serve as a general in the Chinese Army.  Lea’s story may have been the influence that charmed Burroughs into seeking a place in the Chinese Army.

     The United States not only knew of the malcontents’ activities but even tolerated them perhaps abetting them.  The US role in European history has been that of a spoiler.  Looking upon all colored peoples as victims needing their help Liberals could do no other than work for their interests against the Europeans.

     One of the more disastrous actions was John Hay’s Open Door policy in China.  At the time in the 1890s the European States were about to partition China into spheres of influence.  What the result would have been is anybody’s guess however the world would probably be much different today.  Hay’s Open Door policy scotched the partition with the result that China remained a unified State.  Of all the turning points one can find in history this is undoubtedly a turn in the tide of fortunes for the West.  Subsequent to the Hay policy Chinese revolutionaries were hosted in California.  Mexican gun runners operated from the US during the Mexican Revolution as Zane Grey records in novels like The Light Of Western Stars and Desert Gold.

     Of course the Irish who called Ireland the Ould Sod and America the New Island acted as one people divided by an ocean.  Funds and guns were raised in America and used in Ireland against the British.  In the unrestricted immigration of the time Irish revolutionists moved back and forth across the Atlantic.  If arrested in Ireland they claimed American citizenship and were released to return to the US.

     In 1919 a most egregious example occurred which received no reprimand from the US, while England didn’t even bother to file an objection.  Eamon De Valera, the future premier of Ireland escaped the British to be smuggled to the US where he functioned openly.  William K. Klingaman tells the story in his popular history ‘1919’ of 1987:

     Eamon De Valera, meanwhile, had been smuggled out of Ireland and into the United States, where he was touring the major cities along the East Coast, drumming up financial support for Sinn Fein and the Irish Republic.  His reception was nothing short of spectacular.  De Valera was given the presidential suite at the Waldorf; the Massachusetts state legislature received him in a special joint session; forty thousand wildly cheering supporters turned out to hear one of his speeches in Boston; and the press seemed to love him wherever he went.  After all, he was excellent copy, and news of English injustices in Ireland always sold plenty of papers.  As the Nation noted with bemusement, “He gets a front-page spread whenever he wants it, with unexampled editorial kindliness thrown in.”  The tall, very thin, dark Irishman brought no message of peace and goodwill to the United States, however.  Now that the Peace Conference was over and freedom-loving Irishmen still remained enslaved under the British yoke, De Valera told an enthusiastic audience in Providence, “the war front is now transferred to Ireland.”

     So, while the Irish were embattled on the Ould Sod, the Irish of the New Island had enough influence and power to baffle any objections either in the US or England.  They were truly functioning as a state within a state in the US and as revolutionists on the Ould Sod.  Thus the US influence in international politics was unique indeed.

     The Italians also functioned as emigrant workers of Italian citizenship before the War and were an irredentist population within the United States with many colonial beach heads.  After the war, assuming the continuance of unrestricted immigration Mussolini attempted to shift the cost of medical treatment for wounded Italian soldiers by sending them to the US for free medical treatment.  This is astonishing stuff that gets no notice in history books.

     Of course, the most famous instance of dual citizenship of a divided homeland is that of the Jews.

     A ship landed in the seventeenth century in New York City, New Amsterdam as it was known then, bearing a hundred plus Sephardic Jews from Brazil.  The next immigrant cadre were the German Jews mainly from 1830 to 1850.  These two immigrations were small compared to the influx of millions of Jews from the Pale of Settlement usually known as Polish or Russian Jews.  From 1870 to 1914 they came in increasing numbers.  As I have detailed elsewhere the intent to transfer the whole population of Jews from the Pale to the United States was aborted by the outbreak of the Great War.

     Jews had always been forbidden Great Russia.  However during an expansionist phase Russian annexed the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the North.  The annexed areas became the Pale Of The Settlement along with the Polish Jews acquired by the first partition of Poland.  Thus Jewish nationalism came into conflict with Russian assimilationism.  The Russians, of course, were sovereigns of the land while the Jews were a stateless nationality.  The Russians along with the rest of their acquired  peoples attempted to Russify the Jews.  These along with Poles, Letts, Estonians, Lithuanians and whatever resisted Russification.  In point of fact, the Czars had bitten off more than they could chew.

