Reconstruction- Phase Two
April 3, 2013
Reconstruction- Phase Two
by
R.E. Prindle
Reconstruction is America’s unfinished revolution….
-Eric Foner
Reconstruction was not just something that happened after the Civil War; it was and is a program, a policy, a desideratum of the Left. Now that we are well into Barry Obama’s second term impersonation of a president of the United States we have to ask ourselves, is the increased social unrest of Negro on Aryan crime and inexplicable increasing frequency of crazy Whites shooting up schoolrooms and movie theaters coincidental? Or is it evidence of a second phase of Reconstruction. The changing of America from White to Black?
It should be obvious that the American Civil War only used Negro slavery as a pretext to continue the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. The participants were the same- the Roundheads of New Anglia and the Cavaliers of Wessex.
The Roundheads had never shown an aversion to slavery at any other time in their history. Indeed, during the East Anglian interregnum the Anglian leader, Oliver Cromwell, rounded up tens of thousands of Irish and sent them to the West Indies to live and perish as slaves cheek by jowl with the Negroes from West Africa. Irish slaves were especially profitable as they cost nothing while the purchase of Negroes from their African chiefs was a costly enterprise limiting profitability.
From the other side of the Atlantic it was those enterprising New Anglian Yankee traders who bought from the African chiefs and foisted their surplus cargo on the American colonies. Let us never forget that Negro slaves were bought and sold in the Anglian colonies of New Anglia while White slaves, politely called Indentured Servants as they hadn’t been purchased were prominent in all the colonies.
So slavery was not all that repugnant to the Roundheads of New Anglia; what was anathema to them was their old Cavalier enemy from England in the South.
By 1865 the Anglians ranging across the entire Northern tier of States had been become sanctimonious.
It was not to end slavery they fought but to exterminate their Southern Aryan adversaries. Thus the draconian measures taken in Reconstruction to make the Negro supreme over the Aryans. Thus Thomas Dixons post-Reconstruction plea to the Anglians to remember that the Southern and Northern Whites were Aryans and to pledge never to slaughter each other again for the benefit of Negroes. The Anglians took every possible means to subordinate Whites to Negroes. True savagery rather than an attempt to actually reconstruct society on an equitable basis- whatever equitable could mean in the circumstances.
The majority of American Negroes were imported after 1800. A great many from say 1820 to 1860. That means they were fresh from the jungle, mere savages, with no familiarity with civilized procedures and conditions, such as for instance, freedom. They had always been slaves, always. Freedom was a strange White condition so foreign to them that they didn’t actually know what it meant. They had no idea what freedom meant except that Whites appeared to have it. Enfranchising such people on a basis of equality with civilized people then was an egregious crime.
Indeed, while enfranchisement was being forced on Sourthern Whites, States of the Anglian North such as Michigan and Ohio and most others legally excluded Negro enfranchisement by new laws. Ever the hypocrites, Liberals.
From 1866 to 1877 then, Southern Whites fought a continuation of the Civil War to preserve their freedom from Negro-Anglian domination. With help from Northern sympathizers they were successful in this as official Reconstruction was terminated in 1877 while Jim Crow was established to preserve Aryan supremacy.
Oh, I know, Negroes, Anglians and some others find the notion of White Supremacy as repulsive. But, there are others who find Negro Supremacy, Jewish Supremacy and what have you just as repulsive, perhaps Judaeo-Negro Supremacy even moreso.
The point is: there will always be the Top Dog. There is no reason that the Top Dog shouldn’t be White rather than Black or Jewish piebald.
Now, the Civil War did not end in 1865 nor did Reconstruction actually end in 1877. As Eric Foner expresses it they were unfinished revolutions, still in progress today. Both efforts just went underground.
The Negroes still long to be Top Dog which the Anglians, now Liberals, long that they should be. The Southern White has been replaced by the Aryan as the adversary that is to be destroyed. If one accepts that Jim Crow was fully operative by 1900 then the Negro-Jewish-Liberal counteroffensive began in earnest at that time.
During the next fifty years from 1900 to 1950 the effort was to erode and destroy Jim Crow. This effort effectively succeeded in 1954 with the Supreme Court Brown vs. The Board Of Education decision. The decision of the Court was the opening shot of the Second Civil War of Jews, Liberals, and Negroes against the Aryans; hence the Anti-Aryan Hate Laws to disenfranchise the Aryan male.
These laws are unconstitutional as they violate the right to equal protection of the law. As it now stands all other races and classes are protected against the apparently all powerful White male but the Aryan male is legally unprotected on a basis of inferiority in direct violation of equity and the Constitution.
Thus the Aryan male is deprived of the right of self-defense much as was the Negro Slave. So far the Aryan male has chosen to suffer the indignities rather than right the wrong. This was not always the case. In a situation perhaps more dire than today the Aryan males of Louisiana chose to protect themselves and theirs. As William A. Dunning in his Reconstruction, Political and Economic of 1907 relates the story, pp. 248-49:
Quote:
The conservatives (Renamed Domestic Terrorists by 2011) of (Louisiana), large numbers of whom were organized in semi-secret and military societies known as White Leagues, had been quiescent since Grant’s formal recognition of Kellogg in the spring of 1873. The radical government maintained a formal existence, but with no moral and little material support from the White population. In September of 1874, Kellogg undertook to seize a lot of arms which the White Leagues of New Orleans had purchased. The result was a pitched battle between the league and the police, mostly Negroes, who were organized and equipped as soldiers. The police were totally defeated and dispersed, and the radical governor took refuge in the custom house and protection of the Federal troops.
Unquote.
That appears to be the situation we’re headed into now as the Negro government of the United States has bought and distributed billions of rounds of ammunition and millions of automatic weapons with the apparent intent of subduing the legally unprotected Aryan males while beginning the attempt to disarm them.
If the Negro government expects less from current Aryan men than the response of the men of New Orleans he may wish to re-examine his intentions. Let history be the guide. History has shown the futility of force to achieve social goals. One deplores the possibility of armed defense by the Aryans but one is guilty of weakness of mind to suppose they will docilely submit to being enslaved which is the next step down from disenfranchisement.
I advocate nothing, no massa I just be speakin’ trut’ to power, humbly, massa, ever so humbly, o’ cose, but due caution in provoking what history shows to be the inevitable result should be considered. Not even the Soviet Union with all its brutal power could maintain itself against the justified will of its subject peoples. Remember Mussolini and his lamp post, Hitler and his bunker. Vengeance is mine says de lawd.
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality
by
R.E. Prindle
Book Two
Ed And Emma
Part VII
The Big Change
For a convenient date, in 1920 the post French Revolution age came to an end and the post-Bolshevik Revolution began. For all practical purposes the Communists had ended the Bourgeois Era. The technological era that began c. 1900 now began to mature.
The impossibility of heavier than air flight conquered by the Wright Bros. in 1903 would in a scant twenty-some odd years in the very near future evolve into supersonic flight. By 1950 not only would the Cape to Cairo flight be a reality but the London to Cape flight would be a fact. Vitamins would be discovered. A mere twenty-seven years in the future the discovery of DNA would begin the revelation of the human genome. The future was glittering like mica in granite. Science fiction was slowly becoming the most important fiction genre.
Just as Ed’s life had forced a succession of personalities on him beginning at eight or nine so the discontinuity of 1920 would obliterate the twenty four years he had spent in the nineteenth century and the twenty years of early twentieth century technology. There was no time to prepare. The future, as it were, was on him. The New Era but not as anyone had imagined it.
The insane politics America had been preparing through unrestricted unlimited immigration was upon it. The nut cake experimentalists had forced both prohibition and the female vote through at the same time. And then there was the income tax that became a political weapon that destroyed the whole notion of wealth. Huge fortunes were reduced to a shambles by various forms of taxation meant to ‘redistribute’ the wealth. Despoiled people like W.R. Hearst, a Liberal bete noir, who had been protected by their wealth were brought crashing to the ground. Even Edgar Rice Burroughs as absurd as it may seem would be levied a heavy ‘excess profits’ tax.
Yea, verily, the last were becoming the first and the first were becoming last. Culture was in a shambles.
And at this time Ed moved to Los Angeles to begin a new life, assume a new personality. A life that began as the realization of all his dreams but one. The missing dream was sexual satisfaction; but he would try.
His intent as he came West was to begin a new life as, get this, a hog raiser. His idea was to obtain twenty acres and raise prize pigs. It seems like a stretch but if one remembers in Little Lord Fauntleroy, Fauntleroy’s newsboy friend went to California where he became a successful ranch manager. Ed had read the book many times so, perhaps, under personal and societal stresses he thought to live the fantasy.
He was at a financial peak having just earned a hundred thousand dollars in one year with every indication that such prosperity would continue for a few years at least. But he had not had time to assimilate two new realities- The Communist and Jewish Revolutions.
Of course the Communist Revolution had been brewing for some time. For at least thirty five years the turmoil had been increasing. The Haymarket Riot had been a precursor. Jack London’s The Iron Heel had appeared in 1908, Thomas Dixon’s Comrades in 1909. In 1916 Dixon had published The Fall Of A Nation in which the US was undermined by Communism; after the fact of the Bolshevik Revolution Dixon had been ready with his play Bolshevism On Trial.
Combined with and leading the Communist Revolution was the Jewish Revolution. The Jews hoped to realize their Messianic dreams of a thousand year reich held for centuries even millennia through the combined efforts of the people rather than a single savior. This Revolution was hoped to be realized between 1913 and 1928. While the terminal date was optimistic the beginning date of 1913 was activated.
Neither Dixon nor Ed understood what a game changer the Russian Revolution would be in the US. Freedom of speech disappeared over night as Communists and their fellow travelers punished writers who deviated from their ideology while the Jews were ever on the lookout for evidence of anti-Semitism which was very broadly construed. Thus both Dixon and Ed would be punished for dissenting from either’s plans.
As the Bolshevik Revolution triumphed in Russia in 1917 so by 1919 the frontal assault was being undertaken against American institutions. Imitating American political forms the Jews drew up a Jewish Bill Of Rights nearly mocking the US Bill Of Rights. The Jewish Bill of Rights along with a questionnaire was sent to all prominent Americans of which the creator of Tarzan was one.
If you failed to respond in the approved manner or not at all this placed you in the category of anti-Semite. So, while Ed responded he questioned a few tenets thereby placing himself on the Hollywood blacklist. He found himself there with Henry Ford and this will lead us to some interesting subterranean history that one might say was forgotten but the question is was it ever recognized?
The Judaeo-Communist war against the reputations of those who questioned either’s motives did not end in the twenties and thirties as one might suppose but continues to this very day.
Among other efforts to further discrediting these bete noirs of the post-war period has been an effort by a current Jewish professor at Case Western Reserve by the name of Richard Slotkin. Now, unless you’re investigating the dark corridors of subterranean history nearly everything I’m going to talk about here will be new to you. Just as the Catholic Church has its index of forbidden literature so do the Jews. Over the years editions have been published of what is termed arch anti-Semitic literature. These books are always worth investigating.
Two authors who published in 1916 and 1920 have been anathemized as arch anti-Semites a notch below Adolf Hitler. These men are Madison Grant and his book The Passing Of The Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard and his books The Rising Tide Of Color Against White World Supremacy, The New World Of Islam and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Under Man. Mr. Slotkin in his book revives the discussion of these two authors and associates them with Edgar Rice Burroughs as though all three were involved in some White Supremacist conspiracy to bring Hitler’s version of the thousand year reich into existence while causing the My Lai massacre.
I would have known nothing of this had I not discovered the Jewish Classics Of Anti-Semitic Literature. Having learned I decided to investigate.
My first reaction, even second reaction was that the two authors had nothing to do with Ed. But then my study of Ed’s 1924 novel Marcia Of The Doorstep led to the discovery that a large part of the story was based on three theatrical articles in Henry Ford’s collection of Jewish studies titled The International Jew as well as three more that were based on The Jewish Bill Of Rights mailed to all those prominent Americans.
Before we get to an analysis of Grant and Stoddard we have to examine certain aspects of the career of the organizer of psycho-analysis, Sigmund Freud, over the years from 1895 to 1917. You see, in subterranean history one dark corridor leads into another something like the corridors beneath Ed’s imagined city of Opar. Sometimes you have to keep your hand on the right hand wall so as to find your way through the labyrinth.
Most people think of Ed as a dummy without a real thought in his head. In fact he was interested in psychology and did have some background in it. If one takes for instance the labyrinthine corridors that constantly recur one should ask what they represent. Ed knew they represented the subconscious. He indicates his knowledge of the subconscious for instance in The Gods Of Mars when fighting in the Thern chambers. Then the symbolism with La beneath the labyrinth of Opar in Tarzan The Invincible is more than striking.
La had been deposed by the rebels and placed in a cell within a chamber guarded by a lion. The lion had urinated and defecated creating an almost impenetrable barrier between Tarzan and La. As La represented Tarzan’s Anima the imprisonment of La in such deplorable conditions and the difficult path to her is very symbolic, while revealing Ed’s knowledge of psychology.
Sigmund Freud was the mastermind who brought the current situation into existence beginning about 1895 when he joined the International Brotherhood of B’nai B’rith. Here he said he found a society of like minded men in which he was very comfortable. Like minded in what way? In the sense that they wanted to destroy Aryan Europe and remake it under a Jewish sovereignty. As Barbara Spector of the current Judaeo-Swedish organization Paideia puts it the idea is to replace Aryan knowledge with Jewish knowledge. If so, this gives some meaning to the Nazi resistance to Judaism in the twenties and thirties and the resultant Final Solution. Thus, while the world’s attention was focused on the flamboyant figures of Lenin and his group in the political field, Freud and B’nai B’rith were quietly working out psychological problems, setting up the intellectual infrastructure for the aftermath of the Revolution. I suspected for some time that Freud was only revealing a fraction of what he had learned about the functioning of the mind.
This was confirmed on a reading of Marie Bonaparte’s psychological analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems and stories. Marie Bonaparte was one of Freud’s coterie of female protégées. His harem so to speak. Marie Bonaparte was a Grecian Princess whose devotion inflated Freud’s ego more than somewhat. Her analysis also indicated that Freud’s disciple Otto Rank, frequently disparaged by other psychoanalysts, was much more important to Freud’s theories than he is credited.
Bonaparte’s analysis from whom she credits Freud for her most significant interpretations demonstrates the profound level of psychological manipulation available to Freud and which he employed. Without awareness of Freud’s lower researches one might as well not have a mind one would be so defenseless.
It seems more than probable then that such organizations as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith was Freud’s brain child. And from that sprang the whole method of attacking Aryan institutions. Freud’s theories might even be construed as a sneak attack. While some, such as the English writer D.H. Lawrence, understood Freud’s goals and methods only too well, the majority of psychologists were looking at the scientific aspects of what Freud publicly proclaimed.