     Had the Russians been facing mere dissident peoples they may have been able to manage them.  But, along about mid-nineteenth century the political ideology of Communism provided a framework within which all peoples could combine thus submerging their national identities for their political goals.  It is true that fifty to sixty percent of all Comunist parties were Jewish but the remainder which was substantial, wasn’t.  As part of its ideology Communism discouraged nationality so it was possible for numbers of all nationalities to work together.

     The Russians became the adversaries of the Jews, the Czar their bete noir.  Thus a remendous undeclared war existed between the Communist Revolution, usually called just The Revolution and the Russian government and people.

     By the time the Jewish emigration to America began in earnest in the 1870s the Jewish mind was conditioned by this warfare.  Now, all Israel is one.  Therefore the German Jews who had preceded the Jews from the Pale prepared the way for those from the Pale.  Whole industries were immediately controlled by Jews.  The male and female garment industries being the prime example.  The work force of these industries was almost entirely Jewish.  Thus the infamous sweat shop may be said to be of Jewish origin although it is usually used to defame the United States.

     The whole garment industry of the country then was controlled from New York City.  We’re talking big money with a lot of it flowing into Jewish agencies sometimes euphemistically called charities.  This money in turn fueled worldwide Jewish warfare on Russia.

     The Equitable Insurance fraud for instance was caused by the international banker Jacob Schiff who as administrator looted the Equitable of a couple hundred million dollars to finance the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war of 1903-05.  The Japanese could not have fought the war without that money.  Thus Schiff and his people paved the way to Pearl Harbor.

     While the Russians had their hands full in the East Schiff and his fellow Jews engineered and financed the First Russion Revolution.  The signing of the Russo-Japanese Peace Treaty was done at Portsmouth, New Hampshire ostensibly by then US President Theodore Roosevelt but under the watchful eyes of Schiff and his fellows.

     As I have said simply because a people emigrated doesn’t mean they renounced their original identity.  Witness the Irish.  As is clear from their intent to evacuate the Pale in favor of America the Jews retained their Eastern European interests.  This would be even more manfest after the restriction of immigration at the end of the War.

     Like the Irish who used American citizenship to negate the laws of England the Jews used their American citizenship to thwart the interests of Russians, or the Czar as they put it.

     The Russians forbade Jewish traffic over their borders in an attempt to contain Jewish subversion.  If you were in, you were in, if you were out you were out.  In line with European concepts of nationality this was workable.  But Jews resident in America using their US citizenship, in this instance, demanded to be treated strictly as US citizens but of the Jewish ‘religion.’  Thus, they said Russia could not refuse them entrance on the basis of their ‘religion.’

     The US with its polyglot population all with US citizenship whether Irish, Jewish, Italian or whatever had to insist on the rights of all US citizens.  Thus Jews were able to travel freely across Russian borders to coordinate Jewish actions to subvert the Russian State.  As I have pointed out, after the Revolution the name Russia was dropped from the State name as it became the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics governed almost exclusively by non-Russians.

     The B’nai B’rith had been around since 1843.  Then the American Jewish Committee was created in 1906.  Within seven years Jewish influence had increased so signficantly that they were able to direct US policy to the extent that diplomatic relations were broken off between Russia and the US in 1913 the year the Liberal Coalition elected Woodrow Wilson as its first president.  From 1913 to 1933 the US had no diplomatic relations with Russia/USSR.  It is interesting that relations with a legitimate government were discontinued by Woodrow Wilson and resumed with an illegitimate government by his disciple Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  On of his first acts as President.

     In 1913 the B’nai B’rith created its terrorist arm the Anti-Defamation League.  So there was actually a dual drive to acquire control of the USSR and the USA which one might add came very close to succeeding.  And this be a very small but dedicated number of people.

     As I point out in Part IV in 1919 the AJC  contacted Burroughs undoubtedly amongst a host of others to endorse a Jewish Bill Of Rights.  The program was in place by 1920 when this segment of my study ends.

     As can be seen the unofficial role of the United States in world affairs was an unsettling and disturbing one of the inactive aiding and abetting of revolutionary movements from China to India, across the border into Mexico while actively aiding if not abetting the Irish against England and aiding and abetting if not supporting the Jewish war on Russia.

     To the American Liberal all these revolutionary efforts were being conducted by victims.  Hence Liberal efforts at directing American policy were in the interests of any revolutionary group which includes the Socialist and Communist parties.  This Liberal attitude continues worldwide to the present time.

     Within the United States these ‘victims’ were gathered together under the aegis of the Liberal Coalition.  All dissenters whether anti-immigrationists, nativists or whatever were pathologized as mentally unstable people.  Insanity then becomes a religious attitude complementary to terms such as heretic, infidel or anti-Semite; terms not to be taken seriously.

     Liberalism is a religion thus assuming control over institutions of hgher learning.  The University system of the United States was turned from one of educational insitutions into religious seminaries.  The American university system of today is a religious system of Liberal seminaries.  Only the correct religious view is permitted, any other is penalized.

     Now, the Liberals who derived from the Puritans were an Old Testament biblical group who considered themselves the successosrs of the Hebrews as a Chosen People.  Beginning in 1870 the original Chosen People began their invasion.  It was like two Napoleons meeting in an insane asylum.  Each considered the other an imposter.  But the Jews had the whip hand over the Liberals as they quickly controlled the communiations media gradually eliminating anything seditious to its belief system.  As I explained earlier any writing that casts doubt on the claims of Judaism is anti-Semitist.  Americans were conditioned to view anti-Semitism as the worst possible crime deserving imprisonment or expulsion from the body social.  What we really have is the reimposition of the medieval Catholic Church in the form of Judaism.  Having seized control of the political system of the United States by 1920 the other important object was the discrediting of Science.

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from the flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

     And Poe might have added:  God from his heaven/ pleasant summer dreams of chosenness from our minds.  Yes, Science was the great enemy, the great anti-Semite.  It is not particularly well known but Jews are more anti-evolution than even the Christian fundamentalists of Tennessee in the twenties or the Kansans of today.  Evolution absolutely denies the fact that the world was created by god 4004 years before Bishop Ussher or the year 5778 or whatever of the Jewish calendar.  Make no mistake the notion of the world having been created by god recently is fundamental to Semitic religions.  Once it is disallowed the basis of the Semitic religions ends.  You can see why they fight so hard against Science.

     Science still being the problem religion was cloaked in its guise.  The scienfific Socialism of Marx is little more than Talmudic Judaism.  Freud’s exaltation of the subconscious is little more than an assault on the conscious rational thinking that makes Science possible.  Einstein’s preposterous notion of the ‘fabric’ of Time and Space among others is a disguised attempt at imposing faith.

     All of these movements came to fruition in the Second Decade.  Einstein’s theories were supposedly proven during an eclipse of the sun in 1919 during which it was ‘confirmed’ that the light of distant stars streamed around immovable bodies.   I mean, the Greeks said it:  What happens when an easily resistible force meets an immovable object?  It flows around it just like water around a rock suspended in a stream.  Boy, you have to be a genius to figure that one out- wrap it up in the facric of Time and Space and send it as present to God.

     So, the problem still remained what to do with the ‘pathological’ types who gave the lie to the Judeo-Liberal doctrine?  Science and Religion cannot co-exist.  This is a sea change in human consciousness comparable  to the transition from the Matriarchal to the Patriarchal.  Good will is not the problem and cannot solve the problem.  In 1943 Gustavus Myers devised the current method of interpreting American history in his book The History Of Bigotry In The United States.  He thus provided the means to pathologize the non-Judeo-Liberal people.  They became irrational, insane, evil bigots.  So then one has the people of the book the Judeo-Liberals on one side and ‘bigots’ on the other.  So, Moslem-Infidels, Semites-anti-Semites, and Liberals-Bigots.  It isn’t rational, it’s religious.  Virtue goes with the one; criminality with the other.  Once you are accused there is no argument.  Confess your heresy and take your punishment.  The role model is the Inquisition of the Catholic Church.

     Myers began from the beginning hitting his stride with the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s.  He essentially made all immigrants victims in the Liberal sense by depicting them as virtuous innocents insanely treated by American ‘bigots.’  Hence the title of his book.  His school took root and flourishes today.  Oscar Handlin, John Higham, Richard Slotkin.

     Handlin’s stuff is irrational.  John Higham’s Strangers In The Land is valuable but skewed.  The skewing can be easily unscrambled.  But Richard Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation is of importance to Burroughs and our theme here.  The first 225 pages of Slotkin’s book lead up to a denunciation  of Burroughs as the premier bigot of American literature actually making him responsible for the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam.  The first 225 pages are worth reading although you can throw the rest of the book away.