Hence the turn of the century was widely recognized as a turning point, the high water mark of Aryan success. The tide had turned. And then in 1914 the greatest disaster ever to overtake the Aryan world happened when the Central Powers took on the Allies in WWII. The Great War was virtually the suicide of the Aryans.
Now, in conjunction with Freud and B’nai B’rith Jewish religious fundamentalists moved into the sciences to corrupt the science according to religious doctrines. The area now to concern us will be anthropology. Ed’s stories are very easily fitted into an anthropological context. Once you accept that he is writing within the context of the problems of his day the stories begin to make more sense.
We return now to the anthropologist Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race. In Jewish eyes they are the great race, but Grant was talking about the Aryan race or the Nordics. Aryan and Nordic are two terms that constrict Jewish throats. They form the conflict between European and Jewish knowledge; science versus magic or the supernatural. One can easily see the threat of science to magic and hence Judaism.
Grant called his book The Passing Of The Great Race because the Great War was destroying the very flower of the Aryans no matter which side they were dying for. Thus the entire ‘race’ was suffering irreparable losses.
Within this concern Grant employs the scientific anthropology of his time beginning with the researches of the great English anthropologist Francis Galton. Grant traces the migrations of the various Aryan peoples from their origin in Central Asia throughout the world and their absorption by numerically superior races.
Although Grant only obliquely hints at Jews a couple times he ignores their ethnicity completely merely including them in what he calls the Alpine Race. And in truth, according to Jewish legends the Jews are not a race per se having evolved as a mere religious splinter group from the Semites of Mesopotamia c. 2000 BC. No different a situation actually than the Scientologists of today.
Scientifically Grant was correct. There is really nothing about his book that a scientific observer could find to be anti-Semitic. However in a Freudian religious interpretation the volume is an extreme threat to Jewish claims of uniqueness. Thus, following Freud the anthropology of the Jewish Franz Boas deflects anthropology from the scientific basis such as Grant’s to the religious basis of Jewish fundamentalism in that all men were created by god on a specified date hence being all the same with the exception of the Jews who are semi-angels sent to earth to bring the knowledge of god to mankind, in other words, the Chosen People. Hence we have magic versus science.
While we can’t be certain that Ed read Grant, the author was a close associate of Teddy Roosevelt of whom Ed was in thrall. That would have been a recommendation while the thoughts expressed by Grant don’t differ widely from those expressed by Ed.
Shortly after Grant’s opus was published Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) began his anthropological series led by his The Rising Tide Of Color Against The White World-Supremacy (1920), The New World Of Islamism (1921) and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Under Man (1922). At the same time, in 1920, Henry Ford began his series of exposes of Jewish machinations in the Dearborn Independent collected into the four little volumes of The International Jew. And then, because of his 1919 response to the Jewish questionnaire Edgar Rice Burroughs was blacklisted in Hollywood.
How do all these strands relate? I’m going to have to go into more detail than I wanted to bring Ed into this larger picture. The Small in the Big Picture.
2.
The Small In The Big
During the Middle Ages the Jews seeking a refuge found one in the poorly organized and thinly populated spaces of what would become known as the Pale Of Settlement when the whole area came under Russian sovereignty after the First Partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century.
The whole area between the Baltic and the Black Sea in the strip that included Poland Byelorussia and the Ukraine became the designated settlement area for Jews. They were forbidden Great Russia. Prior to Russian annexation of these territories Jews had led a semi-autonomous existence under the Poles. The Russians refused to acknowledge this autonomy demanding that the Jews as well as all subject peoples assimilate to Russia. The Jewish fancy is that they can only be subject to ‘God’ and ‘his laws.’ Hence the governance of all others is rejected. Thus, about 1800, began the century long conflict between the Russians and the Jews that resulted in 1917 in the victory of the Jews over the Russians. Like the Amalekites of old the name of Russia was obliterated replaced by the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics while the Czar and his entire family were erased from the face of the earth, hurled down a mine shaft.
Beginning about 1871 the Jews discovered America; as steam had replaced sail wholesale emigration became possible (steerage). Thus an accelerating stream crossed Europe to Hamburg from Russia. Over the next forty years roughly half of Russia’s Jews emigrated. The infra-structure had been put in place to receive the entire remaining population beginning in 1914 but the Great War disturbed that plan while the doors to America were slammed shut after the War.
The way had been prepared for the Russian Jews, so to speak, by the German Jews who had emigrated after the failed revolution of 1848. The German Jews were among the most eminent bankers of the US controlling enormous sums of money.
Thus the transfer of half the Russian Jews combined with the economic power of the German Jews gave the international Jewish community a power base on each side of the Atlantic. Thus the First Russian Revolution of 1905 was engineered from within Russia while the Russo-Japanese War of 1903-05 resulting in that revolution was brought about by the US Jews.
For a few previous decades the International Jewish Government had been run by the Alliance Israelite Universelle from Paris. In about 1900 this government was transferred to the US becoming the American Jewish Committee. Jewish affairs were then led from the US under guidance of its President, the banker Jacob Schiff. Schiff obtained the money to lend the Japanese by raiding the reserves of the Equitable Assurance Society creating quite a scandal and investigation. This came to naught needless to say.
Thus the Japanese were able to war on Russia resulting in their victory of 1905. Schiff then arranged for the peace treaty to be drawn in the US under the auspices of Theodore Roosevelt under the guidance of Jews who participated in the negotiations. So Russia was taken to the cleaners.
Now, the Jews in America were US citizens while to the Russians more importantly they were American Jews conspiring with Russian Jews. They therefore forbade US Jews entry into Russia. The US Jews then claimed all the rights and privileges granted to US citizens including the right to enter Russia as US citizens whether they were Jewish or not.
This conflict of interests caused great friction between the US and Russia. In 1913 the Jews succeeded in exacerbating the situation to the point where diplomatic relations were broken off between Russia and the United States for their sole benefit. Thus the two percent, the tail, wagged the dog of the 98%. Between 1913 and 1917 there were no diplomatic relations between the two countries.
This situation then was portrayed correctly in Ford’s The International Jew.
Now, the Jewish Revolution advanced by the logic of ‘by any means necessary.’ Think about that: ‘any means necessary.’ That means by any method that produces effective results. No morality when necessary; sanctimonious morality when that works. Once again this was all organized by Freud and the International Brotherhood of B’nai B’rith from Vienna. What the American Jewish Committee in America did was in conjunction with Vienna, Paris, Moscow and wherever.
In Russia, then, where the Jews had seized the reins of government the means was one of murderous brutality while the revolutionaries flooded back into German and Hungary in the attempt to seize power in Central Europe while at the same time denying what they were doing. That attempt was blocked by Hitler and the other Volkist Partys.
In the United States it was impossible to actually seize the reins of government although that was tried and denied and events had to proceed by other means but the Jewish Revolution was one revolution going on in both the US and the USSR. This is what Ford meant by ‘the International Jew.’
In 1913 the socialist revolution in the US advanced when Woodrow Wilson stole the election through the antics of Peck’s Bad Boy, Theodore Roosevelt. Otherwise he would have lost the election by 60% to 40%. With the accession of Wilson Jews flowed into Washington to share government al control with the Wilsonian Socialists. It is no coincidence that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith came into existence at the same time. The ADL rapidly seized power and by the end of the war was pretty much in the unassailable position they are today.
To be brief, a great many of the wartime agencies were under the control of Jews including the all important War Industries Board in charge of reorganizing the industries into soviets. The WIB then was in the process of socializing industry when the end of the war aborted that plan. The WIB was the bedeviling agency that alerted Ford to the Jewish threat. This threat was exacerbated after the War when he received his copy of The Jewish Bill Of Rights to which he reacted defensively by buying The Dearborn Independent and beginning his series of articles exposing Jewish machinations.
So we are now at 1920 and a new America with a combined Jewish-Socialist government. The only real problem Woodrow Wilson had with Bolshevism is that he too had a messianic complex and wouldn’t cede the leadership of the Revolution to Lenin.
This became a moot point when he was incapacitated by his stroke and the repudiation of the socialist Democrats by the election of Warren G. Harding in 1920. It was the return to normalcy as Harding put it. The Jews were expelled from Washington for twelve years returning with the Wilson Redux administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Alright. There’s the broad outline of the subterranean history before glossing over by the official ‘victor’s’ version.
As the Jewish opponents such as Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, Henry Ford and Ed Burroughs couldn’t be eliminated by the means of murder, defamation and character assassination were the means conveniently accessible.
III
The conflict was and is between Aryan Knowledge and Jewish Knowledge. That is, between Science and Magic or magic in its religious manifestation. In anthropology Grant and Stoddard represented Science while Boasian anthropology represents the magical or religious point of view. Thus while there is nothing overtly anti-Semitic, that is say anti-Jewish, in Grant or Stoddard the scientific approach is that per se. There is no room for magic in the Scientific approach. Therefore Grant and Stoddard had to be neutralized. Freud and the B’nai B’rith had devised the method of merely defaming anyone they wanted to neutralize by the accusation of anti-Semitism. This was done. By 1940 neither man had an ounce of credibility while Boasian anthropology was the standard.
While Ed has always been considered an ignorant boob who knew how to write wild action stories, as I have been trying to point out in my essays he was an exceptionally well informed person on all the issues of the day. Thus his stories are founded on sound scientific principles no matter how he distorts them for the amusement of his readers.
Ed did read Grant and Stoddard generally sharing their views. In that sense then his critic, Richard Slotkin, is right. However Slotkin is a Jewish fundamentalist religious writer forwarding Boasian anthropology whether consciously or not.
To return to Henry Ford. Ford’s contact with the Jewish socialist government of Woodrow Wilson convinced him and the majority of US industrialists of the dangers from both Jews and the Wilsonian socialists. While the history has been suppressed and the connections between the International Jewish machinations have never been explored, the Jews were engaged in furious activity, at least until the immigration door was closed beginning in 1921 which frustrated their efforts.
Having been made very wary of Jewish activities then in the last few months of the War and the very alarming year of 1919 when both Ford personally and his company were under attack one can only guess at his reaction when he received his copy of The Jewish Bill Of Rights. One doesn’t have to guess as to the consequence because they were spelled out in the Dearborn Independent beginning in 1920.
His articles, of course, brought the entire International Jewish government down on his head. How much this diverted his attention from his business isn’t clear but in the years from 1920 to 1927 the auto business got away from him as Chevy and General Motors took dominance from him. The Model T was an anachronism by 1927 when Ford shut down his plants for over a year to redesign and update the car as the Model A.
Is it coincidence that he threw in the sponge on the Jewish front in 1927 when he could no longer divide his attention between his anthropology and his business?
Ed had received his copy of The Jewish Bill Of Rights in the Spring of 1919 and rather than wholeheartedly endorsing the Bill’s absurdities made a few pointed objections. This immediately put him on the Hollywood black list of anti-Semites. Combined with his avowed anti-Communism he was then hit from two sides. His income was to be denied him.
Ed put himself in an incredibly vulnerable situation when he bought Tarzana. Rather than buying his twenty acres to raise prize pigs upon his arrival in LA Ed bought the incredible five hundred acre plus Otis Estate that he renamed Tarzana.
He was coming off his best year so that at a purchase price that didn’t exceed his income by that much it probably looked like not that much of a stretch. However Ed was never a practical guy as Emma knew so well. He had never been a farmer, stock breeder or orchardist in his life and now he attempted all three at once. Nor did he have a plan as to how to go about it. He spent money extravagantly as though he had millions in the bank.
It is true that you would have to have been very prescient to understand the deeper meaning of the Communist triumph in Russia that gave them the means to carry the Revolution to the world but the events of 1919 should have given cause for reconsideration. But, Ed was very busy living his life. He probably didn’t have time to think about it that much. Things only become really clear in retrospect.
However, his enemies were watching his every move, quickly perceiving his vulnerability, moving to exploit it. His lack of attention to detail didn’t hinder their plans. His income was immediately attacked making it impossible to sustain his expenses.
The publication of his 1922 novel The Girl From Hollywood that detailed some unsavory aspects of the film capitol at a time it was already beset by scandals such as those of Fatty Arbuckle and the Taylor murder was not well received. Thus after 1922 his movie income dried up with no movies being made until 1927. To compound the problem Ed took the whole year of 1924 to write his literary novel Marcia Of The Doorstep in which he tried to flatter his way back into Hollywood’s good graces. The effort failed when no publisher could be found including his own, McClurg’s.
After a good start in England and Germany his English publisher showed little interest, making no real effort to sell the author. The German market was doing very well for him when it was brought to the attention of the German public that Ed’s pro-ally novels of the war period conflicted with the aims of the Central Powers. Ed’s German sales then tanked so that his income was seriously impacted. One can be sure the objections were Communist inspired and managed.
While he had incurred indebtedness and heavy expense with the Tarzan Estate he now found he was beyond his means. He had to scrabble to save himself from bankruptcy and ruin. It was at this time that he incorporated himself as ERB, Inc. transferring his copyrights and other valuable assets to the corporation out of reach of his creditors. He also tried to develop the Caballero golf course while creating a subdivision of part of Tarzana.
In a really desperate attempt to find quick and easy cash he tried to find oil on Tarzana. That failing he could be seen in the oil marts of LA trying to cook up some deal. Apart from some memorable experiences that he never converted to stories nothing came of it.
Another ploy to raise money was to force McClurg’s to publish many of his lesser works of the second decade that McClurg’s thought lacked sufficient commercial appeal of which opinion they were proved right.
Ed also turned his hand to a couple Westerns and his two Apache novels that he found difficult to get published and when published met with slight success. They are good enough as far as that sort of fiction goes but Ed had so successfully established his reputation as a fantasy/sci-fi writer that he had typecast himself leaving no room for other genres.
For myself, to illustrate the attitude, when I as a young Tarzan fan discovered that he had written Martian novels I was so scandalized that I refused to accept the fact. Tarzan was so sacred I didn’t think Ed had the right to write anything else. If I had known of the Westerns/Apache novels I don’t know how I would have reacted. So, his fans may have been conditioned to the Tarzan/Martian novels so that they would tolerate nothing else.
Whether Ed’s concentration was affected by his financial and political/social woes or not, the mid years of the decade were relatively unproductive for him.
His McClurg’s contract expired toward the end of the decade. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the political situation, none of the major publishers were interested in him forcing him ultimately to begin self-publishing commencing in 1930. In this he was successful but more of that later.
As the twenties began then Ed was under assault from the Communists because he was anti-Bolshevik and under a black list in Hollywood because he failed to endorse the Jewish Bill Of Rights.
At the same time his sexual needs were reaching a critical point. Ed was not getting any younger while his marital situation provided him no satisfaction and the need ‘to live’ a little before he died began to occupy his mind.
Thus personality reformation was forced on him from all sides.
Part VIII follows.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
And
The Accreted Personality
Part V
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Hours In The Library
As the fabulous Twentieth Century dawned virtually a new world different than anything that had gone before came into existence requiring a new consciousness. As usual some could adapt and some couldn’t. In an evolutionary sense those that couldn’t adapt disappeared, those that could survived while those born into the new world accepted it as normal.
Many authors who were very successful in the old world faded from importance not because what they had to say was necessarily irrelevant but because it was no longer relevant to a changed consciousness. Even if their message was universal it had to be expressed in new terms. Some like Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle trundled right along until they died two or three decades later. Some like H.G. Wells whose contemporary novels lost significance and sales potential even though in Wells case his sci-fi output of the nineties has survived strongly until today. His omnibus volume Seven Science Fiction Novels has been a strong seller for nearly a hundred years. A dozen or so handsome editions adorn the shelves of second hand dealers where they turn over at a quick rate.
Still, around 1900 a new generation of writers began to move onto the literary field; the next wave after the crop of the eighteen eighties. The new writers were mainly in the age cohort of 1865 to 1876 as was Ed but he would make a late start in 1912. Memory is the key to psychology. If nothing goes into the memory nothing comes out so it is important to include only the beneficial as much as is possible. It is for that reason that pornography is pernicious. It has little social value; its main function being to stroke one’s fixations. In these crucial years Ed filled his memory banks with the works of the current crop of writers. He unerringly went, as we all do, to those writers and books that talked around his own fixations thus being capable of being incorporated into his own writing.
While he seems to be almost plagiarizing his sources, by the end of the nineteenth century the body of work available had grown to significant proportions. He was not alone in incorporating his reading into his own work. The reading had become part of the social fabric not much different than trolley cars and the soup cans Andy Warhol would later make famous. Burroughs now is part of our mental furniture and while it may not be pertinent to our writing, images and phrases from what we have read may come out of our pen without our realizing it. Almost like saying for dinner I opened a can of Campbell’s tomato soup.
The thousands of movies and records we have seen and know cannot be excluded from our mental processes. So, just as George Du Maurier named his novel Trilby after that of Charles Nodier of the turn of the nineteenth century patterning his story based on that novel that he admired greatly, why shouldn’t Burroughs in his turn do the same. Such referencing was quite common if you read enough and look for it.
It is difficult to know where to begin in listing Ed’s post-1900 reading but as the South formed such a large part of his consciousness it may be well to start with the apostle of the Lost Cause, Thomas Dixon Jr.
Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1846)
Thomas Dixon Jr.
Dixon’s social views differed quite wildly from those of his contemporary H.G. Wells. Indeed, Dixon was of the class that Wells said must not be allowed to express their views lest they cloud those of the Revolution in the minds of the proletariat which must be forced to accept the official views of Wells’ Open Conspiracy version of socialism. No dissent was to be allowed. In keeping with this dictum Anthony Slide gave the scare title American Racist to his 2004 biography of Dixon published by the UKentucky Press in an attempt to make sure Dixon was buried and doesn’t rise again.
Abraham Lincoln
Be that as it may Dixon was extremely popular in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution going into eclipse after his 1919 movie Bolshevism On Trial. So he was both a Southerner, although not a Virginian, and an anti-Communist giving him special appeal to Ed.
Born in 1864 he was old enough to have been aware during the last years of Reconstruction, hence an eyewitness. The grand tragedy of the Civil War for him was that Aryans exterminated Aryans over a worthless cause like Negro slavery. During Reconstruction the Puritan bigots of the North oppressed the Southern Aryans mercilessly so that Dixon made it his goal to reconcile Northern and Southern Aryans, thus the title of his and Griffith’s 1915 movie titled The Birth Of A Nation, in other words, The Birth Of The Aryans as a Nation.
While slavery was the proximate cause of the war the issue takes a subordinate place in the minds of romanticists of the South such as Ed. Dixie is the home of courtly manners and magnolia blossoms, decency and self-respect.
Jefferson Davis
That notion of a Utopia is still shared by many of us today.
The men who settled Virginia were the displaced younger sons of English aristocrats who gave their flavor to the Cavalier State. They were the epitome of desired manhood, the quality versus the equality- hence John Carter of Virginia. Carter is not only a man but the apex of what a man should be.
Dixon wrote several Civil War and Reconstruction novels, all rather good literature. His most famous trilogy of the conflict was composed of The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907). As The Traitor is found in Burroughs’ surviving library it is not unreasonable to believe he read all three and that before he began writing. Dixon wrote two further volumes, The Southerner: A Romance Of The Real Lincoln and The Victim: A Romance Of The Real Jefferson Davis of 1913 and 14 respectively. I’m sure Ed read them both but they were too late to be formative for his writing. I recommend them both highly for a near contemporary history of the events from the perspective of both sides. While it doesn’t seem to be Dixon’s purpose his presentation leaves no doubt in my mind that the assassination of Lincoln was plotted by a cabal of Northern bigots who really wanted to exterminate Southern Aryans replacing them with what they believed to be a pure Negro Republic.
As the Negroes were not welcome in the North these Northern loonies may have believed with Lincoln that Negroes and Aryans could not live together. They probably believed that by ceding the South to the Negroes they had solved the problem. I’m sure it goes much deeper than current research cares to deal with.
Fortunately that didn’t happen. Reconstruction was overturned and the Jim Crow period took form resulting in the current Negro revolution with the threat of a San Domingo Moment.
In addition Dixon wrote an anti-socialist trilogy composed of One Woman (1903), Comrades (1909) and The Root Of Evil (1911). Other than reflecting the attitude of Ed’s thoughts they don’t seem reflected in his own work before 1919 although they may appear in his 1926 novel The Moon Maid.
After the rejection of Ed’s own 1919 anti-Communist tract Under The Red Flag by publishers another work of Dixon’s, The Fall Of A Nation (1916, both book and movie) seem to have been read and seen by Ed. The work would greatly influence Ed’s 1926 novel, The Moon Maid.
So, Thomas Dixon has to be considered a major influence of Ed‘s.
L. Frank Baum (1856-1919)
L. Frank Baum- The Wizard Of Oz
A second major influence, not inferior to Dixon, was the great creator of the Wizard Of Oz series, Lyman Frank Baum. Although chronologically belonging to an earlier age cohort of writers he only began writing at the turn of the century, turning out his fabulously successful The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz in 1900. It is said that Oz was based on the White City of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and most likely was. In those days before movies successful books were turned into equally successful plays as was the case with The Wizard; thus at forty-four Baum was launched on a successful literary career. As with so many writers he squandered his millions ending up virtually broke. He didn’t live long enough for the movies to come to the rescue.
The original Wonderful Wizard Of Oz was written as a political satire which content went missing in 1939’s movie, indeed, it was no longer relevant. Baum should have lived so long.
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz (1900) was followed by The Marvelous Land Of Oz (1904), Ozma Of Oz (1907), Dorothy And The Wizard Of Oz (1908), The Road To Oz (1909) and the Emerald City Of Oz (1910). These were published before Ed began to write so they highly influenced his Martian Chronicles while subsequently issued titles influenced his later work.
Baum grew tired of the series trying to kill it off in 1910’s Emerald City Of Oz but the clamor urging him to write more resulted in the series being resumed in 1913. These titles in order where The Patchwork Girl Of Oz 1913), Tik Tok Of Oz, 1914, The Scarecrow Of Oz (1915), Rinkitink In Oz, (1916), The Lost Princess Of Oz, (1917), The Tin Woodman Of Oz (1918), The Magic Of Oz, (1919) and Glinda Of Oz (1920). There are an additional dozen or so Oz titles but they were commissioned (pastiches) after Baum’s death to Ruth Plumly Thompson and another writer after her. Nice enough but don’t have the spark.
On might say the Wizard far exceeds John Carter in the American consciousness while matching or even, possibly, exceeding that of Tarzan. Without the Tarzan movies the reputation of the Wizard would be as great while that of Tarzan would be significantly diminished.
Baum also wrote a comic strip of stories in 1905 and The Woggle Bug Book in 1905 that Ed may have seen but I haven’t.
One imagines Ed greatly anticipating each Oz book as it was released, stunned by both the stories and the W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill artwork. Always remember that Ed was a failed artist or cartoonist, so the illustration always remained important to him.
Baum like Ed, after having created, an original framework, unmercifully plundered past literature to give substance to his stories. As Ed would follow in his own Symmes’ Hollow Earth stories Baum wrote an entire Oz novel around a version of the Symmes’s theory.
Ed so completely ingested the Baumian parallel universe that it is impossible to conceive of either Helium or Opar without reference to the Emerald City and hence back to Chicago’s White City. John Carter may be conceived of as a male Dorothy off to see the Wizard except that Helium was on Mars. Carter’s accession to the Warlord of Mars may even be seen as a replacement of the Wizard. One suspects that for Ed Baum was the transcendent imagination.
Another important point, as David Adams points out, is that Baum was a theosophist versed in esoteric lore. Baum was among the writers of his day that Ed went out of the way to meet, to introduce himself. It may even be said that he had a relationship with Baum. Ed first introduced himself to Baum in 1913, driving up to Ozcot in Hollywood. The two men were reunited in 1916 during Ed’s stay in LA and again in 1919 for the few remaining months of Baum’s life. He died in May of that year.
So Baum was a central figure in Ed’s career.
George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1926)
Anthony Hope (1863-1933)
George Barr McCutcheon
The third major figure of the decade succeeding 1900 was one George Barr McCutcheon and his Graustark series. Not so well known today he was a major figure in the early years of the century. Reminiscing in the forties in the midst of the disappointment of a second world war in his lifetime Ed remarked that the people then lacked a Graustark so that Ed added that imaginary land to the Oz in his literary memories.
Born in the same year as H.G. Wells, McCutcheon’s first published title Graustark: The Story Of A Love Behind A Throne appeared in 1901 as the century began. Graustark was some Ruritanian paradise located in some imaginary middle European land of wine and waltzes. While a fine imaginary setting I find the novels unappealing. As usual one has the enterprising American lad among torpid European lumpkins.
Of the six Graustark novels three were published before 1912- Graustark (1901), Beverly Of Graustark (1904) and Truxton King: A Story Of Graustark (1909), and three after- The Prince of Graustark (1914), East Of The Setting Sun (1924) and the Inn Of The Hawk And The Raven (1927). Thus only the first three were part of the formation of Ed’s memories when he began writing.
These three were however buttressed by two novels of Anthony Hope the man who invented Ruritanian romances and on whom McCutcheon undoubtedly based Graustark. Hope began his three dozed novel career with the The Prisoner Of Zenda in 1894 followed by the sequel Rupert Of Hentzau in 1898. It would be truly astonishing if you’ve heard of any of the rest of his oeuvre. I certainly never had.
The content of these novelists was directly incorporated into Ed’s two Ruritanian novels The Mad King and HRH The Rider.
The Mad King was a re-courting of Emma that apparently failed.
Booth Tarkington (1869-1946)
Booth Tarkington
A man who Ed thought was the greatest American writer when interviewed in the teens was the enchanting Booth Tarkington, one of the favorites of my childhood. I was enthralled by Tarkington’s Tom Sawyer figure Penrod (1914) Scholfield and Penrod and Sam of 1916. The other titles I read back when were Seventeen (1916), The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), and Alice Adams of 1922.
Tarkington was a prolific writer turning out four dozen or so novels during his lifetime, some in collaboration with Harry Leon Wilson of Merton Of The Movies and Ruggles Of Red Gap fame along with several other significant titles of the day. Burroughs had Ruggles and couple others in his library.
Born between Wells and Ed, Tarkington’s first novel, The Gentleman From Indiana appeared in 1899 followed by his Monsieur Beaucaire in 1900. A whole series of novels followed up to 1912 including The Two Vanrevels so Ed probably had imbibed a lot of Tarkington before and much after 1912. Tarkington was a major influence on Ed’s novels such as The Oakdale Affair and the Efficiency Expert of the teens while The Ambersons and Alice Adams influences show up in Ed’s 1924 novel Marcia Of The Doorstep.
Jack London (1876-1916)
Robert Service (1874-1958)
H.H. Knibbs (1874-1945)
Jack London
Certainly not to be neglected as an influence is the still well known and often read Jack London. The making of London as a writer was the great Klondike Gold Rush beginning in 1896. In 1897 London packed his gear and went North. His experiences in the land of ice and snow provided the material that made his name. A stream of short stories and adventure novels erupted through his pen beginning in 1898 while the novels began in 1902. The Call Of The Wild of 1903 spoke to the wanderlust in Ed’s soul. London did everything that Ed wanted to do, he ranged freely over the entire world in his yacht The Snark, interestingly named after the great poem of Lewis Carroll…beware lest your Snark be a boo…. He was an eyewitness reporter of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, like Ed he was a boxing aficionado, he was ringside as a reporter when Jack Johnson put down the great Jim Jeffries to become the first Negro heavyweight champion.
Ed’s fascination with hoboing had never abated since he mingled with them on Madison, Chicago’s Main Stem, on
Herbert Henry Knibbs
which his father’s factory was located. London’s 1907 memoir of his cross country trip with Kelley’s Army, a part of Coxey’s Army in 1894 must have excited Ed enormously. But, Ed was tied to Emma and unable to roam.
In many ways London’s and Ed’s views were in synch as part of the same age cohort. A Negro’s winning of the boxing championship was really too much for either man to bear. London himself was an amateur boxer. The failure of a White man to appear to wrest the championship from the Negro Johnson drove him to distraction as it did Ed. Although living on either side of the country both expressed their anguish at the same time.
London wrote a preliminary study titled The Abysmal Brute following it with a full scale concerning the championship, The Valley Of The Moon in 1913. Ed set down and wrote The Mucker about his own hobo boxer, Billy Byrne also in 1913. One can only wonder how many other stories were written about an imaginary White boxer recapturing the crown.
The second novel of the Mucker Trilogy all but named London as its inspiration. The Return is a very good novel that celebrated the golden age of hoboing.
Robert W. Service
The novel tied in a number of Ed’s literary hobo sources. In addition to London the poet H.H. Knibbs provided a sort of framing device as Ed wove verses of his great poem Out There Somewhere through the story, essentially basing the novel on the poem. He also included snatches of verse from the Kiplingesque Robert W. Service of The Cremation Of Sam McGee fame.
The Return then might be said to be a celebration of the road based on London’s The Road and poems by Knibbs and Service. Byrne was also probably an attempt to create another series based on The Road to supplement Tarzan but it didn’t take.
Zane Grey (1972-1939)
Grey might be one of the weaker influences before 1910 but Ed was destined to be thought a rival by his publishers. Grey had the magic touch in being able to pitch his is stories toward women thus garnering the big money of the slick magazines. Grey thus earned enough to buy himself a yacht making him the envy of Ed.