     I’ll get back to the scientific aspects of the issue in a minute but, first, as Slotkin concentrates on the Western movie in American culture let’s take a look at one of the premier efforts in the genre, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.  The movie was scripted by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck or, since this is Hollywood, men who would answer to those names. They are probably jewish.  The film perfectly inllustrates the Liberal dogma.

     John Wayne plays the Liberal lead as Tom Doniphon, strange name, along with his noble Negro sidekick, Pompey.  Lee Marvin plays a deranged psychopathic Anglo named Liberty Valence.  Jimmy Stewart plays the long suffering representative of the Law, Ransom- Rance- Stoddard.  Rance is an adjunct to Tom Doniphon.  Liberals = The Law, Bigots (Liberty Valence) = the outlaws.

     Tom can be seen as the abolitionist, justice seeking Liberal aiding the victims.  He is on the side of the victims of Liberty Valence (read, say, the KKK) which is the whole town except himself.  Tom has his negro valet while he helps all the cute immigrants in town still being aloof from the Southwest town’s sizable but segregated Mexican population.

     The scripters assigned the odd name of Liberty Valence to Lee Marvin.  Liberty is a positive virtue while Valence means strong- strong for freedom.  There is little positive about Valence.  He is in fact a psychopathic killer who terrorized the town of law seeking innocent sodbusters.  He actually becomes insane when he extends his whip handle just beating the tar out of his victims.  Valence is employed by the evil cattlemen (read, say, The South) above the Picket Wire (a river).  Why the cattlemen have sent Valence to the town isn’t clear.

     As the representative of the Old South and also any stray anti-Semitic clans who may happen to be about, Valence is especially offended by the peaceable but effeminate Rance Stoddard, who at one point actually wears an apron, the man who is bringing THE LAW West of the Pecos or at least below the Picket Wire.  Apparently the ranchers don’t need no law above the Picket Wire.  Valence harasses and bullies Stoddard who is usually protected by the omnipotent Tom Doniphon but comes a time when   Stoddard realizes he has to fight.  After all a man’s a man for all that.  Don’t know what for though, either his honor or life  or maybe to move the plot along.  Liberty is goading Rance into a gunfight that will be plain murder, as quite frankly, Rance don’t know how to handle a gun and Liberty does, oh boy.

     As the gunfight is filmed from behind Rance it appears that he actually guns Liberty down freeing all the victims of his menace. (The Law vs. The Outlaw; The Liberal vs. The Bigot, The Semite vs. the anti-Semite.)  Thus Rance brings the law to Shinbone, that’s the ridiculous name of the town.  You can see why Liberty terrorized it.

     Later we will see the same gun battle rotated ninety degrees to the right.  Ol’ Tom isn’t going to let Liberty gun down Rance, and also he doesn’t want Rance to be guilty of bloodshedding so he takes the guilt on hisself as he knowed he would.  He and his faithful Negro sidekick cum African gunbearer Pompey (This may be the reason Cassius Clay changed from his ‘slave’ name to Mohammed Ali, another slave name) are standing in an alley opposite Liberty’s left side.  Tom is in the middle of the side street, Pompey bearing the gun, stands against the side of the building.  With breathtaing precision just before Liberty shoots, Tom, in that awe inspiring quitet uncontradictable authority of his says like the Great White Hunter of Africa:  Gun, Pompey.  The ever faithful Negro flips the rifle across to Tom who snatches it from mid-air with is right hand, puts it to his shoulder and snaps off a head shot through the temple that killed Liberty Valence.  (Evil disappears from the town.)

     In order to kill Valence Tom had to shoot him in the left side of his head yet none of the dumbheads of the town wonders how Stoddard accomplished this miraculous feat.

     At any rate Rance is known as the man who shot Liberty Valence.  The old peace loving legalist is carrying his burden of blood guilt pretty well until he is nominated to be the new Congressman from the Picket Wire/Shinbone district (There’s a joke in there somewhere isn’t there?) and from whence he can put those damnable evil, bigoted ranchers in their place.  But damn it, he’s got blood on his hands; how can he serve the people in Washington since he is impure?  This mght have ruined a very promising and lucrative career and perhaps a good movie but Tom takes this moment to tell Rance the True story of the man who shot Liberty Valence.  Rance had to be told this.

     ‘Hot diggity-dog!’ Exclaims Rance trampling over Tom in his hurry to be the next and first representative for Picket Wire.  There may have been gold in them thar hills but it was as nothing compared to the gold to be found in Washington D.C.