Grey began in 1903 with his story of Betty Zane. This was followed three years later by The Spirit Of The Border, then in 1908’s Last Of The Plainsmen. Nineteen nine brought The Last Trail and The Shortstop. The earlier titles were on small imprints while The Shortstop was publishing by McClurg’s, the future publisher of Burroughs. From McClurg’s Grey went to Harper And Bros. who remained his publisher from then on. One wonders if McClurg’s sold his contract to Harper’s or whether they signed him to a one book deal. They certainly tied Ed up contractually so he couldn’t get away.
Grey’s first book for Harper’s in 1910 is the only story to indicate Ed’s readership, The Heritage Of The Desert concerning the Mormons. That influence showed up in 1913’sThe Cave Girl.
I could never get into Grey as a kid although I was given a copy of The Shortstop that I didn’t read then and never have. Still have it though. Grey broke through in 1912 with Riders Of The Purple Sage. The Rainbow Trail and The Mysterious Rider are found in Ed’s library.
I’ve only read Ed’s two Western novels once so I would have to read them again to see how influenced they were by Grey.
Grey’s stuff is alright I guess but the guy’s a real dud writer as far as I’m concerned.
In addition to these major influences Ed also stuffed his memory with reams of poems and magazine articles. The newspapers which were much different then also provided much grist for his mill.
In the background, of course, was Ed’s interest in mythology. He did read Howard Pyle’s four volume version of the Vulgate-Lancelot that appeared after the turn of the century. The two and a half years he spent at Harvard Latin School undoubtedly gave him a good background while in those formative years conditioning his mind to deal with difficult thought processes. After all the mind has to be trained to manage the mass of memories that make the person.
The question during this period is whether or not he read ancient Greek mythology or learned any Greek. I think not. He may have some familiarity with Homer especially the Odyssey on which many of his stories may be based. He was probably familiar with The Labors Of Hercules but I don’t see any evidence of understanding of The Iliad.
The Iliad is important for psychology as Homer introduces the notion of the infinitely powerful mind of Zeus. Zeus could remember everything while having such a powerful mind that he could order the whole of it in sequence while finding his way through any number of conundrums. The only thing he couldn’t do was set aside what was fated.
What goes into one’s memory or mind is of cardinal importance. Trash goes in, trash comes out. Ed filled his memory banks with useful information and wonderful speculative literature. The question, then, is what does one do with those memories now transformed into knowledge. Remembering is the sine qua non but organization is equally important. The mind must be trained. Remembered and organized, then what? Then comes intelligence and application. A flexible intelligence is probably known as imagination. One can combine, rearrange, and recombine one’s memories into new uses. Make meaningful what was formerly incoherent.
Ed well-satisfied with himself remarked that only one in a hundred thousand had a good imagination in which number he obviously included himself among the elite. I don’t know where he got his stat but I’m sure a mind such as his was rare enough. There really aren’t many who can use their mind as he did. One only has to read the Martian writers who preceded him to see the astonishing distance between their work and his. Wells’ War Of The Worlds for instance is a fairly pedestrian work. A missile shot from a cannon on Mars arrives on Earth and some spindly creatures get out who then mount some tripods that begin walking through London spewing some black gas. Fresh at the time but not wildly imaginative. Ed would challenge Wells when he wrote the first third of The Moon Maid. That book was so imaginative, superior to Wells’ First Men In The Moon, as to be the work of a master taunting an obstreperous pupil.
So, when Ed Began 1912 his memory banks were full of experience and stuffed with literature and scientific knowledge that he was able to use so imaginatively that most people were completely unaware of the amount of learning incorporated into his stories.
Part VI chronicles Ed’s life from the beginning of his success to 1920.
Pt. III: Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality
April 12, 2012
Edgar Rice Burroughs
And
The Accreted Personality
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs Searching For The Answers
The Sea In Which He Swam
“I will tell you my history!
And you, excellent agnostic as you are,
‘Shall minister to a mind diseased,
And pluck out the memory of a rooted sorrow!’
What a power of expression there was in Shakespeare,
The uncrowned but actual King of England!
Not the rooted sorrow alone was to be ‘plucked out’;
But the very memory of it.
The apparently simple here holds complex wisdom;
No doubt the poet knew,
Or instinctively guessed
the most terrible fact in the universe…’
“And what is that?”
“The eternal consciousness of Memory,…God cannot forget- and, in consequence of this, His creature, may not!”
Marie Corelli- The Sorrows Of Satan
Miss Marie Corelli- The Soul Of Confidence
There can be no mind without memory. While I personally believe that the unborn infant does have inchoate memories obtained in the womb, let us just say that the memory banks begin to fill with birth. With memory comes an ability to analyze, that is compare, memories. As an example when I was lying on my back in my crib looking at the room for a long time (read, a couple months ) and all I saw were incoherent geometrical forms, angles and triangles, circles and whatever one moment as I looked on in amazement these geometric forms cohered into three dimensional objects forming walls and ceilings, While I didn’t know the names for lamps and lampshades, the lamp in the corner became one. And that was by unaided instruction.
Then they stood me on my feet and my education began in earnest. From that point an infant has to memorize vast amounts of information while somehow learning how to manipulate it for use. By the time you get to school they’re cracking your brain with masses of information.
The basis of mind is memory, that is to say the mind is nearly vacant at birth like an unprogrammed computer. The matrix for memorization is there but the content has yet to be loaded. While loading a computer is a matter of minutes filling a mind takes a lifetime with the crucial years being the first twelve. Zeus in the Iliad had a mind of infinite power and it is the duty of every individual to develop the power of his mind to as close an approximation as Zeus according to his ability.
George Du Maurier
Strangely the psychologists of the period failed to realize this, although the philosopher Carus came close. Freud himself seems to ignore the basic role of memory while some novelists of the last quarter of the century grasped it. George Du Maurier’s wonderful novel, Peter Ibbetson, is a marvelous exposition on the nature of Memory. Marie Corelli’s Sorrows of Satan is likewise built on the nature of memory. In short, without memory we are nothing, without the ability to remember as a child we can amount to nothing, while in old age if we lose our memory we become a vegetable without any purpose. Our existence is really a story of how we accumulated our memories and what we did with them.
There are also kinds of Memory. Experiential memory forms the basis of which much of the content is what the nineteenth century American sociologist Graham Sumner called Folkways. The ways one’s people do and see things that we begin to acquire at birth naturally, or perhaps unconsciously. This memory is supplemented at age five or six with organized education- school. Education is a very hard and painful thing requiring periodic restructuring of the brain when enough knowledge is acquired to demand a change of scale. No wonder fair numbers of people fail this rite of passage. Education gives or should give one a means of interpreting one’s acquired knowledge and experience, hence the importance of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Matters have changed a great deal since the nineteenth century with the development of various forms of media so that the child is bombarded with propaganda that he probably can’t evaluate properly so that the pre-school years have become very dangerous to him. Burroughs didn’t have that problem.
Ed was born into the world in 1875 so that his youth and young manhood was lived in the horse and buggy world shaping his ideas of reality. This would force a severe adaptation to the changes of scale, folkways and technology after 1900. In the sense of H.G. Wells’ novel Men Like Gods the world passed through an interface into a parallel universe where horses and buggies disappeared to be replaced by motor cars and an unparalleled wonder- the airplane. I get ahead of myself. Ed’s mind had assumed its form by 1900 so let’s see, if we can, what he saw, as his memory received its input.
Today we look at his novels of lost world after lost world and sneer at it as an overused literary device. But consider:
To give it a convenient date, the Western consciousness went through a change of scale about 1795. Philip Farmer, the American sci-fi writer picked this date to begin his fictional Wold Newton Universe. The change was the beginning of what might be called speculative fiction. Mary Shelley’s influential book, Frankenstein, would possible be the earliest or very early example.
Oddly enough this very period saw the introduction of the historical novel in the works of the Scotsman, Walter Scott, perhaps the greatest novelist who ever lived. In my book he is. Thus we have a sense of the past and vision of the future emerging as the Western mind set. The historical novel itself is an exercise of racial memory so that along with the change came a realization of the racial self as well as the individual self, an expanded consciousness.
The Western mindset was changed, had been changing, the changes of which took shape during the French Revolution, preceded by the Age of Reason which melded into the scientific outlook.
Hence, when Napoleon, for whatever quixotic reason , invaded Egypt in 1799, he took along a contingent of scientists, who did not exist before that time, to catalog the wonders of that ancient civilization. This was the first of the Lost Empires to be discovered by Europeans only 76 years before Ed was born. And what a Lost Civilization. All had been hidden from Western eyes by the veil of the Moslem occupation of what were traditionally Western lands. But now, the Pyramids, Luxor, the Great Sphinx! The last was celebrated by Shelley’s mind in his great poem Ozymandias nineteen years later:.
The Great Romantic- Percy Shelley
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And whose wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my work , ye Mighty and despair!’
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The European mind was astounded, dumbfounded, amazed beyond measure. This was also the time that the Arabian Nights or alternatively The Thousand And One Nights of Scheherazade was placed in the European canon of literature. And the Egyptian hieroglyphs, so inscrutable, concealed the mystery of this amazing ancient people that preceded the Israelites of the Bible. Yet thirty years later Champollion of France decoded the hieroglyphics and revealed their meaning to the amazement of the world.
So vast were the Egyptian treasures of memory that year by year more astounding tombs were opened, hundreds and hundreds of mummies were discovered, legend after terrifying legend revealed this amazing past until the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in the 1920’s more or less put an end to this terrific hundred and twenty year voyage through mankind’s memory. The curse of the Pharaohs haunted the Western imagination well into the thirties with many movies, the technology unheard of in 1799, exploited the fantasy. Marvel of marvels. The curse of the Pharaohs.
Heinrich Schliemann
Nor did archaeology stop in Egypt. Heinrich Schliemann, a German enthusiast, defied the experts and uncovered the site of Homer’s fabled Troy, the lost civilization of the Iliad. The Iliad that incredible legend of 800 BC turned out to be based on fact. The Greek Myths themselves shape shifted from incredible fantasies to be myths based on actual events. So actual that Schliemann leaving Troy traveled to the Argolid of Greece and unearthed the marvelous lost civilization of Mycenae, revealing a shaft tomb containing what might have been a death mask of the fabled King Agamemnon of the Iliad.
Oh yes, this is old hat to us now but imagine the gasp of astonishment then. And, it didn’t stop with Schliemann’s discoveries either. The walls of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire too were exposed to the light of day with their thousands of cuneiform tablets that once again were almost miraculously translated to reveal that amazing civilization thought to be a figment of the imagination of the Jews but now found real.
These discoveries went on an on and on. Even impoverished Africa contributed the memory of the Malagasy Empire of South Africa with its remains of Zimbabwe.
The British captains returned from India bearing tales almost too marvelous to be comprehended. Read General Forlong’s magnificent Rivers Of Life. The jungles of Southeast Asia gave up many incredible remains including Angkor Wat.
Burroughs is thought to have taken the concept of the lost civilization from that great English author Rider Haggard and while he read Haggard’s works, definitely influenced by them, he really only needed his newspaper to be astonished on, shall we say, a daily basis?
Thus year by year Ed’s memory banks filled with truths made even more incredible by having been the stuff of repressed memory for centuries even millennia.
II.
And then there was the War Between The States and Reconstruction. The Indian Wars post States Rights. How to take all this in. This was not a static period or a simpler happier time as many so fondly imagine.
Ed’s father George T. was an officer in the Civil War serving from the first Bull Run to Lee’s surrender at Appomatox. While soldiers don’t like to talk about their experiences surely little Eddie must have gotten some stories while the Grand Old Army of the Republic, the GAR, would have been prominent marching in parades and having a general political presence at a time when the politicians waved the bloody shirt as having fought.
Ed himself was born two years before the crime of Reconstruction, with all it attendant horrors for the Southerners, so while not having any real memories of the period he would have been aware of it as the following Jim Crow period developed. Romancing the South was prominent through the First World War dissipating in the twenties and thirties and disappearing after WWII. On his 1916 cross country auto tour on which Ed took a portable record player along one of three songs he played over and over was Jack Yellin’s Are You From Dixie?, a favorite of mine. Yellin himself was a Lithuanian Jew who came to the country at five in 1900 and by 1915 was able to write a song reflecting the feeling of the country such as this:
Jack Yellin- Master Songwriter
Hello there Stranger, how do you do,
There’s something’ I want to say to you,
You seem surprised that I recognize
I’m no detective I just surmise,
You’re from the place that I’m longing to be,
Your smiling face just seems to say to me,
You’re from my homeland, my sunny homeland,
Tell me, can it be?
Are you from Dixie, I say from Dixie, where the fields of cotton beckon to me,
I’m glad to see you, tell me, I’ll be you and the friend I’m longin’ to see.
Are you from Alabama, Tennessee or Caroline
Any place below that Mason-Dixon line.
Are you from Dixie, I say from Dixie, ‘cause I’m from Dixie too.
It was way back in old ‘89,
When I first crossed that Mason-Dixon line,
Gee, but I long to return
To those good old folks I left behind.
My home was way down in ol’ Alabam’
On a plantation close to Birmingham,
And there’s one thing for certain, I’m surely flirtin’
With those southbound trains.
Pretty incredible for someone who probably still spoke with a Jewish accent. Goes to show how pervasive the sentimental vision of the South was. The Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris kept the vision alive until it ended shortly after WWII when Walt Disney produced his remarkable Song Of The South. That movie is now banned because Negro objectors wish to deprive us of our cultural heritage even though the movie presented Blacks as so adorable you just had to love them running counter to all the facts as evidenced today.
Ed’s attitude is probably best expressed in the War Between The States/Reconstruction novels of the great Thomas Dixon Jr. and reinforced by D.W. Griffiths’ great movie The Birth Of A Nation.
The Great Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.
Because Dixon points out several unpalatable facts about Northern conspirators who fomented the War and almost certainly conspired to assassinate Lincoln after the War because he wouldn’t crucify the Southern Aryans and attempted to impeach Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson for the same reason, who also resisted their villainous genocidal schemes. Dixon has been slandered to the point of being a veritable non-person, however he wrote very good novels. His diptych The Southerner and The Victim about Lincoln and Jefferson Davis respectively is really must reading for the period.
So John Carter of the Mars series was a Virginian as well as most of Ed’s heroes while he also translates his ’father’ from the Union ranks to those of Virginia. Probably based on memories of Massachusetts’ Phillips Academy he invariably excoriates New Englanders.
Ed’s memories of the War and Reconstruction while learned second hand were a very important part of his mental furniture.
III.
Not inferior to Lost Civilizations and the Civil War to Ed’s mind were the very exciting events of the Scramble For Africa of the last quarter of the century. The Scramble of the European States for colonies in Africa also involved the stories of the searches for Livingston and the sources of the Nile, H.M. Stanley, Richard Burton, and King Leopold of the Congo Free State and many, many exciting stories, real life adventures and adventurers that wouldn’t be believable is they weren’t documented. The imaginary adventures of John Carter on Mars pale before them. I’m sure the character of Carter owes more to them than has been recognized. Certainly the Tarzan adventures couldn’t have been written except for the memory of these great explorers and the events of the Scramble which ended only a few years before Ed began writing.