     Like a good myth the movie can viewed on several different levels.  At face value the story is the story.  It doesn’t take much to view the film as a satire while on another level as a black comedy, or a wry commentary on the difference between the way things appear and the way they really are.

     But on the allegorical level in which I am viewing the story it allegorized the Judeo-Liberal vision of America.  Tom/ Rance represents their vision of themselves while Liberty is ther vision of bigots/anti-Semites.  I don’t know about the writers but John Ford was certainly able to see it that way.

     As a religious metaphor the movie expresses the Judeo-Liberal vision of itself.  That vision can only be realized if science can be disposed of because science, the truth, is the greatest anti-Semite of all.  As Poe realized Science disposes of the idea of God.  Without god there is no Judaism or Liberalism.  One or the other has to go.

     As I have said technological applications of science weren’t actually a threat but Evolutionists like Gall,  Darwin and Dalton were.  Gall was the man who first enunciated a theory that the different areas of the brain controlled different actions or responses.  In Steven Pinker’s terms he discovered the brain was more than a meatloaf.

     Darwin proposed the idea of evolution while Francis Galton proposed the idea of Eugenics.  As I said before, revealed Religion arrives complete and entire being a product of the imagination no different than Tarzan Of The Apes.  Science has to be built up step by step.  Gall, Darwin and Galton took the first developmental steps and while true in their limited way were easy to attack.

     Gall’s exploiters developed the theory of Phrenology which is of course unsupportable so If anyone has heard of Gall he is immediately discredited for Phrenology, something he didn’t do.

     Going into the Second Decade Darwin and Galton had great credibility, if being in minority positions, although Eugenics was very well received by every shade of the political spectrum from far left to far right.  Richard Slotkin bases his attempts to discredit Edgar Rice Burroughs and all non-Coalition writers over Evolution and Eugenics.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs is usually considered a fantasy writer.  One could hardly consider the writer of the Mars, Venus, Pellucidar and Tarzan series anything else.  Fantay writers are not usually taken very seriously being relegated to the non-literary end of of the fiction spectrum.  So then, one asks, why does a Myerian Judeo-Liberal like Richard Slotkin devote so much effort to prove that Edgar Rice Burrughs was ultimately responsible for the My Lai Massacre?

     The simple answer is that Burroughs is one of the most influential mind forming writers of fiction, worldwide, of the Twentieth Century…and counting.  There have been serious efforts to designate Burroughs as a bigot and an anti-Semitist.  The editions of the copies you read have actually been bowlderized.  Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation is a serious attempt to pathologize Burroughs.

     Gunslinger Nation Is the third volume of a trilogy on violence in America, a never ending tiresome concern of the Coalition.  Slotkin is more at home in the nineteenth century of the two first volumes than he is in the twentieth century of this volume.  He should have suspended his pen after the second volume.

     He not only has a shallow appreciation of his theme but he admits it.  The remaining 400+ pages succeeding those on Burroughs are based, I suspect, on one time viewings of several hundred Western movies.  At least he says he’s seen them.  His analysis of categories within the genre and individual films leaves much to  be desired.

     He admits that he read no, or very few, Western novels from 1900-1975 because the field is so vast no one could be expected to do it.

     His nineteenth century material, if skewed in interpretation, is admirably presented.  By rotating the images 180 degrees one can obtain a fairly accurate picture of his subjects.  His presentation on Buffalo Bill and his Wild West was really quite good.  His views on Fenimore Cooper and the Dime Novelists were attractive if prejudiced.

     By the time he gets to Burroughs of whom he has cursorily read a dozen novels or so he is both uncomprehending and imcomprehensible.  He has made no effort to understand the man yet he comes to preposterous conclusions.  As Burroughs was of the Scientific Consciousness which gives the lie to the Religious Consciousness Slotkin attacks on the scientific level.

     He attacks through Gall, Darwin and Galton.  The Liberal Coalition using its religious mentality is able to condemn in others what it applauds in itself.

     The mentality is quite capable of including Burroughs, Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler in one breath as though all three men were on the same level.  What they call crimes in others they call virtues in themselves.

     Thus, during the French Revolution a factory was organized in Paris to make footwear from the skins of murdered aristocrats.  The fact has been suppressed while the story of the lampshades made from the skins of enemies of the Fascist State is held as inhuman.

     The great hero of the Revolution, Victor Hugo, writing in his novel 1793 during the 1860s about the massacres in the Vendee quite bluntly states that those people were in the way of the realization of the Utopian Communist State and had to be removed.  What was fact in 1793 was true in the 1860 mind of Victor Hugo, exercised by the Communists after 1917 and by extension is still applicable today.  Yet all other exterminations are evil in the Coalition mind.  Their own religion justifies their actions as justified sinners.

     During the second and third decades Galton’s ideas on Eugenics had become the vogue.  The use of Eugenics by Hitler and the Nazis is used to discredit the concept and yet Reds of all hues including H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were enthusiastic Eugenicists.

     Joseph Stalin, the greatest Red who ever lived, rather amusingly embraced Eugenics.  (see:  http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/print.cfm?id=2434192005 )

     In the 1920s before Hitler, Stalin ordered his scientists to breed a new super warrior.  “I want a new invincible human being, insensible to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”

     You can see where this leading I’m sure.  Apparently Stalin had been reading Burrughs’ Beasts Of Tarzan because he ordered the scientists to cross a human and an ape to create his New Order warrior.  Imagine a couple divisions of these shaggy haired ape men trudging through the snow behind a line of tanks with a AK 47 in one hand and a frozen banana in the other.

     At any rate Slotkin wishes to link Burroughs up with these ideas that Liberals themselves promoted.  As the second decade wore on a number of writers dealt with these emerging problems of the age.  The two most prominent American bete noirs of the Judeo-Liberals are Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race of 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard and his The Rising Tide Of Color of 1920.  As these men are scientists they were labeled ‘bigots’ which is to say heretics or anti-Semites by the Liberal Coalition.

     It is not impossible that Burroughs may have read these books but there is no indication he did so so that there is no confirmed connection between he and Grant and Stoddard.  As I read Slotkin he believes that Burroughs is complicit with both Madison Grant and Stoddard.  Further there is no doubt Slotkin believes all three men are bad with evil intent.  As the Scienfific findings of these men contradict the religious tenets of the Myersian Liberal Coalition I suppose Slotkin can do no other.  How he manges to lump Burroughs in as an evil malicious bigot seems a stretcher.

     In the first place although the findings of Grant and Stoddard are offensive to Slotkin and the Liberal Coalition they nevertheless show the honest unbiased scientific results of the research of honest scholars who are no less decent and honorable than any of the Liberal Coalition.  Grant’s work is an essay into proto-genetics for which subsequent learning shows no fault.  Stoddard’s work is an excellent faultless political analysis which has been borne out by subequent developments.

     While the Liberal Coalition has chosen to pathologize and demonize all three of these writers their opinion should just be waved aside, disregarded as irrelevant.  Their opinions should be marginalized.  Grant and Stoddard are good and honorable men.

     When I first read Slotkin’s analysis of Burroughs I was outraged and then baffled.  I rejected the criticism but as Slotkin obvously believes this stuff although he poorly documents it his notions were filed in the bck of my brain while I began to search for his reasons.

     From a scientific point of view Slotkin has no basis for his claims but when one lays the Judeo-Red-Liberal matrix over the science all becomes clear.  This is a conflict betwen Arien Age religion and twentieth century science.

     If one looks closely at Burroughs one will find he has embraced science and rejected religion thus immediately becoming classified as a bigot/anti-Semite in their eyes.

     While Burroughs was from the North he is not in full sympathy with abolitionist and Liberal ideals.  he appears to reject the harshness of their attitude toward Southern Whites.  As in Marcia, John Hancock Chase from Baltimore living in New York City seems to be an attempt to reunify the country according to the ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr.  and his Reconstruction novels and D.W. Griffith’s movie The Birth Of A Nation.  To merely be sympathetic to Southern Whites is to deny the victimhood of the Negroes which arouses the animosity of Liberals.  Burroughs has thus identified himself as a ‘bigot, heretic, anti-Semite’.  He is plainly the enemy of the Liberal Coalition.

     And, then, while Burroughs didn’t join organizations like the A.P.A.- American Protective Association- still, like his fellow writers Jack London and Zane Grey he regretted the passingof Anglo-Saxon dominated America.  He hated to see the Old Stock in decline.  Thus in the Myersian sense he becomes pathologized as a ‘bigot.’  From the Liberal point of view Burroughs is clearly guilty and should be banned from literature.  Put on the Liberal Index.  However one has to accept the Liberal point of view to think so.

     He rejects all religion but as to whether he specifically singles out Catholics, Jews or any other sect I don’t believe that there is a shred of evidence.