King Leopold- Man Of Destiny
The incredible story of King Leopold of Belgium is certainly one of the most amazing stories of all time. Originally the Congo was not a colony of Belgium but the personal property, private domain of Leopold, thus Tarzan’s claim to hegemony of all Africa. In addition to the Congo Leopold annexed Katanga while also acquiring Rwanda-Burundi and almost the whole of the Southern Sudan otherwise known as the Anglo-Egyptian province of Equatoria. Unlike most of the other colonies, once the bicycle and its wheel was developed, the discovery of rubber in the Congo made the Congo a cash cow.
Rubber at that time was collected in the wild, later grown on plantations in various locations, then replaced by synthetic rubber made from garbage during WWII. The methods of collecting the rubber were brutal as the Negroes were forced to search the wilds and punished in they didn’t make their quota.
While it’s true that Leopold sanctioned this, Whites anywhere in Africa regressed from civilization to the level of native cannibals. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness was based on a real person. Thus the French in what became French Equatorial Africa were guilty of as heinous crimes as those in the Congo but Leopold took the brunt of the criticism. The Congo Free State was given to Belgium as a gift after the turn of the century. The Tarzan series thus is a memory of the period. The attitude prospered until the thirties when realities obviated the colonial past.
In the post-MGM series of Tarzan pictures filmed by Sol Lesser all the stories take place in Lost Civilizations while the actors, savages and all are White, no Black Africans at all.
Sol Lesser- Tarzan Producer
IV.
Another building block of memory not inferior to the others was the development of science in the nineteenth century. The key event for Ed Burroughs was the introduction of Evolution by Charles Darwin in 1959. Ed uses several strands of biology in his corpus. He knows the earlier work of Lamarck as well as that of Darwin and later evolutionary contributions of Gregor Mendel and the germ theory of August Weismann and his contribution of the Weismann Barrier that Ed apparently rejected.
Thus contrary to the popular conception that Burroughs was some sort of idiot savant. He kept up on current developments well aware of the Curries’ discovery of radium when he began to write. The awareness of radium poisoning was not yet known as he seems to be unaware of it.
Although it is not generally accepted he was also very well informed on the development of psychology. There is no reason that he couldn’t have known of Charcot while he was well up on hypnotism, an essential part of Charcot‘s method. Psychology before Freud preempted the discipline which was a fairly broad loosely defined subject. The field was also open to any and all investigators not yet preempted by the medical profession.
While it is generally believed that Freud discovered or invented the unconscious, this is not so; he merely defined the unconscious to suit his purposes and then by dint of shouting loudly and continuously managed to impose his view as orthodox driving all other understandings off the field. In fact he managed to make his interpretation, almost fabrication of psychoanalysis, the gold standard of psychology.
Sigmund Freud- Dream Weaver
Psychology was split off from philosophy rather late gaining momentum only during the eighteen eighties.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The most significant aspect of psychology that Ed exploited was that of the split personality which
Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde
he embraced to an astonishing degree. He seems to have gotten the notion from Robert Louis Stevenson’s great little novelette, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson got there before H.G. Wells or otherwise Wells would likely have appropriated the genre as well as interplanetary warfare, vivisection, invisibility, time travel and futuristic dystopias, all of which were of inestimable influence on the plastic memory of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
While Ed certainly tried to out-wow these amazing writers perhaps the closest he came was the little recognized story, The Eternal Lover, the title of which is often changed to the Eternal Savage, which completely misses the point. This story was even answered by Kipling and Haggard in their Love Eternal. Eddie was moving in fast company.
He was familiar with many novelists writing in psychological genres including George Du Maurier with his three incredible novels, William Morris of Notes From Nowhere fame and several other interesting but not compelling novels, as well as, I believe, some few novels of Marie Corelli who was working the psychological memory games.
Thus, by the time Ed began writing in earnest in 1911-12 he had a well defined notion of contemporary psychology. One must always bear in mind that Ed read continually and was omnivorous in his choice of reading material. While not of the University he had the more random reading habits of the autodidact.
V.
Having two remaining topics of memory to cover, literature and immigration I think I’ll deal with that of literature first saving immigration for last.
The nineteenth century was the unfolding of the Aryan mind, an age of self-realization and the beginning of the effort to attain full consciousness. This is the story of psychology from then to now. The search for awareness was carried on in medical circles, philosophical circles and literary circles. Psychology was transferred from philosophy into medicine and science in the last half of the century. The quest for awareness was no more prominent than in literature. The German Romantics were the first in the field to explore the nature of the mind. Men like E.T.A Hoffman, La Motte De La Fouque and Charles Nodier represented psychological ideas in their fiction. These are significant but overlooked works.
Friedrich De La Motte Fouque- Wonderful Novels
There have always been stories and storytellers. First in poetic form then evolving into prose. The Greek novels of the Hellenic period are just great. Papryus was expensive and copying by hand was laborious and also expensive. With the invention of paper and moveable typeface and the printing press, books became more economical and multiple copies into the hundreds or thousands feasible. This meant that more people of diverse backgrounds could find their way into print. The key form of expression was poetry but prose gained ground. Then in the mid-eighteenth century the modern novel form took shape to explode after 1795.
Sir Walter Scott- Number One
Perhaps the first great novelist was Walter Scott who, himself began as a poet. His long poems such as The Lady Of The Lake and Marmion are still great reading although out of style along with Scott himself. What do I care about what’s out of style? Do you? Nevertheless Scott became the model for such mid-century greats as Alexandre Dumas, Balzac and Eugene Sue.
Scott and the great French novelists were also influenced by the Gothic novelist Mrs. Ann Radcliffe who wrote her romances in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
There are a myriad of authors, now forgotten except by the scholar or enthusiast who seeks their charm. George Borrow while an eccentric turned out a few worthwhile novels, Thomas, Peacock, Pierce Egan, G.W.M. Reynolds Mysteries Of The Court Of London is a fabulous five thousand page, ten volume novel of the period. Everything you’ll ever need to know. Charles Dickens and all the great novelists of the mid century wrote scores of interesting worthwhile novels now nearly slipped through memory. Of course there is only time and room in the mind of we moderns who are bombarded daily by radio, songs, film and TV plus tens of thousand of books appearing annually, for so many old books. The need for selection is paramount while the changing social and political situations are relegating the world of pre-9/11 to the historical dust bin. Still the treasures are there buried like Long John Silver’s gold for those who care to dig. Let’s hope you’re one.
As I have noted, after Darwin in 1859 and the rise of psychological sensibilities, of which Darwin was ignorant, changed for the upcoming generation who took the stage in the eighties. The great modern genres were in embryo. Jules Verne had already begun his scientific romances that were influential while he continued writing into the twentieth century. His books are now heavily bowdlerized because his acute observations of the reality he perceived are no long thought proper by our modern social Mrs. Grundys.
Camille Flammarion, the very great French scientific neo-romantic writer made the space travel and planetary romance popular beginning in the sixties at the same time as Verne.
In 1880 Percy Gregg published Across The Zodiac which is erroneously credited as the first Martian romance beginning the long fascination with the Red Planet for which Burroughs was for so long credited. It was in the mid-eighties that a major influence of Ed’s began to publish and continued to publish at the rate of two or three volumes a year for nearly forty years, the great, wonderfully imaginative Henry Rider Haggard. A most versatile writer now known mainly for his African novels as the Scramble was in process. Haggard also wrote a half dozen great ancient Egyptian lost civilization romances that are well worth reading along with a couple Hebrew volumes of the Roman wars that are exceptional. It appears that Ed read most or all of Haggard.
The year after Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Stevenson published his great scientific psychological thriller, Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. A key fact for Ed’s mental development is that these novels that are considered classics today were published during Ed’s lifetime or the decade or two before his birth so these really startling and amazing novels were as fresh in their impact as, say, a Rolling Stones record in the sixties and seventies. One imagines schoolboys gathering in knots and talking about them excitedly, much as we did about the latest sci-fi pieces in the fifties. While we know that Burroughs read these books we can’t be sure when but I imagine that to have read these books he must have done most of them close to the publishing date or they couldn’t have been part of his mental furniture by the time he began to write in 1911-12. And he had a lot of reading to do.
The Sherlock Holmes of Conan Doyle who began his career in 1886 also which continued intermittently for twenty-five years or so dazzling Ed’s mind. Doyle as I see it was also dealing with a split personality. Holmes and his alter ego are essentially two aspects of the same personality. Watson belongs to the pre-scientific past while Holmes is the scientific thinking machine devoid of sympathy. Watson takes the sentimental side. In addition Doyle introduces a third personality element in the criminal mastermind Moriarty who is a sort of Hyde to Holmes Jekyll, hence his is the social negative to Holmes positive.
Jekyll and Hyde and Holmes and Watson were introduced in the same year of 1886 as Marie Corelli’s Wormwood that also deals with the splitting of personality. As these books couldn’t have been influenced by each other one has to assume that the notion of split or multiple personality was being bruited about. Corelli seems to have attended Charcot’s demonstrations so that all psychological roads lead back to the Salpetriere.
There is no clear evidence that Burroughs read Corelli but as she was among the best selling and most sensational authors of the period I have little doubt myself that Ed followed his unerring instincts at least sampled her work.
Another author plowing the same furrow that Burroughs read for sure was George Du Maurier whose first novel, once again dealt with a split personality. In his novel, Peter Ibbetson of 1891, his character has a childhood in France which was very happy. Through the death of his parents he was sent to an uncle in England who while providing generously for Peter’s education nevertheless was cold while being disgusted at Peter’s rejection of his ideas of manhood. Peter’s glowing childhood expectations were dashed throwing him into a deep depression. Now let’s catch up on Burroughs’ development and I’ll return to Du Maurier later in another context.
Mark Twain
Now, Burroughs’ loved three novels that he read and reread six or seven times by 1920. They were Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Ed was led unerringly to the three novels that dealt most explicitly with his mental fixations. The first two were published during Burroughs’ childhood while the last was published shortly after the turn of the century in 1902.
Two of these three books relate to Burroughs life from birth to age twenty in 1896 with the last relating to the next period. One’s favorite books, songs or music are always going to relate to psychological needs developed during your early years. You may or may not have realized their psychological importance. It can’t be said whether Ed knew why the books were his favorites or not. All three relate to the blighted hopes of his youth. As far as I can recall all of Ed’s books tell the same story as these three in variation.
All three tell of a young prince who is disinherited and then after a series of adventures comes into his own again. In Twain’s Prince And The Pauper we have the double, or split personality of the Prince and the Pauper. Identical in appearance. By some literary magic the two exchange places with the Prince trading roles with the Pauper. In the end the Prince reassumes his proper role.
In Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy one has the boy who is the son of a Lord, thus being a little Prince, growing up in America in straitened circumstance who then is discovered and comes into his inheritance and true identity. He has a sort of double in a newsboy who follows him to England before moving to California where he becomes the successful manager of a ranch thus foreshadowing Ed’s flirtation with and move to California where he bought the Tarzana estate.
The Virginian of 1902 does not properly belong to his childhood but follows the same theme with the addition that the hero meets his true love and has an idyllic wilderness honeymoon. Shortly after reading the book he took his young wife Emma West to Idaho in what seems like an attempt to live the book. Emma was the wrong girl and the wilds of Idaho the wrong place.
It would seem then that Ed was highly influenced by what he read. He was also able to retain an accurate remembrance of the stories in his memory. The period from 1896 to 1911 was also filled with literature that furnished his mind for the literary tasks ahead of him.
So, in addition to the truly great literature of Dumas and Sue, Verne and Haggard, he was drawn to the interplanetary adventure. Like Freud who appropriated the long history of the Unconscious to himself so Burroughs absorbed and transcended the thirty years or so of previous interplanetary adventure to himself. Just as one erroneously thinks Freud invented the unconscious so one thinks Ed Burroughs invented the Martian interplanetary romance. No so. Earlier examples are constantly being discovered. At this time the earliest Martian novel is considered to be the one by Percy Gregg entitled Across The Zodiac published in 1880.
Greggs’s novel is written in the high Victorian style reminiscent of Anthony Trollope or just any of the crop of English writers of the 1820 or so generation so that the emphasis is sort of pre-scientific and stuffy unlike Burroughs’ writing which began after the invention of cars and airplanes, movies, phones and the whole works. Probably for that reason Burroughs displaced all other Martian writers with the exception of H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds. Even that which was on the edge between the Victorian and Edwardian periods relates more to the past than to the future.
There is a question as to which of these books Ed may have read. I think it not improbable that if he had heard of them he would have sought them out. Nor would, say, Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac be as obscure in Ed’s day as it is now. There would have been not a few people who were familiar with such a book to refer Ed to it. As an inveterate magazine and newspaper reader there is no reason he might not have come across a reference. After all he did read Popular Science and Popular Mechanics both of which originated in the last quarter of the century. So, while it cannot be said for certain I think it probable that he was familiar with most of the Martian literature so that when he began A Princess Of Mars he knew what the landscape should and shouldn’t look like and knew what to avoid.
He was early introduced to the idea of the double and multiple personality through Jekyll And Hyde. The book was a clear cut example of split personality. The puzzle of a divided personality fascinated Ed while the literature of the subject is fairly extensive with numerous writers discussing it in various manners of doubling. From 1886 to 1900 many outstanding examples appeared that given Ed’s attraction to the sensational he would definitely have heard of while when reading those works and Ed’s works the same themes and even details are recurrent in both. Thus, while I have never read of Marie Correli’s name being mentioned in connection with Ed’s work she manages that same dark, murky sensibility in connection with personality dissociations. She was one of the best selling authors from 1886 to 1900 so there is no chance Ed hadn’t heard of her.
While he may have read Corelli it is certain that he read all three of the novels of George Du Maurier- Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian.
The first, Peter Ibbetson, 1891, follows Ed’s usual formula of a happy childhood disrupted by an untoward event. In this case having been brought up in France, his parents died and he was sent to an uncle to be brought up in England, thus a personality divided by French and English identities with the latter unhappy.
Now, Du Maurier concentrates on the need for memories. As he says, quite rightly, without memories what is a man. Nothing. Just a vegetable. Ibbetson, then, chronicles his childhood French memories while abhorring his current English situation. The crisis comes when Uncle Ibbetson insults Peter’s mother; Peter then murders his uncle.
Before he did Peter meets his childhood sweetheart, Mimsy, now married as Mary, the Duchess Of Towers. The childhood affection was sincere but she is now a married woman. Peter would have been hanged for the murder except for the intervention of Mary and her powerful friends and then is given life without parole.
Before Freud appropriated the topic for his own ends the Unconscious was thought to be a source of great intellectual riches with incredible paranormal, that is to say supernatural powers. At the same time dreams were improperly understood while also thought to have paranormal powers attached to them. Du Maurier invented something called Dreaming True while at the time Lucid Dreaming was a hot topic. Lucid Dreaming is when you consciously invade your dreams without waking and direct the dream’s course. Robert Louis Stevenson, who died in 1894, said that he wrote many of his stories while dreaming lucidly. They read like it too. Ed Burroughs, also, was interested in Dreaming True and Lucid Dreaming and said that he too took his stories from his dreams. If you read Burroughs with Lucid Dreaming in mind you can trace those influences too.
So, and now this seemed possible at the time and may seem possible to some today, Peter and Mary agreed to establish mental contact and Dream True. That is to say that they would each enter into one another’s dream together. This they succeeded in doing thus each led a double life. Now, in the very nature of things, they could not dream of anything that was not in their memories. Thus, they could only dream for instance of chairs they had seen, places they had been, only that of which they had memories. Du Maurier intuited that mind was wholly memory. Nothing comes out that didn’t go in.
As they had read of prehistory they could travel back through time into prehistoric situations. Everything went well for twenty-five years until one day the dreamgate was closed. Peter couldn’t enter from his end. His worst fears were realized. Mary had died.
His disappointment unbalanced his mind so that he went insane. He was removed from the prison to the asylum, his memories in disorder. I suppose Du Maurier meant shizophrenic in which one’s memories are so painful they became confused, working against each other so that the mind can’t function properly.. Over time he became reconciled to the reality and regained the use of his memories. And then one night while Dreaming True he sat by a dream river when Mary, released from heaven as a very special dispensation, appeared to him, explained the situation and told him they would meet in heaven.
The second novel, Trilby, one of the most celebrated of its time deals with the iconic hypnotist, Svengali, evil but potent, who exploited Trilby, a memory creation Du Maurier borrowed from the novel of the same name by Nodier, the Romantic. Hypnotism will play a significant role in Ed’s work. And finally the third novel, The Martian, inspired Ed, and his mind focused on Mars.
Du Maurier’s Dreaming True meshed with Stevenson’s Lucid Dreaming as a source for obtaining material unconsciously. It is clear that Ed was heavily influenced by Stevenson having read most if not all his fiction. It seems probable that he would have read articles about his hero who spoke freely of his Lucid Dreaming technique. Thus when Ed said he found his stories in his dreams there is no reason not to believe that he was familiar with these dream theories and their source in the unconscious.
The Fantastic E.T.A. Hoffman
Lin Carter believed and I concur that Ed also read novels by William Morris of News From Nowhere fame who writes dreamlike stories bearing some relationship to those of Ed.
I intend to pause at 1900 continuing on with Ed’s life experiences to 1911, but to close on this theme, this next book appeared shortly after 1900 but is very much a product of the pre-industrial period before 1900 so I include it here.
In England during the last quarter of the century the spiritualist movement gravitated from the US to England and even Germany where it was treated as a science to be investigated, hence the plethora of novels like those of Du Maurier and Marie Corelli.
Not only was the unconscious thought of as a repository for multiple personalities but even the fantastic notion of past lives. Thus people sprang up who believed, or said they did, that they could remember previous incarnations. This notion was also helped along by the appearance of Hindu and Buddhist missionaries in Britain and the US with their notions of reincarnation.
Among these imposters was a Swiss woman using the name of Helene Smith whose supposed lives were recorded by the psychologist Theodore Flournoy. Now, he conducted a serious scientific investigation of the woman’s claims. That Flournoy could allow himself to be so deluded demonstrates the psychological novelty of the Unconscious.
Miss Smith was a shop girl who was much displeased with her situation so she began to fantasize. Using the spiritualist movement as a stepping stone Flournoy made her famous. She would have done much better to turn her fantasies into novels much like Ed would but she enjoyed the attention her past lives claims got her. She chose three past identities, one as an Indian Princess, another as a Martian and the third as Marie Antoinette. Of interest here is that she invented a Martian vocabulary that only she could translate. Burroughs himself followed a few years later with his own vocabularies of various provenance including African Ape, the first and once universal language.
There is no reason to go into the details of her debunking, the point here is that it is thought that Ed read Flournoy’s account: From India To The Planet Mars. Certainly he would create three ‘past lives’ as identities to explore his own fantasies- Mars, an imaginary Africa and the Earth’s Core. The late life Venus stories can be discounted. By c. 1900 then the foundations of his novels had already entered his memory banks where they bubbled under his conscious mind where he could work on them both consciously and unconsciously letting them slowly ferment.
Terminating the nineteenth century were two works by the deviser of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. The first was his Interpretation Of Dreams and the other, The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life. The true significance of these books are overlooked but they both deal with the primacy of Memory as the basis of mind. Reminiscences as he would say.
As Freud noted that the problem hysterics suffered was not biologic but the distortion of memories or reminiscences, so both his two volumes deal with the distortion of Memory in ‘normal’ people. Freud must have thought he was normal as he used himself as a subject in both books.
As Freud grasped, dreams are based not only on memories but the distortion of memory by one’s fixations. That is, a fixation of a memory too hurtful to face so that it is fixated in the form of the hurt from which point it constellates similar subsequent memories and even shapes them and one’s actions to conform to its fears. So, from reminiscences of hysterics Freud had moved on to the memories of dreams and parapraxes.
Even more prescient was the study that followed a couple years later: The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life. The book is ill-titled, being somewhat off putting although very easy reading, but of even more significance than his dream book. This was the study that gave rise to the term ‘Freudian slip’. It is a study of parapraxes and how one’s memory interferes with another memory to blot it out. Strangely Freud missed the import of the significance of Memory taking it more or less for granted.
Freud’s analysis of parapraxes such as forgetting a word you commonly use was superb. He demonstrates significantly, from his own example, how unpleasant memories that one might associate with a word cancels out the ability to recall the word. In other instances one means to say one thing but let out one’s true intent by saying another.
Thus the subconscious whether in dream distortion or waking distortion affects one’s life, clashing with the conscious. The memories one has, the subconscious, one’s true desires emerge against one’s will. Of course, practice can eliminate or reduce word substitutions which is done by sharpening one’s conscious efforts to deny entrance to the sub- or Unconscious. In the struggle to unify one’s consciousness, that is, as Freud would put it, have your ego fill the space occupied by the Id- a later name for the Unconscious one must eliminate the interface. The only successful method is to integrate one’s consciousness so that the mind functions as one unit however perfectly or imperfectly. This is rare but it can be done by searching for and recognizing the significance of one’s fixations. Forget the term Depth Psychology; that’s a misnomer.
Barring that the choice is to recognize the influence of the unconscious and try to pose an impervious barrier to its influence in the sense of W.E. Henley’s famous poem, Invictus (The Unconquerable) Henley wrote the poem in 1875 although the title was added later by an editor, so that one may be sure that Ed knew the poem and used it as bedrock as so many of us have. There are interpretations, I give mine:
W.E. Henley
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance,
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul.
There is a temporal interpretation as well as a psychological one. I am interested in the latter. D.H. Lawrence is quoted by Rudiger Gorner in his essay ‘The Hidden Agent Of The Soul’: “The novels and poems come unnoticed out of one’s pen.” This is true. One has conscious intentions but as one writes trancelike, hidden meanings emerge from the pen allowing for different interpretations of the words. Whether Henley had a conscious understanding of the unconscious psychological meaning of his words, the psychological interpretation fits. That’s all I can say.
‘Out of the night that covers me…’ In Greek mythology the night is construed as female, that is, the unconscious, the unknown, as with the depths of the sea, another female symbol. Daylight was considered as conscious and male as one can clearly see. The Night, is uncertainty and darkness when the goblins come out. It was feared. Henley clearly interprets night that way: …black as the pit from pole to pole. In other words he is in the grip of the unconscious with not a glimmer of light from one end to the other, he might have added, and from East to West.
But Henley is defiant of the darkness. He thanks whatever gods may be for his unconquerable soul. In other words, come what may he will not tamely submit. ‘Black as the pit…’ In my own hour of darkness, one of them, in my own hour of need, sometime in my teens, I gathered courage from Henley’s pen to fight that mountain of despair. I’m sure that Burroughs did too.
‘In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeoning of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed.’ I’m not sure of the wincing but I have been strong enough not to cry out loud. Henley had his problems. He contracted tuberculosis of the bone and at seventeen had a leg removed at the knee. The doctors wished to take his other leg too but Henley stoutly refused. Thus he lost a leg but rather than succumb to despair his ‘head was bloody but unbowed’ under the ‘bludgeoning of chance.’
The first two stanzas were all there was of significance for me at the time while, for myself, I have considered it a two stanza poem but it continues with Henley’s rejection of the gods and of heaven and hell, both subconscious projections. ‘Beyond this place of wrath and tears, looms but the horror of the shade’. I interpret shade as nothingness. ‘And yet the menace of the years find, and shall find me, unafraid.’ A fine show of bravado just in case. Henley certainly spoke for Burroughs and I suspect for a great many of you, us.
And then a dismissal of consequences: It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll… It don’t bother me none, he says. And why? Here comes the clincher, that line that gets ya, because: I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Damn right! And that’s called Positive Mental Attitude. Life isn’t worth living without it.
So Ed hangs in there, head bloody but unbowed, waiting for the turning of the tide. As the proverb goes: It’s a long road without a turning.
In closing this part let me remark that Ed was very fond of popular poetry of the Kipling kind. For those interested, I’m sure someone may be, there is a compilation called The Best Loved Poems Of The American People compiled by Hazel Felleman first published in 1936, in print since then, of which every poem I am sure was known to Burroughs. A poem couldn’t be too schmaltzy for him, he even has the collected Edgar A. Guest in his library. These bits of poetry were as essential to furnishing his memory as anything else he read.
VI.
The history of immigration in the US is the least understood and most misrepresented topic in US history. The history of immigration has invariably been written by Liberals or immigrants themselves so the story as taught in schools is rather one sided. The Key text is Gustavus Myers The History Of Bigotry In The United States. If you’ve read that you’ve got the official story. Just for the record, on my mother’s side I’m Polish and Pennsylvania Dutch; on my father’s side solid Scotch-Irish from the Kentucky hill country, both grand parents. I’m a hillbilly boy with a Polish accent. My name, Prindle, is usually thought of as English so I have the field covered. I have been subject to the all the discrimination currently employed against the English.
In discussing Ed’s point of view he thought of himself as pure English while on his father’s side he was English with an Irish admixture and on his mother’s side, Pennsylvania Dutch. Amusingly in the twenties he wrote his mother-in-law asking for Emma’s genealogy. Mrs. Hulbert, aware of Ed’s vanity on the issue, sniffed that Emma was English on both sides.
The first immigration problem was, of course, the Irish and if I may say so, with good reason. I rather favor the Know Nothing side of the argument. The animosity during Ed’s youth between English and Irish was intense. Apropos of Ed and John the Bully who was Irish I think the following probable. The Burroughs had two Irish maids, young women, before whom I suspect Ed put on airs about being English and therefore superior to the Irish. I think this got on the girls’ nerves so that they got an Irish kid to terrorize Ed and put him in his place. Otherwise I don’t see John waiting on a corner for a kid four years his junior who he couldn’t possibly have known. The consequences were more than the girls could have imagined.
After the Irish came the Socialists of the failed Revolution of ‘48- The Forty-eighters, another of Ed’s bete-noirs. Mostly German they contributed to Ed’s disgust of Germans when he saw them marching through Chicago under their red flag. The Haymarket Riot of 1887 also made a big impression on him especially as his father attended their execution.
Up to 1871, post-Civil War immigration had been Northern European which was thought to be compatible with the Old Stock, at least in retrospect. Prior to the Civil War, industry in the US had been more or less of the cottage variety, recalled by Longfellow in ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stood…’ But, with the invention of the steam engine on steel rails in 1830 a much larger scale of industry was required. Bessemer process steel, rolling mills and what all that also called for a greater concentration of labor.
To obtain that the industrialists moved further East into Europe recruiting from other than Nordics. At the same time the Jews of the Pale (the prototypical ’Eastern European’) discovered America quickly advancing from a trickle of immigration to a flood. Thus during Ed’s youth the character of Chicago changed year by year, unnoticeable consciously until the Great War. Then in the nineties the Italians added the US to their migratory circle. For at least a hundred years the Sicilians had been migrant labor in Europe, going North during the summer and returning South in winter.
Their first Western addition was Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. In the days of sail the circuit lasted a year or two as they could follow the sun North into Brazil, and Central America. With the reliability of steamships it was possible for them to return home more frequently and cheaply in steerage. Then in the nineties the Sicilians discovered New York and the US, which they added to their circuit.
They were never true immigrants being more of what were disparagingly called Birds Of Passage. They came for the money. In most years prior to the Great War nearly as many returned to Sicily as arrived. The Great War stranded them in the US but post-war Mussolini still considered them Italian citizens and so did they.
The Americans, never a very realistic people, believed that all these immigrants were on the same political and psychological wavelength as themselves, hence that the immigrants would assimilate overnight. The world war was an eye opener when all loyalties overrode American sympathies. A howl of pain went up from Teddy Roosevelt when he realized the reality and exclaimed against the ‘American boarding house.’
Of course, the history books tell it quite differently but, in fact, there was as much sympathy as not for Germany. Not everyone saw the English as innocent. The Irish who sided with the Germans in both wars were on the side of whoever was fighting England, hence if the US officially sided with England they were less than loyal to the New Island.
Chicago itself during Burroughs’ time as now had a remarkably low percentage of Old Stock, on the order of only 15 to 20%. So the babel of other tongues and accents must have offended him more than they did John Rocker of our time who was sent back to the minors for observing the fact in New York City. The second Black List one might say, but unbacked by a rehearsed voice of objection such as the Communists had in the forties and fifties.
Ed had his prejudices as every man must, Old Stock, immigrant or what. He observed the Revolutionary activity in Eastern Europe with a wry eye taking the side of neither the Jews or Russians. He definitely added the Russians to the Germans as objects of distaste. The villains of the first four Tarzan novels would be Russian. The early novels have been heavily censored so his attitude toward the Jews requires early editions to unravel. There appears to be no animosity to them but as an anti-religionist he had to find their religious beliefs as ridiculous as any of the three Semitic religions. There doesn’t seem to be any problem with the Jews until they caused it in the aftermath of the War but that’s slightly in the future and will be dealt with at that time.
It is enough to say that Ed was proudly Anglo-Saxon as he should have been and that whatever his beliefs on immigration he endured the immigrant nations stoically. At present there is no evidence that he took an aggressive stance toward them as many of his countrymen did. But, listen, I was in the orphanage and I have a very good idea of what aggression is and it didn’t just come the Old Stock. My immigrant brothers were in there too. We were told to take the alleys and stay off the city streets or take a beating. These were seven, eight and nine year kids these grown men were threatening and some of the kids did take a beating although I never did. I know where discrimination is at. So what.
Part IV will continue Ed’s temporal life from 1886 to 1911-12. Part V will review his reding from 1900 to 1920. Part VI will pick up from where Burroughs Rides the Rocket Pt. I left off. There will probably be four or more additional parts but I don’t have blocked out yet.
A Review: Part III, The Mucker And Marcia Of The Door Step By Edgar Rice Burroughs
September 11, 2008
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
Reconstruction, Tourgee And Dixon
June 9, 2008
A Review
Reconstruction:
Albion Winegar Tourgee And Thomas Dixon Jr.
by
R.E. Prindle
The conflict between the North and South is the central conflit of United States history. Whether the Civil War was fought to preserve the Union or over slavery the African issue was the central problem of the country. The aftermath of Reconstruction was and has been devastating to US history. Mark Sullivan comments the Reconstruction period in Our Times, Vol. III. He is writing c. 1930:
Hardly to this day has any unbiassed summation been made of the destruction that the North visited upon the South. Rarely has any conqueror in history been so ruthless- by comparison, the treatment of Germany by the Allies was the rebuke of a complaisant parent to a naughty child. The North, by abolishing slavery, wiped out five billion dollars’ worth of the South’s property. That was but the beginning. Abolition of slavery was the complete destruction of the South’s economic system, land in the South was made valueless. Then the North, by conferring suffrage on the negro, set the former slave in power over his recent master, and for ten years maintained him there by arms. The very aorta of civilization in the South was more near to being completely severed than historians have commonly realized. In the University of South Carolina, a State institution authority over which rested the legislature, a corn-field negro, barefooted, illiterate, sat in the chair and drew the salary of the Professor of Greek. Over a period of forty years, including war, reconstruction (ironic word!) and the aftermath of both, the lamp of education in the South was saved from complete extinction only by the devotion and patience of half a dozen men. With the other consequences went a discouragement which accepted the physical deterioration, through disease, of large portions of the rural South, as merely one detail of a fate it was useless to resist.
The excuse of the North was that Southern Whites had enslaved the African. For some reason the New England States made Southern slavery an issue although those states, as Bible pounders, were not opposed to slavery in principle. Shortly after the Civil War certain New England citizens established themselves in the Hawaiian Islands where they began to grow staple agricultural crops. Farm labor therefore became as big a problem for them as it had been in the South. They were not averse to establishng a contract labor system which was a form of wage slavery. The New Englanders, some of them churchmen, saw the Chinese as inferior coolie laborers not unlike the African. Learning from the Reconstruction African situation in the South they were reluctant to import the Chinese as permanent residents.
Thus the contracts of the Chinese specified that the Chinese return to China after the termination of their contracts. This the Chinese saw no reason to do staying on as permanent residents. Reluctant to import more Chinese the New England planters cast about for another alternative. They settled on the Japanese. Thus a ship sailed into Tokyo Bay and the Planters forcefully abducted, kidnapped, a hundred odd Japanese from Yokohama taking them back to Hawaii where they were put to work.
So we may assume that the New Englanders were not entirely sincere in their objection to Southern slavery.
In addition during the Grant administration while Reconstruction was in progress the annexation of San Domingo or Haiti was proposed. Under the French administration of the area using African slave labor San Domingo was the richest and most productive colony in the world. It could be made so again under American administration. How they proposed to farm the land without African labor remains a mystery. It could only have been achieved by some compulsive means.
As the Africans have never worked the land of this richest of areas without compulsion one would be amused to learn the proposed solution to this pressing problem of labor.
One can only conclude that as no region of the US objected to forced labor that truly the Union was the reason for the Civil War. The reason for Reconstruction has to be explained otherwise.
The next problem is the nature of the African. Nowhere in the world without an overawing show of force were the Africans docile. The history of Africa is perpetual genocidal, tribal warfare. The Africans had the very reasonable attitude that the way to treat an enemy was to stamp them flat. Exterminate them.
The attitude is apparent everywhere in Africa today most obivious at the moment in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
In Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century the small number of French planters proved unable to control the overwhelming number of Africans, the latter rising up and defeating their owners. In this action known as the San Domingo Moment the White males were exterminated to the man while the females were given the option of sex slavery or rape and death.
One might say this was race hatred but I say no. The response was no different than any other tribal conflict in Africa; the difference in Haiti being merely that the French were White.
In the US the White Planters managed the Africans by the threat of slightly superior numbers while overawing the Africans into if not total submission something very nearly so. Thus the character the North gave the Africans in the South was at complete variance with the worldwide reality.
The North took the forced submission of the African in the South that produced a seemingly submissive inoffensive, harmless type of being the actual nature of the African. Tourgee refers to Africans as ‘poor innocents.’ Northerners believed that the lack of apparent intellectual capability was due to ill treatment and the lack of opportunity for education. So the real question is who was right about the relative capability of the African to the Caucasian? The North or the South? This problem is important and has to be dealt with.
We are told that the African was first to evolve as a Homo Sapiens from the Last Hominid Predecessor. That was c. 150,000 years ago. Had the African not been disturbed by outside peoples he would be living today as he was when he evolved so long ago. Many peoples have visited sub-Saharan Africa, that is to say, Black Africa, over the last few millennia. Phoenicians and Carthaginians visited sub-Saharan Africa both overland and on voyages around the coasts. Greek traders visited the source of the Nile, identifying the Mountains of the Moon while Romans established trade routes across the Sahara. The Arabs established contact beginning in the seventh century at least while Malays from Indonesia established themselves on Madagascar while penetrating into the continent itself making settlements about the year +1000.
All influences were absorbed by the Africans without any serious changes to their intellectual or social organization. Europeans established stronger settlements in Africa ruling Africa for a hundred years or more. They have been or are being expelled from Africa while most notably in Zimbabwe and South Africa Africans are destroying any traces of European civilization and reverting to their ancestral ways. Only a liberal could deny these obvious facts.
The African capability for civilization was fixed one hundred fifty thousand years ago. The African mind is incapable of permanently adjusting to any higher level of civilization.
The Southern Planters in daily contact with Africans had this fact impressed upon them continuously. The mind is not so elastic that it can escape its evolutionary limitations.
As an example I quote Rudyard Kipling from his American Notes of 1889:
The Americans once having made them (the Africans) citizens cannot unmake them. He says, in his newspaper, they ought to be elevated by education. He is trying this; but it is like to be a long job, because black blood is more adhesive than white, and throws back with annoying persistence. When the negro gets a religion he returns directly as a hiving bee, to the first instincts of his people. Just now a wave of religion is sweeping over some of the Southern States. Up to the present two Messiahs and a Daniel have appeared and several human sacrifices have been offered up to these incarnations. The Daniel managed to get three young men, who he insisted were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, to walk into a blast furnace; guaranteeing non-combustion. They did not return. I have seen nothing of this kind, but I have attended a negro church. The congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and tears, and one of them danced up the aisle to the mourners bench. The motive may have been genuine. The movements of the shaken body were those of Zanzibar stick dancers, such as you see at Aden on the coal boats; and even as I watched the people, the links that bound them to the white man snapped one by one and I saw before me- the Hubsha (the Woolly One) praying to a god he did not understand. Those neatly dressed folk on the benches, the gray-headed elder by the window, were savages- neither more nor less. What will the American do with the negro? The South will not consort with him….The North is every year less and less in need of his services. And yet he will not disappear. His friends will urge that he is as good as a white man. His enemies…it is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Of course the Liberal will say that Kipling does not observe accurately and that HE is a ‘bigot.’ Nevertheless if one looks at locales in the United States where the African dominates such as Mississippi, Detroit, Pontiac, Flint, Saginaw, Chicago, New Orleans, what does he find? A replica of Lagos or Zimbabwe. A return to ancestral ways.
I’m not one to quote IQ scores because they only prove what is obvious to the naked eye. Genetic studies prove that as Homo Sapiens continues to evolve, the African who, as a species, is fully evolved, will only continue to fall further and further behind. This may not be his fault but it remains a fact.
To counter these facts the Liberal merely says that a hundred fifty thousand years isn’t enough time to make an accurate assessment; we must be patient.
Thus when the Civil War ended and Reconstruction began Albion Winegar Tourgee went South with his prejudices as a carpetbagger to try to place the African over the Southern White.
Tourgee was an honest man who sincerely believed that he was doing right by punishing the White while trying to impose the African on him. Tourgee moved back North after Reconstruction and took up his pen to become a successful novelist. Among his works were two novels recounting his experiences and opinions during Reconstruction. The novels are: A Fool’s Errand by One Of The Fools and Bricks Without Straw. They are both reasonably good novels although the latter is more or less a strike off of the former but for my tastes a better story and novel.
It is in A Fool’s Errand that Tourgee tackles the problem more head on. Completely disrgarding the character of the African in Africa or Haiti he takes the paternalistic Liberal approach that he is dealing with innocent little children who need his protection. This attitude is actually only a variant on the Southern. His is a good Northern Charlie compared to the bad Southern Charlie.
His anlysis of the Southern attitude is quite accurate and well thought out; his solutions are faulty. A Fool’s Errand is well worth reading to contrast the two viewpoints. His own pretensions of innocence and superiority to the Souterners is revolting. He should have known of Grant’s plans to annex Haiti that should have given him an intimation of the vulnerability of Northern pretensions. I’m sure he probably wasn’t aware of Puritan doings in Hawaii and Japan.
Slavery is detestable, I myself have no problems with that although firms like Nestle’s and Starbuck’s are accused of benefiting from slave labor in the chocolate and coffee businesses. That means that you and I enjoy the fruits of slave labor with our coffee and chocolate. Those big screen TVs we all covet so much are made by slave labor in China. Tourgee if he had thought about it would have noticed that the African franchise he was attempting to force on Southern Whites was denied Africans in his home State of Michigan and nearly universally among all parts of the Northland and West. Kipling writing a few years later than Tourgee was speaking accurately.
Tourgee was indignant at what, as he puts it, the Southern Planter had done to the African. He says quite plainly that there was no punishment too severe for the Southern White nor should it end quickly. He virtually proclaims the need to boil the Southern White in oil. This seems extreme in a world where slavery was rife most especially on the African continent. He might have put just a little of the blame on those greedy African chiefs who sold their people into bondage for filthy lucre.
He might also have noted the Israelite Solomon who when he ran short of money to finance his temple to his god gathered together numbers of His people and sold them into slavery to get on with the building of the House Of The Lord.
Tourgee’s novels went unanswered while selling well for a decade or two. But then Thomas Dixon Jr. took up the cudgels on the behalf of the South and told their version of Reconstruction in his trilogy of The Leopard’s Spots, The Clansman and The Traitor. Of course Liberals who control the seminaries of their religious system sometimes referred to as the American University System, dismiss Dixon as a stone cold bigot and ‘racist.’ One suspects without ever having read him which is of no consquence as they pay no attention to the other side of the story once their minds are made up.
As Dixon points out, those Puritan sea captains made a fortune or two out of the slave trade, the profits of which returned North to finance Puritan bigotry and possibly large bequests to Harvard University. Puritan cotton mills processed the cheap slave produced crop without worrying too much about its provenance. Dixon gives numerous examples of the hypocrisy of the New Englanders.
Slavery of any sort past or present cannot be justified but it was that very cotton that caused slavery to blossom and extend into Alabama and Mississippi. The institution then ran into the unique State of Louisiana.
Louisiana and more specifically New Orleans had a history dating back to the French Caribbean plantations, in fact, New Orleans was part of the French circle but a remote outpost in relation to the British colonies of the East Coast. As on Haiti and other French islands freed Africans were allowed full citizenship privileges including owning slaves. Thus, as the American settlers moved West after 1793 and the invention of the cotton gin becoming mere frontiersmen the closer they got to Louisiana, where the African, French and mixed races already were. Louisiana Africans, as in Haiti, were slave owners.
As W.E.B. Du Bois points out but gives no reasons for it, slavery in Louisiana where Africans were influential was of a different character than in the East. The East was as benevolent a form of slavery as is possible while in Louisiana as Du Bois himself points out the African owners preferred to work slaves to death, fhen buy replacements. This in turn created a market for slave breeders who arose in Kentucky.
The breeding of Africans for slaves was especially repellent to American sensibilities but had slavery continued public opinion would have gotten used to it as it gets used to every other perversion. It can however be no coincidence that slave breeding occurred just up river from the slave consuming States of Mississippi and Louisiana.
I mention this matter only to show that the subject of slavery is not monolithic but much more complex than normally discussed.
Both Tourgee and Dixon write about affairs in North Carolina on the East Coast. This differentiation should not go unnoticed. I suspect that a very large proportion of the illegal importation of slaves that occurred after 1800 was done through ports in Louisiana and Texas far from the central authority. If that should be true then the character of slaves fresh from Africa between, say, 1850 and 1860 would be much different than those Tourgee was familiar on the settled East Coast.
Tourgee, convinced that the Africans were gentle, innocent people, was blind to the outrages committed by both carpetbaggers and the more truculent Africans many of whom wore the Union uniform with the full backing of the Federal government which was bent on persecuting Whites.
Dixon then whose credibility the Liberals wish to destroy writing twenty years or so after Tourgee and probably in reaction to him wishes to give the Southern side of the Reconstruction story. He is much more realistic and sympathetic than Tourgee. The latter writes both his novels with nary a reference to the radical reconstruction of the insane abolitionists in Congress like Stevens and Stanton who quite literally wished to see Southern Whites exterminated ‘root and branch’ a la the San Domingo Moment and the entire South given over to the Africans. As Tourgee himself said, they believed there was no punishment too severe for the Whites.
One need not wonder how Tourgee would view the White genocide occurring in Zimbabwe and South Africa today as his current Liberal counterparts applaud lustily. In that light one shudders to think what will happen in the US if these Liberal assassins are not displaced before they seize the government in the Stalinist style and initiate the genocide of Whites they are currently advocating which one assumes will include themselves.
To understand the problem, the attitude among both Liberals and Africans from the Civil War/Reconstruction period that persist through today a reading of Tourgee, especially A Fool’s Errand, and Thomas Dixon would be some time well spent.
Finis
A Review Of The Traitor By Thomas Dixon Jr.
March 15, 2008
A Contribution To The ERB Library Project
A Review of
THE TRAITOR
by
Thomas F. Dixon Jr.
Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.
Review by R.E. Prindle
Of Thomas Dixon’s Reconstruction Trilogy- The Leopard’s Spots, The Clansman and The Traitor- only the last is found in ERB’s library. It would seem reasonably sure that he read the other two also. As The Traitor was published in 1907 it seems certain that the trilogy was read before ERB put pen to paper so that Dixon was influential on the whole of ERB’s career.
This is no small influence as the Civil War and Reconstruction are central to ERB’s works. Once again, one is amazed at how ERB could absorb so many influences and keep each nearly discrete. Further on I will postulate the possible influence of Alexandre Dumas’ French Revolution series.
Of interest to ERB’s reading habits Bill Hillman recently posted a list of books in ERBzine of ERB’s post WWII reading list that Burroughs described as a few of the books he’d read. As the list was substantial the complete list must have been enormous. The list mainly consisted of books in the areas of crime and other topics which certain minds share. As I happen to be one of those minds based on the internal evidence of the novels and shared intellectual direction I feel a fair amount of confidence in my speculations concerning his reading although I leave room for error.
I am also of the opinion now that he could have read from 500 to 750 books from, say, fifteen to thirty-five when he began writing. His consumption from 1911 to 1940 must have been enormous. Fortunately we can get a pretty good fix on the type of books he preferred from his library.
Thomas Dixon Jr. lived from 1864 to 1946. Reconstruction was in effect from 1865 to 1877 when the last occupation troops were withdrawn. Dixon grew up in Shelby, North Carolina where his father was an important figure in the first Ku Klux Klan. The Traitor is apparently based on his father’s career. It is said that because of corruption in the Klan his father was instrumental in disbanding it.
Dixon although young would then have had first hand experience with both Reconstruction and the Clan.
Dixon believed, and I second him, that Reconstruction was one of the most brutal crimes in history. It certainly ranks in the same category as the French Revolution’s criminal acts in The Vendee and Hitler and Stalin’s actions from 1925 to 1945. One should not underestimate the horrors of Reconstruction. Liberals, for their own reasons, have attempted to excise the period from US history while sanitizing what little is taught. One is certain than an inquiring mind like Burroughs sought out the true and whole story.
Liberals have blackened Dixon’s name as they have that of Dixon’s fellow Southerner, D.W. Griffith, who produced the Dixon trilogy as the most amazing movie of its time- The Birth Of A Nation. In 1915.
While both Griffith and Dixon have been defamed as racists in today’s multi-cultural society they must no longer be seen as racists merely as representatives of an anti-Liberal segment of White culture.
Dixon was one of the most popular American writers of the period to at least until the aftermath of the Russian Revolution when he and writers like him, including Burroughs, came under attack from the Communists. With the exception of Burroughs all have been defamed into oblivion today.
As we know Burroughs’ father, George T., served in the Union Army during the Civil War. His father’s more admirable attributes seem to have gone into the character of John Carter, the hero of the first three Martian stories. He seems to have been combined with a Confederate Officer of Virginia stock as well as a character of the nature of Count Caliogstro of the pre-French Revolution period.
Here the problem of Alexandre Dumas and his Revolutionary romances enters. John Carter’s tomb in Connecticut is probably based on Graham’s tomb in The Traitor. The similarity is striking. Carter’s longevity may be based in part on Dumas’ description of the charlatanry of Cagliostro who claimed to be as old as the Great Historical Bum while rationalizing his ability to survive much as the thousand year old Martians did.
The Great Alexandre Dumas
The Martians were in fact deathless as was Cagliostro’s claim unless they were killed by some sort of physical accident. Dumas’ Caliogstro describes his situation in these exact terms. The novels in Dumas’ roman a fleuve are the Memoirs Of A Physician, Joseph Balsamo, The Queen’s Necklace, Ange Pitou, The Countess Of Charny, The Chevalier Of The Maison Rouge and The Blue And The White. I can recommend them highly. We know that Burroughs read The Three Musketeers and probably The Count Of Monte Cristo. He may have read one, two or more of the Revolution series also.
There is an interesting passage in the Physician in which an ignorant country boy teaches himself to write both printed and cursive letters after a very rudimentary instruction in reading. The passage bears comparison to Tarzan’s teaching himself to read and write. The point being that Burrough’s imagination was probably fired by this series.
Now, we know that Burroughs was always opposed to the Revolution. Dumas would have introduced him to conspiracy theory. I would guess that ERB read Dumas before 1900 but that is just a guess. Also bear in mind what we consider ‘classical’ literature was current in Burroughs’ youth. All these books would have been new and therefore doubly exiting. As David Adams noted to me concerning Baum’s Oz series the books would have been equivalent to a new Beatles record in the sixties when people rushed to stores at the earliest possible moment to get their copy. Knowing this stuff would have made one a very hep cat.
We also know that prior to 1911 Burroughs associated with several knowing people among which were Sweetser and Dr. Stace. These buys are always into conspiracy theory as, indeed, am I . As I have said as Burroughs and I share the same reading tastes I think it less than pure speculation that Burroughs also knew something about the Revolutionary conspiracy. Difficult to tell what.
It doesn’t appear that ERB was ever a Freemason. The Revolution was attributed to the Masons. The lodges then would have been thought Communist then by their opponents. Communist and Illuminated. The Illuminati are, of course, central to any conspiracy theory.
In theory and certainly in fact the lodges were instrumental in the overthrow of the French monarchy. I have even read that Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans were involved with the Rosicrucians, hence the Freemasons and hence the Masonic revolution against thrones. While I don’t find the idea improbable I haven’t got enough evidence to speculate one way or the other. I find it interesting though to see that John Adams was thought to be Illuminated. It is certain that Revolutionary cadres in the form of Libertines were active in England during the seventeenth century and were certainly instrumental in the destruction of London’s Newgate Prison some few years before the destruction of the Bastille.
It is also certain that Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati infiltrated the French Freemasons some few years before 1789 and that the Jacobins arose from them. It is also clear that the Illuminatti infiltrated American Freemasons at least by 1799. There are those who believe with good evidence that Thomas Jefferson was Illuminated. Indeed, the Communists of the twenties called Jefferson one of their own. It seemed ridiculous until one looks a little further. Whether Lincoln was one of the Communists’ own along with Jefferson as they claim seems preposterous on the surface of it.
However an illuminated Mason by the name of Morgan was about to publish a book exposing the Masonic plot in 1843 when he was abducted and murdered. A symbol of the Illuminatti was the Phrygian Cap. The Union enlisted cap is nothing less than the Phrygian Cap with the front knob truncated and replaced by a flat board. So, shall we say that the Illuminatti took a prominent but disguised role in the Civil War.
If this Jacobin-Illuminatti attitude was in the Northern attitude then it must have been represented in the Abolitionist attitude. Their hatred always directed against authority was the directed against the Southern Whites and in favor of the Negroes. And in fact it was attempted to make Whites slaves to the Negroes. Just as in France the hatred was directed against not only Aristocracy but against peasants or anyone who resisted the Jacobin or Liberal will. In the Vendee of France which remained loyalist genocide was carried out on the Vendeans. I have no doubt out and out genocide would have been committed against Southerners if it had been possible. In that respect perhaps Sherman’s antecedents should be examined to determine unrecognized motives for the march from Atlanta to the sea.
There is no question that a great many of the post-Civil War immigrants were Communists or socialists and that they refused to accept a non-socialist America. Many if not most of the 48ers who fled Europe after the failure of the Revolution of 1848 were socialist while there is no reason to suppose that a large number of those were Jacobins or Illuminated.
Burroughs first contact with these people was as a child or teenager when he saw them parading through Chicago under the Red banner. It seems very unlikely that he wouldn’t have picked up a lot of anti-Socialist information. At any rate his hatred of German and things German began at that time developing into a near mania during the Great War and a firmest attitude by WWII.
I can’t guarantee that he read Dumas’ Revolutionary novels but there are enough seeming contact points in the novels to indicate that he may have. Thus John Carter’s longevity may be based on Dumas’ portrayal of Cagliostro. This input Burroughs combined then combined with his readings of The Virginian and the positive aspects of his father to create John Carter. It is probably significant that Carter was the main character in only the first three Martian novels before ERB’s father died. When George T. died John Carter ceased being the dominant character being replaced by his son Carthoris in the next novel, Thuvia, Maid Of Mars. Burroughs may not have been able to divide his own alter-ego between Carthoris and Tarzan as the former disappears being replaced by a number of different personae.
However ERB understood the Civil War and Reconstruction the two events were a significant part of his mental makeup.
Pioneering Filmmaker, D.W. Griffith
The three Dixon novels were formative before he began to wirte while the Dixon scripted The Birth Of A Nation filmed by D.W. Griffith and released in 1915 had a terrific impact on Burroughs as well as the Nation.
The movie would have revived all his emotions on the two topics. I have read the novels of the subsequent years with this thought in mind but echoes may be there.
Over the following decades Liberals have succeeded in characterizing Birth Of A Nation as ‘racist’ which it is not. The story may be culturally centered on the White side of the story rather than the Black but this fact doesn’t make the movie any more racist than if it had been culturally centered on the Black aspect. The issue of race simply cannot be avoided.
The movie misunderstands the breach between the two White viewpoints of the North and the South. While the movie is plea for Whites to never do this again and to reunite as one people, the bigots of the North wished only for the destruction of Southern Whites. As the Jewish historian Eric Foner writes, Reconstruction is the unfinished Revolution that is still going on today and will culminate in the election of Barry Dunham-Obama and its sequel.
Eric Foner
Eric Foner is part of the Foner dynasty of Communist historians. His uncle Phil Foner wrote distorted labor chronicles while his Pappy Jack was dismissed from his academic position in the ‘50s as a Communist.
The movie was the most successful of its time providing the funds for the MGM empire. Louis B. Mayer who was a theatre operator at the time made enough from the movie to go to Hollywood and establish the Mayer studios which Loews later combined into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer when they crushed William Fox of Fox Studios which then was combined with Twentieth Century to become Twentieth-Century Fox.
The movie certainly was not considered racist at the time except by the Jacobin faction who were not as influential then as they have become today. The Democratic president of the time, Woodrow Wilson, thought it a superb movie.
Interestingly both Wilson (1856-1924) and Dixon were together at Johns Hopkins University with Dixon being a champion of Wilson. D.W. Griffith, from the South as was Wilson, was Burroughs nearly exact contemporary. Griffith was born in Louisville, Kentucky also in 1875 dying in 1948 two years before Burroughs. Griffith was another who was marginalized by the Communists.
Thus the essential Edgar Rice Burroughs was taking its final form in the years from 1900-1911. I would like to organize those years as part of his early married years. This is not easy. As we are aware when he and Emma returned to Chicago from Idaho and Salt Lake City in 1904 ERB was suffering from the excruciating headaches that lasted half a day incurred from his beating in Toronto.
His sojourn in Salt Lake must also be included as part of his education as with his innate anthropological curiosity he would have investigated the absurdities of that religion. Once again he was much closer to the origins of the religion as it had only about sixty years of history to deal with rather than one hundred and sixty.
Even on the train trip back to Chicago ERB would have traveled through an entirely different landscape along approximately the Mormon Trail than today. The geographic changes have been enormous. The earlier geography would have influenced Mormon memories and stories that he would have heard. As an example of a feature that has been completely destroyed is a description from a book titled: The Mormon Trail: Voyage Of Discovery, The Story Behind The Scenery by Stanley B. and Violet Kimball. Page 35:
Weary teamsters and tired oxen struggled onward despite the difficult, rocky terrain. Many journals commented on the hordes of grasshoppers that had helped deplete the area of grass. Still, the optimism remained high in camp for they knew the Sweetwater River was just around the bend. The ground here proved to be miry, “smelled bad”, was swampy and many oxen got “buried in the mud.” Mosquitoes and “Gad flies” were numerous, and both oxen and humans were plagued for miles. The water along this route was so bad that even the cattle refused to drink. Most of the time they had to use sage for firewood here because buffalo chips were scarce and so was wood.Among the several landmarks along this part of the Trail were the Avenue Of Rocks and The Devil’s Backbone. Today the quarter-mile-long Avenue Of Rocks is gone, a victim of road widening.
That’s how little Americans care for their environment. Possibly the Avenue of Rocks was used by Fennimore Cooper as a locale in his novel The Prairie that Burroughs was certain to have read.
The Mormons would have made the trip a scant thirty or so years before so Burroughs would have been regaled with stories by those who had made the trip, probably before Buffalo Bill cleared the prairie of buffalo. Certainly before the tremendous network of reservoirs that now cover the area.
Having returned to Chicago Burroughs had to get down to some serious living; something he wasn’t good at. One would imagine that his father with a long history in business in Chicago could have gotten him a decent job to start but for some reason of which we are not informed he seemed to be in disrepute. ERB literally started at the bottom taking jobs for which there were few applicants.
Burroughs ran through an odd assortment of jobs over the next seven or nine years. After all it was only seven years from 1904 to 1911. Short enough in the telling but the equivalent of several lifetimes in the living. I won’t do a recital of the jobs as I’ve done it before while everyone is familiar with the story.
Intellectually these were stimulating times for Burroughs. L. Frank Baum’s Oz books began at the turn of the century, Baum trying to end the series in 1910. The Oz stories had a great influence on ERB. Jack London began publishing whose hobo experiences probably rekindled Burroughs interest in that life find expression in the trilogy of novel involving Billy Byrne that began in 1913 shortly after ERB began writing.
Owen Wister published The Virginian that would be so influential on Burroughs’ writing going into the character of John Carter. The Graustark novels of George Barr McCutcheon also began appearing the memory of which ERB would cherish to his dying day.
And of course ERB had his relationship with Dr. Stace. Now, Porges gives us very little information on this period in ERB’s life. However John Dos Passos in his USA trilogy includes a character who closely resembles Burroughs. This is in the third volume, The Big Money. Dos Passos was a vicious little man. At the time he was an open Red. Somewhat later in life he supposedly became a ‘conservative.’ As Reds go becoming ‘conservative’ in my opinion merely means getting old. I don’t see how anyone who has based their life on Communist principles can ever embrace opposite principles but many people can, or at least, they allow themselves to think they can.
It would be absurd to think that there would be no stories circulating about one of the most successful writers in the world. Dos Passos was actually from Chicago although absent most of his life, still he undoubtedly picked up some stories on Burroughs who would have been thought of, at the very least, as a colorful character. Thus writing in the thirties Dos Passos may very well have picked up stories from people like Frank Martin himself. Can’t be sure at this time of course…but if you look…
John Dos Passos
Dos Passos carefully describes the type of businessman ERB was. There apparently was a type of scrabbler who while not being able to afford an office of their own would rent space for a desk in someone else’s office so they could have an address. Sort of like the mail box addresses existing today. As an independent businessman Burroughs was of this type. In this capacity Dos Passos has his character turn up with a patent medicine type who go through Michigan trying to sell their wares. Dos Passos details of the foray are unimportant and probably highly imaginative but definitely derogatory. But then his whole corpus is of a mocking nature.
The point is Porges describes about this time, 1907 or so, that Burroughs sent Emma a note from South Bend, Indiana lauding the town saying that he would be back home soon. Porges doesn’t say what he was doing in South Bend. We are left to guess.
I would imagine it was something along the lines that Dos Passos describes. Or perhaps this was about the time the Feds cracked down on the Patent Medicine business and Burroughs and Stace may have found it convenient to absent themselves from the Windy City. I haven’t been able to find a reference to such a trip in the corpus as yet.
More to follow.
I, Dynamo 