     One can’t read with his contemporaries eyes so perhaps what isn’t so clear now leaped out of the page then.  Burroughs ruminations on Eugenics, especially in the pages of Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar, may then have been more obvious to them than to us.  But at the same time his opinions wouldn’t have been offensive to them.  As the Liberals accepted Eugenics then as readily as anyone else it would seem that the present emphasis on Burroughs’ fascination with the subject arises primarily from the Liberal rejection of their own past although it is still possible that what contemporary Liberals accepted in themselves they rejected in others as they do today.

     While I originally rejected the notion that there was any reason to suspect Burroughs of being an ‘anti-Semite’ I think that if one is looking for indications from the Coalition point of view one can find them.  As I point out in Part IV the American Jewish Committee contacted him in 1919 while there are passages in Marcia Of The Doorstep that the Coalition could construe as anti-Semitism and for which Burroughs was possibly punished.

     Finally Burroughs as a follower of Teddy Roosevelt rather than Woodrow Wilson might have been suspect.  The period after the Great War when it became evident that a very large percentage of the immigrants did not really consider themselves American’s caused TR to remark that America had become merely an international boarding house.  Quite true but who would have thought anything else was possible?  Today the term ‘international boarding house’ might be interpreted as Diversity or multi-culturalism. TR was head of his times.

     The period ending in 1919 also represented the changing of the guard.  Buffalo Bill died in 1917 taking hs mythic Wild West with him to the grave.  He also represented the end of the first America.  The Anglo-Saxons who had won the West.  Of course the winners of the West were not nearly so Ango-Saxon as represented but in general it was true.  There are almost no non-Anglo-Saxon names in the novels of Zane Grey other than Mexican.

     Also in 1919 TR himself passed away just as he was scheduled to be the Republican Presidential candidate for 1910.  His loss was keenly felt by Burroughs and his friend Herb Weston.  I doubt TR could have adapted to the new problems America was facing even as well as Warren G. Harding did.  How TR might have interpreted the challenge to American Democracy of the Liberal Coalition isn’t too obvious.

4.

Recapitulation

      In 1066 and succeeding centuries the Norman Conquerors enslaved the Anglo-Saxons of East Anglia which was an affront deeply resented.  Take a lesson.

     In the sixteenth century when the printed Old Testament became universally available the East Anglians identified with the enslaved Hebrews of Exodus.  They elected themselves a Chosen People and developed the compensatory Utopian attitude of inherent virtue as the Chosen People Of God.

     In the seventeenth century New England was settled by emigrants from East Anglia.  Not just English but East Anglians.  Virginia was settle by descendents of the Norman conquerors of 1066.  The Virginians once again chose slavery as the method of labor.  First indentured White people then Africans.

     While Utopian ideals developed in New England the abolitionist movement began which resulted in the Civil War-War Between The States.  War between regions or actually a war between ideologies.  There was no chance the South was going to discontinue slavery anythime soon no matter what anyone says.

     In revenge for 1066 the Cavaliers (Whites) of the South were absolutely crushed giving up all rights by surrendering unconditionally.

     The nascent Liberal Party of Puritans elevated the Africans over the Cavaliers thus establishing their protectorship over the ‘victims’ which is characteristic of the faith while establishing their power over dissident Whites.  Thus the Liberals ultimately aligned themselves with all colored revolutionary movements in the world against White European conquerors.

     Within the United States they viewed immigrants as ‘victims’ of the Old Stock pathologizing the Old Stock as ‘bigots’ no better than the Cavaliers of the Old South or the Europeans.  All opponents of of their Liberal religious ideology which included the intellectual mindset of Science thus became wrong headed vile ‘bigots’ who had no right to live.  After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the utopian Communist ideology became their politics; call it Socialism it comes out the same.

     As Edgar Rice Burrough was not a Liberal, not a Communist and not Religious but Scientific he unwittingly placed himself in opposition to the Liberal Coalition.  On that basis a serious attempt was made to abort his career while subsequently an attempt to erase his name and work from history is being conducted.

     Thus the twenties ushered in a new changed era fraught with new adjustments which were misunderstood or not understood at all.

     Burroughs career after 1920 has to be seen in the light of this concealed antagonism that he had to counter without being clear as to its causes.

     Thus the contrast  between The Mucker and Marcia Of The Doorstep can be seen as a response to two different challenges united by Burroughs personal psychological development.

Go To Part IV:of The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep