TOQ: First, provide a brief description of your professional career, academic background, and life’s work.

JG: My Ph.D. is in Russian literature, which seemingly is unrelated to eugenics, but there is a connection: I edited and translated two Russian books on the Soviet forced-labor camps and one for Holocaust Library on the slaughter of Jews on occupied Soviet territory. I then went on to create a statistical model of IQ lowering as a result of violence targeted against high-IQ groups. To my surprise the mean was not significantly affected, but the right tail of the statistical curve suffered enormously. Imagine, for example, that two dozen of the world’s most brilliant composers had never been conceived: The average ability of subsequent generations would not be measurably different, but how impoverished music would be! Since at the time I was directing the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, I was able to give a lecture on the topic in the Smithsonian Castle on the Washington, D.C. Mall. If I had had to submit a proposal to make such a presentation, it would have been denied.

The fact that my training is in a different field is not only not an accident, it’s an essential precondition. Geneticists, sociologists, anthropologists, et al. who openly advocate eugenics are unemployable. My website (http://whatwemaybe.org) is the most widely visited of any website on eugenics. It is getting 8,000 hits a day, and a third of a million people have downloaded my free book Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century.

TOQ: What is the essence of your argument and the thesis of your latest book?

JG: Despite the revolution in our knowledge of genetics that has taken place since the founding of the formal eugenics movement, the essential argument for eugenics remains unchanged: a negative correlation between intelligence and fecundity and also the need to maintain selection in a modern world where virtually every women lives to experience menopause, thus transforming selection by survival into selection by fertility. We have effectively reversed evolutionary selection with devastating consequences for our genetic patrimony.

But eugenics is more than just preventing the squandering of our genetic patrimony. It is also continuing evolution. The most likely candidate for continuing evolution is the creation of the machine brain. Why should humans be the end of evolution? This is speculative, of course, and I may be wrong in betting on the cybernetic horse.

TOQ: Why did you decide to write on this topic?

JG: Ideology often serves as a rationalization for deep-seated emotional attitudes. Basically either we are satisfied with our own species and even see ourselves as created by God in his own image or we reject this view as hubris. Diversity is indeed a great richness within our species, but not when it extends to low intelligence and disease. The reality is that the bulk of humanity has been left out of culture, science, and civilization.

There is so much to admire in our species that it is a truly humbling experience. At the same time I’m not happy with the species in many ways. For that matter, I’m not all that pleased with myself.

TOQ: You identify eugenics as a human rights issue. Could you elaborate on this point?

JG: I define humanity, not as the totality of people alive today, but as the totality of people who will ever live. Thus the greater good argument (utilitarian ethics) dictates that we assume our parental responsibilities.

Our moral obligation to do everything in our power to ensure that children be born healthy and intelligent seems so obvious that it should not have to be argued.

Eugenics is also flesh and blood of the environmental movement. It is human ecology. We cannot act as the ultimate invasive species, counting on moving to a different planet after we have trashed our own. Eugenics is joined at the hip with the heritage of Malthus.

TOQ: Considering the underlying science of the concept of selective genetic breeding (the concept of the thoroughbred among some species) is demonstrably sound, why does the topic remain so taboo as it pertains to human reproduction? Some would argue that establishing government eugenic programs is the slippery slope toward totalitarianism. Do you agree? Explain.

JG: The traditional counterarguments to eugenics—that nurture is everything, that testing is useless, that heritability is zero—are straw men that cannot be taken seriously. Nevertheless, the fear of eugenics is unfortunately not without justification. Marx never envisaged the Soviet purges. Proponents of eugenics cannot know who will take up their banner. But the refusal to intervene in human selection is also a choice. And it is a choice that reverses the momentum of evolution. So I would rather take a risk than face inevitable doom.

TOQ: Resistance to eugenics, particularly as it applies to human reproduction, stems from religious beliefs over the “sanctity of life”; abortion, birth control, embryonic selection, in vitro fertilization, and gene replacement therapy contravene natural law according to many Christian denominations, most notably the Roman Catholic Church. Is this an unbridgeable chasm between religion and science? Would Catholics as well as fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants compromise their own religious convictions by embracing eugenics?

JG: Religion represents an attempt to explain the universe. Science is a competing paradigm. There is also the inertia of tradition. Still, religion has accepted science in other areas. Religious believers accept the multiplication table, why not eugenics?

TOQ: In her book Preaching Eugenics author Christine Rosen describes how several prominent religious leaders embraced the idea of eugenics. The Rev. William Dean Inge (1860–1954) is one of the more notable examples. Do you consider this to be an anomaly? What has changed since then to widen the gap between the clergy and eugenicists?

JG: Prior to the issuance of the 1930 Papal encyclical Casti connubii the Catholic Church was in many respects supportive of eugenics. The antieugenics position of Pius XI was reinforced by the conservative religious denial of evolution itself. Then came the onslaught of radical egalitarianism—Marxism, behaviorism, Margaret Mead/Franz Boas-style anthropology, Freudianism. This was momentum that had been building for more than a century. Its weak spot is that it is scientifically invalid. Sociobiology in its study of animal behavior has fatally undermined traditional morality. Religion-based denial of evolution is a temporary aberration that could be reversed far more abruptly than many realize.

TOQ: One misconception of eugenics is that it is “anti-family” in orientation. One could argue that the positions of active participants in the American Eugenics Society were “pro-family,” given their orientation toward “Fitter Family Contests” and their concern that too many professional couples were forgoing marriage and raising smaller families, thereby leading to dysgenic results, an underlying theme of the recent movie Idiocracy. How do you view this?

JG: Traditional family values present a mixed picture. No animal breeder would even consider monogamy. The biggest hurdle that eugenics will have to overcome in the long run is the abandonment of the “reproductive rights” of genetically disadvantaged persons. No one is denying them the right to marry and have children by using donated sperm or eggs. With this reservation, the traditional family is a wonderful model for bringing future generations into the world. But resistance will be fierce and perhaps impossible to overcome.

TOQ: One controversial argument of your book is that Jews, who were once avid supporters of eugenics in the pre-World War II era, are guided by misconceptions and myths that eugenics is synonymous with ethnic and racial genocide. Elaborate on your position of why you think Jews (and other groups) should come to value the importance of eugenics.

JG: I am gathering material for a new book, to be entitled Don’t Do What I Do: Jewish Eugenics. Jewry is in its very essence the historical product of eugenic inbreeding. And while it is true that the early eugenics movement was largely a WASP phenomenon, Jews played their own modest role in the movement. The Jewish assault on eugenics did not begin until the late 1960s—a quarter century after the end of World War II. Today Israel is the world leader in practicing eugenics; Jewish practitioners of eugenics just avoid using the word eugenics. But Diaspora Jews swim in the larger intellectual tide; more than half now marry non-Jews, and their Total Fertility Rate is below replacement level. Thus Diaspora Jewry is rapidly committing suicide as a result of its nominal rejection of eugenics. I published an article to this effect in the New York newspaper Jewish Week, and the editor received a number of positive responses from readers, one of which he published. Given the reality of Jewish political muscle, the only way that eugenics can resume its formerly leading role is to explain to the Jewish community that they are acting contrary to their own best interests. The same is true for immigration controls.

I have been reading late nineteenth century anthropological discussions, and I am struck by the collegial spirit that prevailed among Jewish and non-Jewish scholars. Today the prevailing climate is one of anger on the one side and paranoia on the other. And since a handful of Jewish billionaires have bought up the media, the upshot is censorship. I must tell you that I see TOQ’s position as counter-productive. The eugenics movement can be revived and “damage control” can be achieved with regard to immigration only by bringing along Jewish opinion. This is doable. Any political position declared “anti-Semitic” is dead in the water.

Eugenics is for everybody. Those who advocate eugenics for their own group only are not only acting in an immoral fashion, they are hurting eugenics for their own group.

TOQ: The grip of contemporary political correctness on modern intellectual life in Western societies constricts freedom of inquiry and speech beyond general taboos to the point of quasi-criminalization of certain views and perspectives. Do you see parallels between what is happening within academia and among elites in these societies and the rigid government-enforced conformity that defined the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union? Where do you think this is headed? Is there reason to be optimistic about a return to more open debate and discussion of taboo and controversial subjects without the risk of losing a job or facing some sort of social sanction?

JG: All societies have always been regulated by a mixture of manipulation and coercion. The Soviet government placed greater emphasis on coercion than does the U.S. governmental duopoly, which has proven more skilled in manipulation. But the iron fist of coercion is always on the ready, should manipulation fail. The war on terrorism is snake oil. Any modern state is inherently and hopelessly vulnerable. The current U.S. government is laying the foundations of a police state that would have immeasurably greater resources for controlling the population than did the Soviets. Still, it is unwise to underestimate the power of chaos.

TOQ: In the past eugenicists have proposed various government-sponsored initiatives to implement eugenic policies and programs. They range from positive eugenic measures, such as William McDougall’s tax-subsidized payments to middle and upper middle-class couples for having large families, to negative eugenic plans, such as William Shockley’s proposal to pay welfare mothers not to have children. Should the government establish eugenic policies, and if so, which policies should the government adopt? If you were overseeing the government’s initiative in this area, what specific policies would you urge?

JG: First of all I want to say that I believe in a universalist eugenics that is based on genuine affection for all ethnic groups, without exception.

The very diversity of human populations, shaped over the ages by radically differing environments, is a great resource for our species, even though eugenics does aim at a reduction of that portion of genetic variance that leads to sickness and low intelligence. All groups have strengths, and any association of eugenics with intergroup hostility or the denigration of other groups creates ill will for eugenics and is counterproductive.

Eugenics is feasible only to the degree that currently living people are willing to implement it. That means that radical solutions are not practical. It goes without saying that the ability to guide subsequent evolution depends on the strength and will of government, but even a relatively weak government can exercise considerable influence over fertility.

In my opinion the proposals advanced by Shockley and McDougall have no chance for implementation just now, but the following steps are entirely doable within the current intellectual climate, so different now from what it was a hundred years ago:

First, quantity, not quality, should be the chief priority of population management. It does appear that there are too many people for the environment to sustain them in perpetuity without environmental degradation.

If this perception proves to be overly pessimistic, the error can be easily and expeditiously corrected. If it is correct, however, the consequences will be irreversible.

Women all over the planet generally want to limit their fertility. U.S. foreign policy should shift away from its current fixation on political manipulation, codenamed “democracy,” and provide the encouragement that women require and the assistance that they want. The “demographic transition” is too uneven and needs to be urged along. To take but one example, Bangladesh is home to 150 million people but is only about the size of the state of Wisconsin, and 80 percent of its land area is flood plain.

Who will take in these people in the face of rising sea levels?

Resistance to abortion as part of family-planning can be overcome by presenting family planning as the ideal way to reduce abortions, albeit not eliminate abortion since termination of pregnancy is often the only line of defense for low-IQ populations.

Second, the current system of rendering assistance exclusively to needy single mothers is a genetic disaster that makes low-IQ groups our breeding pool. It should be replaced with national medical insurance and free day care for all. This would provide essential assistance to welfare populations that would permit them to work, but not encourage them to have still more children.

Third, it is not in America’s national interest to massively import the underclass of other countries to “do jobs that Americans do not want to do” and who then become part of our breeding pool. On the other hand, neither is it morally right for us to rob the underdeveloped countries of their persons of ability. Unfortunately, and I stress the word “unfortunately,” the introduction of an enforceable national ID card that will remove the source of temptation is essential.

Fourth, incredibly, a majority of Americans still advocate the teaching of creationism in the schools. How can genetic selection even be discussed in such a climate!? The government needs to invest heavily in education.

Fifth, the Jewish community, which suffers disproportionately from genetic illnesses as a result of historic inbreeding, is actively pursuing genetic testing and counseling in a truly enlightened fashion, and its policies should be held up as a model for everyone.

None of these policies is not particularly controversial and all are entirely feasible within the context of the current intellectual climate. More ambitious measures can be undertaken when eugenics wins broader acceptance.

TOQ: If each racial-ethnic group practiced eugenics on a comparable level, where more competent individuals with stable personalities—those on the upper end of the Bell Curve—reproduced at comparable rates, would this close “the educational/IQ gap” and would disparities in socioeconomic indicators (income, crime, educational achievement) decline as a result? If not, why not? Will we have to live indefinitely with differences in average ability levels and the prospect of human inequality from group to group?

JG: The question of between-group abilities and emotional proclivities is a scientific question with moral implications. Eugenics is for all groups, and all groups possess persons whose genetic patrimony should be preserved. A group of lesser native ability can even outstrip a more talented group, depending on the energy with which it pursues genetic selection. We should not feel threatened by other groups’ successes, but instead should be happy for them and attempt to emulate their success.

TOQ: Do you envision a future in which popular opinion or at least a large part of it will come to embrace eugenic policies?

JG: I advocate the de-demonization of eugenics, but I am leery of seeing it “embraced” by the broad public. The historical eugenics movement was quite influential on a more selective basis, and even then the amount of dilettantism and sheer snobbery was depressing. A delicate balance is necessary, enlightening elites, who go on to take genetic consequences of government programs into consideration. Practical eugenics is actually a very conservative, low-key, common-sense worldview. What is wild-eyed radicalism is the extreme egalitarianism that is still being presented to the public. But to be fair to its proponents, they have legitimate fears—fears that I share—and thus they present an ideology in which they themselves only partly believe, but which is really intended for the masses.

TOQ: Genetic screening is frequently attacked as “the new eugenics.”

JG: Actually, in a sense precisely the opposite can be true.

Prior to the advent of genetic testing, the only method of combating genetic illnesses was to reduce fertility among persons actively manifesting such diseases, but this was extremely ineffective in instances of recessive genes, which usually do not occur with great frequency.

The current practice of prenatal diagnosis followed by abortion of affected fetuses is the mirror image of inbreeding, which seems to be dysgenic in that it increases the frequency of tragic genetic illnesses but at the same time reduces the number of carriers—a decidedly eugenic consequence. Similarly, selective abortion seems eugenic in that it reduces the number of persons actively suffering from genetic illnesses, but also increases the number of carriers. Eugenic is what helps the gene pool. It is of course desirable that genetic screening be employed to reduce the number of sick people in the next generation, but carrier fertility also needs to be reduced.

Heightened mortality is evolution’s cruel way of correcting for inbreeding. Primitive societies evolved genetically through polygamy and inbreeding. Selective abortions liberate harmful genes from negative selectionary pressure and allow them to replicate themselves with greater frequency.

TOQ: And just how do you reduce such undesirable fertility?

JG: We have been molded by evolution to sacrifice everything for our children, and even to neglect our own parents, since effort expended on them is effort taken away from our children, reducing what sociobiology refers to as our “fitness” as a species. But concern for distant posterity is not part of our mental hardware. In discussing eugenics I have frequently heard the objection “What have future generations ever done for me?” The fundamental dilemma of eugenics is that it argues on behalf of a still nonexistent constituency, so that no quid pro quo is possible. Politics amounts to coalition building. Who will partner with them?

The available social levers are either a) an appeal to conscience or b) coercion. The former is ineffective, and the latter is improbable. This is the strongest argument against eugenics—that it is utopian and thus unrealistic. That is always the response to idealism. Sometimes you have to do what you can—even when prospects seem bleak.

Still, when all is said and done, while genetic illnesses are significant, they are peripheral to the fundamental core of eugenics—the negative correlation between intelligence and fertility, and, as plant and animal breeders have always known, “like breeds like.” Modern genetic knowledge has never challenged that fundamental fact. So perhaps the optimists have a chance at success after all. We have to try.

TOQ, vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring 2007)

Modern liberals like to praise W. E. B. Du Bois for predicting that race would be the defining issue of the 20th century. But another man, writing at the same time, also made that prediction. Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) is not as well remembered as Du Bois and his name is usually paired with words like “racist” and “white supremacist,” but perhaps a better word would be prophet. His major work, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, was written in 1920 at a time when whites had colonized and ruled most of the world. Stoddard warned that supremacy was about to end and that whites had better prepare for the consequences.

Although he published 14 other books, The Rising Tide of Color remains his best known work. Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, it was not an obscure right-wing manifesto but a mainstream sensation by a Harvard-educated scholar. In it Stoddard pointed out that the number of non-whites was growing rapidly and that some, especially Asians, were mastering Western technology. Increasing numbers of non-whites were threatening white colonies in some areas but, most importantly, they threatened even traditional white homelands. How skillful and united whites were in handling the rising tide would in large part determine the future of their race.

The Asian Threat

The Rising Tide of Color begins with a description of the various non-white populations of the earth. Although his classifications are sometimes crude, Stoddard makes sharp distinctions between different races of non-whites. In his view, East Asians living in the “yellow man’s land” were the greatest threat to whites. He classified north Asians — as well the west Asians of the “brown man’s world” — as high races with histories of accomplishment that deserve respect. Indeed, he wrote that for a thousand years the East put constant pressure on the West and at one time threatened to conquer all of Europe. By the time of Charlemagne, the “white man’s world” had shrunk to only the lands west of the Elbe River. Charlemagne pushed the invaders out but whites never fully reconquered the lands that had once been theirs — a failure in which Stoddard saw much significance:

… [W]est-central Asia, which in the dawn of history was predominantly white man’s country, is today racially brown man’s land in which white blood survives only as vestigial traces of vanishing significance. If this portion of Asia, the former seat of mighty white empires and possibly the very homeland of the white race itself, should have so entirely changed its ethnic character, what assurance can the most impressive political panorama give us that the present world order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?”

“Future generations have a right to demand of us that they shall be born white in a white man’s land.”

Of all the threats to the West, Stoddard believed the Japanese were the most serious. He quotes early British envoys who described Japanese as “highly intelligent children” who could quickly acquire Western techniques. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 these “highly intelligent children,” shocked the world by becoming the first non-white nation in modern times to defeat a white nation. Since white hegemony was maintained not by love but by respect and fear, Russia’s defeat by Japan was, in Stoddard’s view, “a body blow to white ascendancy.”

Japanese writers and government officials were not shy about drawing conclusions from their victory, and soon began turning western ideas of supremacy on their heads. At the outbreak of the First World War, Japanese writer Yone Noguchi wrote that the conflict meant the ruin of whites. “It means the saddest downfall of the so-called western civilization; our belief that it was builded upon higher and sounder footing than ours was at once knocked down and killed; we are sorry that we somehow overestimated its happy possibility and were deceived and cheated by its superficial glory.”

Stoddard quotes a Japanese imperialist pronouncement written in 1916:

As for America — that fatuous booby with much money and much sentiment, but no cohesion, no brains of government … Well did my friend speak the other day when he called her people a race of thieves with the hearts of rabbits…

North America alone will support a billion people; that billion will be Japanese with their slaves. Not arid Asia, nor worn-out Europe (which, with its peculiar and quaint relics and customs should in the interests of history and culture, be in any case preserved), nor yet tropical Africa is fit for our people. But North America, that continent so succulently green, fresh, and unsullied — except for the few chattering mongrel Yankees — should have been ours by right of discovery; it shall be ours by the higher, nobler right of conquest.

A Burmese journal called Buddhism, wrote that the “yellow peril” was nothing more than an expression of Darwinian superiority.

The West has justified — perhaps with some reason — every aggression on weaker races by the doctrine of Survival of the Fittest; on the ground that it is best for future humanity that the unfit should be eliminated and give place to the most able race. That doctrine applies equally well to any possible struggle between Aryan and Mongolian — whichever survives, should it ever come to a struggle between the two for world mastery, will, on their own doctrine, be the one most fit to do so, and if the survivor be the Mongolian, then is the Mongolian no “peril’ to humanity, but the better part of it.

Although it was partially controlled by Japan, China also was a threat to the West. With one fourth of the world’s population, an armed China would pose an even greater challenge than Japan. Stoddard reported that in 1905 Chinese school children were taught to chant the following lines:

I pray that the frontiers of my country become hard as bronze; that it surpass Europe and America; that it subjugate Japan; that its land and sea armies cover themselves with resplendent glory; that over the whole earth float the Dragon Standard; that the universal mastery of the empire extend and progress. May our empire, like a sleeping tiger suddenly awakened, spring roaring into the arena of combats.

There was good reasons to take note of the Asians.

Brown Men

According to Stoddard, the brown man’s land was the Near and Middle East and stretched into northern Africa. Racially it was a jumble, including within its boundaries such groups as largely-white Persians and Turks, largely-black Yemenite Arabs, and Himalayan and Central Asian yellows. With the exception of India, he saw Islam as the great unifying force of this world. In 1920, the brown man’s world was completely controlled by whites, but this did not guarantee permanent white control in the face of rising brown solidarity fueled by what Stoddard called “the Mohammedan Revival.”

Ironically, this revival was aided by Western technology. Newspapers allowed Muslims to communicate with each other across their vast world. A Syrian Christian, Ameen Rihani, characterized that world in a May 1912 article in Forum magazine:

A nation of 250,000,000 souls, more than one-half under Christian rule, struggling to shake off its fetters … [A] nation with a glorious past, a living faith and language, an inspired Book, an undying hope, might be divided against itself by European diplomacy but can never be subjugated by European arms… What Islam is losing on the borders of Europe it is gaining in Africa and Central Asia through its modern propaganda, which is conducted according to Christian methods … Europe drills the Moslem to be a soldier who will ultimately turn his weapons against her …

Though Islam was a growing force, Stoddard did not think the brown threat comparable to the yellow peril. While Japanese talked openly of racial superiority and conquering white lands, the brown revolt against white rule was mainly defensive, showing few signs of expansion. Stoddard saw the brown man as having enough room for his growing population and thought any alliance among the browns would break up after white rule ended. He expected internal warfare among the browns to be constant, and thought a yellow-brown alliance unlikely. Stoddard’s main concern was that resurgent Islam might affect another sphere of white political control: black Africa.

The Dark Continent

Sub-Saharan Africa was the world of the black man. Four-fifths of the world’s 150,000,000 black people lived in Africa in 1920, with the rest scattered in the New World. Africans had suffered from a history of isolation: “Cut off from the Mediterranean by the desert which he had no means of crossing, and bounded elsewhere by oceans which he had no skill in navigating, the black man vegetated in savage obscurity, his habitat being well named the “Dark Continent.’” In stark language, Stoddard described blacks as never having developed a civilization and having no history: “Left to himself, he remained a savage, and in the past his only quickening has been where brown men have imposed their ideas and altered his blood. The originating powers of the European and the Asiatic are not in him.”

Though white contact with sub-Saharan Africa began four centuries earlier, only in the nineteenth century did Europe give the area its full attention. Within a generation Africa — both black and Arab — was partitioned by European powers, and only Liberia and present-day Ethiopia retained qualified independence.

Europeans took root in Africa — at both the northern and southern extremes — in a way they never did in Asia. Over a million Europeans — mostly French — settled in Algeria and Tunisia, and a million and a half Dutch and English in South Africa. With white control firmly established in these areas, the main question for Africa was whether whites could maintain their hold on the inner continent. This would depend on how well they contained the spread of Islam. According to Stoddard, the continent would fall either to white Christians or Islamic browns; Africans themselves would never be masters in their own house.

Stoddard believed the black man’s lack of originality and history made him particularly susceptible to outside ideas and people. Africans readily accepted the religions of both browns and whites, but since blacks were a naturally warlike people, they would be more inclined to accept Islam than Christianity. Islam had not yet penetrated below the equator and Stoddard praised the efforts of Christians to convert blacks:

In so far as he is Christianized, the negro’s savage instincts will be restrained and he will be predisposed to acquiesce in white tutelage. In so far as he is Islamized, the negro’s warlike propensities will be inflamed, and he will be used as the tool of Arab Pan-Islamism seeking to drive the white man from Africa and make the continent its very own.

Stoddard warned that “Pan-Islamism, once possessed of the Dark Continent and fired by militant zealots, might forge black Africa into a sword of wrath, the executor of sinister adventures.”

For Stoddard, the real value of Africa lay in its rich raw materials. He believed the European powers were well aware of the brown threat and was confident they could control the spread of Islam. Moreover, whites continued to settle in Africa, making more and more of it “white man’s country.” The real danger to white control lay in potential weakness and discord within the white world itself.

Red Men

By “red men” Stoddard meant the American Indians of Central and South America. In his view they accounted for about two-thirds of the population of this area with whites and “near-whites” comprising about ten percent. Stoddard contrasted the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish with the settling of North America by the British. The British undertook a genuine migration, bringing families who meant to stay, whereas Spanish men came alone to the New World for treasure and adventure and mated with Indian women. Their “mestizo” offspring were sometimes joined — primarily in Brazil — by the mulatto offspring of whites and black slaves. “Zambos” were the result of black-Indian mixing.

As long as the colonies were held by Spain, Latin America had a system of white rule, and what Stoddard calls an “idle and vapid” white governing class at least formally forbade miscegenation. After the revolutions against Spain, which Stoddard called a white civil war, there was massive racial change. The white rulers were decimated by the revolutions, and their ranks were further depleted by the large number of loyalists who returned to Spain. Non-whites, many of whom had fought for the revolutionaries, wanted their share of power and the result was a long series of coups, revolutions, and wars that resulted in a worsening of conditions in most of Latin America.

Stoddard praised Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay as mostly-white nations that encouraged European immigration. He particularly singled out Chile for its social and political stability as well as its racial consciousness: “The country was settled by a squirearchy of an almost English type. This ruling gentry jealously guarded its racial integrity. In fact, it possessed not merely a white but a Nordic race-consciousness.” Stoddard was optimistic about these areas of South America since white immigration — mostly German — seemed to be strengthening their already strong white identities. The rest of Latin America seemed doomed to endless cycles of anarchy, tyranny and revolution.

While Stoddard saw little of value in the red man’s land, he did think it important to keep Asians out. He noted that the Japanese had targeted Latin America for expansion, and quotes a Japanese he identifies only as Count Osuma as saying, “South America, especially the northern part, will furnish ample room for our surplus.” In fact, during this period Japan was trying to strengthen relations with Mexico by posing as a counter-balance to the hated “gringo.”

Stoddard predicted the red man’s land, like Africa, would eventually be controlled by outsiders, white or Asian. The other races were out of contention because: “The Indian is patently unable to construct a progressive civilization. As for the negro, he has proved as incapable in the New World as in the Old.” Again, as in Africa, whites had the advantage over Asians. With strongholds to the north and south and with increased European immigration, white hegemony in Latin America was secure unless “internecine discord,” robbed whites of their vigor.

‘The Swarming of the Whites’

Like Madison Grant (see AR, December 1997), Stoddard divided whites into Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans. While he considered them all sound stock, in his view, the Nordic had made the race great. He argued that traditionally it was Nordics who repelled Asiatic invasions of Europe after Alpines or Mediterraneans had been defeated.

Before the 16th century Europe had a civilization no better than Asia’s, but the years 1500 to 1900 marked the “white flood.” This period began with Columbus in 1492 and was established in 1497 with Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a route to India. Stoddard believed these discoveries not only opened new lands to Europeans, but had a profound psychological effect as well. The white man went from static “dead-end” to dynamic discovery:

… [H]is inherent racial aptitudes had been stimulated by his past. The hard conditions of medieval life had disciplined him to adversity and had weeded him by natural selection. The hammer of Asiatic invasion, clanging for a thousand years on the brown-yellow anvil, had tempered the iron of Europe into the finest steel. The white man could think, could create, could fight superlatively well. No wonder the redskins and negroes feared and adored him as a god, while the somnolent races of the Farther East, stunned by this strange apparition rising from the pathless ocean, offered no effective opposition.

Thus began the swarming of the whites, like bees from the hive, to the uttermost ends of the earth. And, in return, Europe was quickened to intenser vitality. Goods, tools, ideas, men: all were produced at an unprecedented rate. So, by action and reaction, white progress grew by leaps and bounds … For four hundred years the pace never slackened, and at the close of the nineteenth century the white man stood the indubitable master of the world.

The thought that this supremacy could end, “never entered the head of one white man in a thousand,” wrote Stoddard. Indeed, in 1920 whites were the most numerous race on earth. Comprising one-third of humanity, they occupied 40 percent of the globe, and controlled 90 percent. He called white expansion “the most prodigious phenomenon in all recorded history … Never before has a race acquired such combined preponderance of numbers and dominion.” Though most whites could not foresee it, Stoddard warned that hegemony was about to be challenged.

Only white solidarity could stop the rising tide of color, but the First World War destroyed this solidarity and showed the colored world that whites were vulnerable through internal discord. Just as the Peloponnesian War was the suicide of Greek civilization (“the saddest page in history,” writes Stoddard) the Great War threatened to mark the end of white supremacy.

“The war was nothing short of a headlong plunge into race suicide,” wrote Stoddard. He estimates it took 40,000,000 lives including civilians. Moreover, the conflict had a severe dysgenic effect, with the best young men of Europe dying without passing on their genes. The least fit — the cowardly and physically or mentally deficient — were left behind to propagate. Thus in 1920, at the time Stoddard wrote, the heart of the white world lay in ruins. Europe was financially and physically broken, it’s racial solidarity shattered, the flower of its youth dead on the battlefield — it stood at the same crossroads as the Greeks following their fratricidal war. The decisions made then would determine the fate of the white world.

Plugging the Dikes

In his plan to hold back the tide, Stoddard divided the world into “dikes.” The outer dikes were areas where whites had political control but had not settled. Examples were India and Egypt. Inner dikes were areas where whites firmly established, as they were in North America and Australia. Between these two lay a category he called enclaves, where whites had settled but had not displaced the native populations. Examples were Algeria and South Africa.

Though Stoddard did not advocate outright abandonment of the outer dikes, he did not consider them necessary for white survival. The question of retention would turn on economic, political, and strategic considerations. In the case of Asia, he urged whites to face the inevitable: “White men must get out of their heads the idea that the Asiatics are “inferior.”… Men worthy of independence will sooner or later get it … Let us not exhaust ourselves by stubborn resistance in Asia which in the end must prove futile.”

The inner dikes were the frontiers of the white world marked not by boundary stones but flesh and blood: “They are the true bulwarks of the race, the patrimony of future generations who have a right to demand of us that they shall be born white in a white man’s land. Ill will it fare if ever our race should close its ears to this most elemental call of the blood.”

The inner dikes could be breached by war, trade, or immigration. Japan showed in the Russo-Japanese War that it was a military power. Also, it and other Asian nations were in the process of industrializing and could potentially threaten the West through trade. As they prospered they would look for new areas for their surplus population, including Australia and the United States. The only thing to stop this immigration was the will of whites. If this will ever faltered or was weakened by internal discord, the inner dikes would be flooded by people seeking the better living conditions offered by the West. This is why Stoddard saw the First World War as such a bad omen (he also noted that each side used colored troops from the colonies to fight fellow whites).

Though he feared that whites were “ill-prepared” to stop the rising tide of color, he still hoped they would rediscover that race is destiny. It was due to their unique genetic heritage that whites could rule the world and create a great civilization, and it was impossible to have the civilization without the race.

For white civilization is today conterminous with the white race… It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption. What has taken place in Central Asia, once a white and now a brown or yellow land, will take place in Australasia, Europe and America. Not today, not tomorrow; perhaps not for generations; but surely in the end. If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed.

Warnings, Heeded and Ignored

Lothrop Stoddard was not alone in warning the West. The early 20th century saw the publication of several major books on the importance of race. Among these were: Mankind at the Crossroads by E. G. Conklin (1914), The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant (1916) and Race and National Solidarity by Charles Josey (1923) (reviewed in AR, August 1992). The May 7, 1921 Saturday Evening Post carried an editorial on immigration that said, “Two books in particular that every American should read if he wishes to understand the full gravity of our present immigration problem: Mr. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Dr. Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color … These books should do a vast amount of good if they fall into the hands of readers who can face without wincing the impact of new and disturbing ideas.”

Initially some leaders were ready to heed the warnings. Congress passed the Johnson Act of 1924, which effectively ended non-white immigration. Stoddard testified at the congressional hearings. Also, the new science of eugenics was becoming well accepted. Stoddard was in charge of publicity for the Second Eugenics Congress of 1921, which was chaired by Madison Grant and held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (see AR, February 1997, for an account of the respectability and broad popularity of the early eugenics movement).

Despite these early successes, subsequent leaders ignored Lothrop Stoddard’s warnings. Twenty years after The Rising Tide of Color was published, Europe again erupted into civil war. Nazi Germany allied with the dreaded Japanese, who made good on their threat to attack the United States. Eugenics was soon linked to Adolf Hitler and concentration camps. Europe gave up her Asian colonies and soon all of Africa was freed. The supposedly permanent white colonies in Algeria and Tunisia were betrayed in the 1960s and Rhodesia and South Africa collapsed soon after. Australia abandoned her “whites-only” immigration policy in the 1970s and the United States and Canada put in motion immigration policies which, if not reformed, will make whites a minority by mid-century. Even Europe, the heart of the white world, faces massive Third-World immigration and high fertility rates combined with below-replacement white birth rates.

Just as Stoddard feared, the rising tide of color is swamping the West. Ironically, it is not the “yellows” who are displacing whites so much as the “reds,” “browns”and blacks, from whom Stoddard expected no real challenge. But just as he predicted, white disunity and loss of will are the culprits, not the inherent dynamism of non-whites. We still have time to rebuild the inner dikes — but only if we rekindle the will to do so

“They would say: “I want Harpaya, (ejaculation), I would then ask what this Harpaya means and they would answer, ‘not only harpaya but we want it ‘all inclusive’, full sex.’ I used to tell them that we don’t do it and he would reply, ‘Read my lips, ‘the women are all included’, the salesman in Tel Aviv promised us that it’s Akol Kalul!’ Sometimes one of the female managers would suggest for to us to follow the guests’ demands just as a guarantee that they would come back.”

On 22 November 2002, Hotel Paradise Mombassa, an Israeli Hotel in Kenya, was attacked by a group of terrorists. The following Maariv piece isn’t concerned with Al Qa’eda, but rather with the devastation the Israelis left behind.

This is the story of a beautiful Israeli hotel on the African seashore. It is the story of an Israeli owned holiday resort in Mombassa, Kenya, designed and built solely for the Israeli tourist market. It is also the story of total abuse of the local impoverished population. It is a tale of humiliation, cruelty and continuous daily rape of struggling African women. It is the usual horrendous story of Israelis inflicting pain on others but at times it is very funny in spite of itself. For instance, once a week, when the Israeli groups were departing in busses on their way back to the Mombassa terminal, the local crew ordered the African staff to chase their departing busses with tears in their eyes and to scream ‘please don’t leave us, we love you, please come back’. This bizarre instruction was given to the local crew by the Israeli hotel management as part of the package deal, the last image to bring home of an unforgettable holiday. I allow myself to assume that the Israeli managers detected some clear yearning for love amongst their Israeli clients. One may ask what may stand in the core of such a longing for declarations of love. Considering the clear fact that those Israeli tourists were mainly engaged in turning Mombassa into Hell on earth, why do they really need to feel beloved after all that? I wonder why the Israeli offender insists upon being loved by his victim? Ordinary human beings do not expect to be loved by their hotel receptionists or room cleaners. But then, ordinary human beings do not tend to humiliate, abuse and rape hotel staff. They may spend some time in the hotel, they may enjoy its services and then they just pay and leave politely and quietly. For the Israeli tourists, as you will soon read, staying in the hotel is a clear ‘letting go’. It is the ideal environment to manifest one’s darkest libidinal impetus and practice total denial of any moral conduct. For the Israeli tourist, holiday is the materialisation and embodiment of their control zeal. For the Israelis, as you will read shortly, to go to for a holiday in Africa is to experience the varied possibilities of becoming a very wild animal.

The following journalistic piece is a glimpse into some Israeli pathological psychotic conditions. It is a bizarre story of an absurd criminal identity that demands affection from its victims. The story wasn’t written by myself, I just translated it into English. It originally appeared only in Hebrew in Maariv, Israel’s 2nd biggest daily paper. I spent time translating it because I do believe that is rather crucial to permit people outside of Israel a better understanding of the Israeli character and characteristics. Seemingly, some amongst us tend to believe that the Israeli approach towards the Palestinians is the outcome of specific colonial circumstances. Apparently, they are wrong. Israeliness is a radical form of blind cruelty and the Israelis have no problem taking it with them wherever they go. In Palestine it would be the Palestinians who suffer, in Goa it is the poor Indians. In the following story it is the deprived labour force of Mombassa, Kenya who confronts Israeli sadism. There is an old and famous saying, ‘you can take the man out of Israel but you can never take Israel out of the man’. You may want to take a nice deep breath before you read what the men of Israel are up to.

“Fear and Contempt in Heaven”
Omri Hasenheim, Kenya
14.10.2005
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART/995/971.html

In hotel Paradise Mombassa, crew members were humiliated by the Israeli tourists. It’s no surprise that even after the 2002 terror attack on the hotel, they refuse to forgive, not Al-Qa’eda but rather us (the Israelis).

It is standing on the white sand that is apparently more beautiful than ever. The luxury buildings invite you for a ‘dream of a break’, the rooms and the suites are loaded with exceptional handmade wooden furniture. In between the restored buildings you find a stream with golden fishes. At the bar you can hear the echo of some laidback African beat. All around the gigantic swimming pool you can see many monkeys jumping around. From the dining room windows you can see the magnificent sea-view. On your way to the dining room you may want to visit the alligator pool, clearly the alligator grew a bit since that horrible day of terror.

Welcome to Heaven, Hotel ‘Paradise Mombassa’

At just a kilometre from there, in a Msomrini village, two orphan girls are making dreadlocks for each other. Not far behind them, an isolated miserable mud shed is standing, all around poorly clothed toddlers are playing. They are dirty, their noses are dripping. A few broken stools are spread around. On one of them, Dama Safaria is sitting. Before Al Qa’eda blew up the very little she had, she used to work as a dancer at the hotel. For two years she danced traditional African folk dances, something that helped her to forget the misery she was born into. In Msomrini, everyone was happy to dance for just $2 a day. In the beginning Dama was rather happy, but then, as time went by, the Israeli employers realised that they could probably get away without paying. After the performances, her husband used to march from the village to the hotel to beg for her wages. “We loved to dance for the Israelis,” says Dama, “but then once the payment day arrived our smiles would fade away.”

On the morning of 22 November 2002, Al Qa’eda terrorists attacked at the hotel. Once the explosion went off, it didn’t take long before Dama realised that her husband was missing. She was horrified, a few minutes later she was told that he was killed. Since then, she is struggling on her own to maintain herself and her nine orphans. Her youngest son is just four years old. From the hotel management she heard nothing. No one came to visit or even just to offer condolences. Neither the Israeli Government nor Kenyan officials have shown any interest. “We, the dancing company, are still owed $120 for the last four performances in front of those Israeli tourists,” she claims in despair.

“After the terror attack my life became impossible. In the winter I beg for the farmers to cultivate our land for literally pennies,” in the summer she herself doesn’t realise how she makes it.

Two month ago ‘Paradise Mombassa’ was reopened under a new management comprised of one Israeli, one French and one American. They try to minimise their exposure, very much like the previous Israeli owner Yeuda Sulami who denies to this day his involvement with the previous management. The new management does its utmost to change the hotel’s image, they are trying to leave the Israeli market behind. Instead they aim to appeal to European and American markets.

But for many locals, this new business face lift won’t make a big difference, the memory of those very years of total abuse by Israeli tourists and management is not going to fade away. They won’t forget the Israeli guests that sexually assaulted them or were just rude and arrogant. They won’t forget the Israeli management who came along with some bizarre professional demands, failing to pay their monthly wages on time and eventually just stopped paying altogether. Now, maybe out of hope, or just the will to open their hearts, they are giving their personal account of ‘Paradise Mombassa’.

The idea to erect an Israeli hotel on Kenya’s seashore in the late 1990s was proved to be ingenious. Until then, Kenya was famous for its wild Safari adventures. Yeuda Sulami and his business partner Itzik Mamman came up with the idea of using Kenya as an Israeli holiday resort. They founded a company and started to sell holiday packages including flights, accommodation and local tourist adventures. In the beginning, they were buying accommodation services from local companies. But the Israeli appetite knows no limit. ‘Why don’t we make the big money ourselves’ asked the two, ‘we shall build our hotel on the beach.’ Soon, they joined forces with local investors and founded a company based on ‘time sharing’ holiday rentals for Israelis. The Israeli client reacted enthusiastically, at the end of the day it was: a beautiful hotel offering sunny beaches at the time of the Israeli winter, complete with a flourishing cheap sex industry and just four and a half hours’ flight time from Tel Aviv.

The leitmotif that guided Sulami and Maman was that the Israeli guest who may come to Kenya once would return. Thus the promotion packages were sold ridiculously cheap. It all worked out perfectly well. Many Israelis returned and invested in holiday accommodation (one Israeli bought 52 holiday units for the sum of $1.5 million). Every week 250 Israelis landed at Mombassa airport, they found an Israeli hotel, it was fully Kosher and it even had a proper synagogue.

The hotel started to operate in the year 2000 and was officially launched a year later. Local crew was recruited from surrounding hotels. Most workers admit that in the beginning they were rather happy, but things deteriorated rapidly soon after the official opening. Rather soon it was clear that someone was about to pay for the Israeli extravaganza.

Man should never be Alone

Three years later, the humiliating practice is left like an open wound in the memory of the female hotel crew veterans. Once a week, just when the Israelis where checking out on their way back to the airport, a bell rang. ‘Get ready, the guests are leaving,’ announced the head of the entertaining team, frantically chasing the female crew. They were all ordered to gather near to the entrance gate and to chase the leaving busses while weeping desperately in front of the Israelis. Once they caught up with the busses they would bang on its metal frame with tears dropping from their eyes.

“It was a bizarre order,” giggled Saline Aching, the chief masseuse. “We were told to chase the bus, to sing and cry so the guests would know that we love them and want them to come back. I remember myself running like in a frenzied state, I would hit the bus with my fists shouting to the guests, ‘why do you leave us?’ ‘We miss you’, ‘We love you’. The Israelis would stare at us from the windows, some of them believed us to be genuine, others were shooting us with their video cameras. ”

Rahima Josef Katan: “If you were not crying you may find yourself in danger of losing your job. We were asked to think of something bad that happened to us, so we can cry for real. I didn’t cry.” “I didn’t cry,” Confesses Catherine Khaa, masseuse. “How could I, I didn’t love them at all. I fact I hated them.”

The weekly bus chasing was just one example of the way the staff were supposed to treat the Israeli guests. The principles were obvious: humiliation, indignity, and hard labour. The guidelines were clear: The client is always right, the client must be happy, the client must return. The ones who carried most of the burden were the females amongst the entertainment team. Dorothy Maly recollects that once a week, on the arrival day, five of them would be taken to Mombassa airport. “We used sing to them Jambo Jambo (hello hello) and Evenu Shalom Aleichem. The local Kenyans were sure that we had had lost it but the Israelis were over the moon. They loved noise, once we arrived at the hotel, again we started singing loudly. In the night we were instructed by the manager to scream till the last Israeli leaves the dance floor. If a guest decides not to go to sleep, you were required to stay with him till he quits to his room. We were demanded to produce noise almost 24 hours a day. When we took a break, the manager would come and bark: ‘What’s the matter with you, do you fall asleep? I will cut your wage, move on…’.”

The agenda dictated from above was that a bored guest would never return. Rahima Raymond, masseuse: “We were doomed to sit with the guests till the small hours, to hang around with them. Sulami made it clear that we must keep the guests happy. We were dancing with the men in nightclubs just to make sure that they weren’t staying alone. In case we refused to do so, they would complain to the management: ‘Why don’t they come out with us?’ ‘We want to see the African night life’. They obviously didn’t care about our commitments and family life. Obviously, we didn’t get any ‘extra’ for those services. The day after, while they were still in bed we had to start again at eight in the morning. The slogan ‘the client is always right’ took over. Josef Katan: “they taught us a behavioural code, if a man is near to his wife we were supposed to hold his hand in a certain way, if his wife wasn’t around then we should behave rather differently.”

“There were religious Jews who couldn’t sign the room service notes on the Jewish Sabbath. We would then keep a note with their room number attached to their bill. Once Sabbath was over, some of them would just refuse to pay. They would argue that we invented it all, ‘you forged our signatures’, they would say. The management would always believe them and expect us to cover their bills. I just couldn’t believe that humans can behave as such.”

To be seen like an African

The ever-growing demand to entertain the Israeli guests enforced a maximised utilisation of the local workforce. The crew were mobilised from the many different departments to the entertainment team. “They could pool me out of the kitchen, telling me that the guests want to have a good time and I should go and hang out with them,” says Josef Katan. “ I would then ask, how can I bake cookies and dance simultaneously? The entire hotel was as an entertainment squad. The kitchen stuff were entertainers, the receptionists were entertainers, gardeners were entertainers.” Mali, a dancer: “Saline, the chief masseuse would give us a shout when too many Israelis wanted a massage at the same time. At the time I knew nothing about massage. There was a woman that was brought over by the hotel’s rabbi and she was supposed to teach us. After a short instruction of five minutes I was apparently ready to have a go.”

In order to maintain ‘authentic African spirit’ the staff was obliged to put on very minimal clothes. Unlike the other hotels in the vicinity, where men were serving in uniform, in Paradise Mombassa the male crew were walking around half naked and with bare feet. The females were allowed just a minimal fabric on their breasts and pubes. “Even when temperatures dropped we were not allowed to cover ourselves.” Marci Mawagambo Aching said: “Sulami wanted us to look ‘authentic’ so when you walk around, the guests can check you out for the night. You must be attractive so they re-book another holiday. It was horrible, but what can you do? I needed the money. One of the Israeli female managers told us that we better follow Sulami’s orders, if he wants us too look like Africans, we better look like ones.”

Even most basic conditions were lacking. ‘Paradise Mombassa’ is located 8 kilometres from the main road. The dirt track to the hotel passes through a wild savannah loaded with outlaws. But then a solution was found, a truck originally built to transport livestock was converted to transport forty humans. An Israeli employee says, “it was a truck with a sealed cargo wagon without benches. People were so squeezed in that we had to leave the back door open.” Josef Katan: “We felt like animals. Sometimes we were left with no oxygen, but we knew that if we complained we would then asked to stay in the hotel. That would obviously mean we would not be able to see our families. So we kept quiet.” Once a newly appointed manager asked how the Kenyans felt about the manner in which they were transported. The answer was rather clear, ‘for them it doesn’t matter, as long as they are delivered to their work they are happy.’

Even for meals during the working hours, local crew were left to fend for themselves. But then a creative solution was found. Aching: “there were times when Sulami was kind and let us eat the guests’ leftovers. We were lucky because the Israelis are greedy, they would go to the buffet and put on their plates far more than their bodies can take. They would take piles of salads, and massive chunks of meat, but then, they would barely touch it and leave most of it behind.” Mali: “If to tell the truth, we could see that the food was already on someone else’s plate, but some of us had to eat it, just because they couldn’t afford to buy somewhere else. They where hungry, what could they do?”

But it goes further. It didn’t take long before the local crew realised that they were not insured. It was clearly revealed after a security man was murdered and his colleague was wounded during a burglary, till this day, neither the grieving family nor the wounded man received any compensation. Work contracts were granted only to the very top managers. Lower hierarchy were provided with a meaningless paper stating an agreed figure. This document has never been respected by its initiators.

Good Machine, Good Machine

Saline Aching was curious to understand some Hebrew terms, it is her interest in the Hebrew language that helped her to grasp the meaning of Akol Kalul, all included. Not one hotel staff failed to understand the meaning of the Hebrew idiom that became the hotel business philosophy. All hotel services where included in the price of the holiday package purchased back in Israel. Soon the staff learned that this very idiom means a lot to Israelis.

“All day long I heard the guests shouting Akol Kalul,” says Josef Katan. “Some of them held me by my arm and shouted at me Akol Kalul. Even on the beach they would just shout to passing people Akol Kalul, Akol Kalul. I would then ask them what that ‘Akol Kalul’ means? They would answer, ‘everything, even you’. I used to tell them that I am not Sulami’s property. He owns the hotel but not me. I thought to myself, “God, do they behave as such in their own country?”

In the best case scenario, the Akol Kalul was practiced in the free buffet bar materialising into gigantic chunks of meat put on a single plate. In the worst case scenario, it found its way into the massage room. Needless to say, not even one guest evaded his right to be massaged. Aching says, “The first thing the male guests did upon arrival, even before they unloaded their suitcases in the rooms, they would sprint to the massage room. They would enter the hotel with their eyes wide open asking, ‘where is the massage room?’ I used to plan the daily schedule, there was a competition amongst them who is going to get there first.

Mali: “My role was to tell them: ‘I am Dorothy and I am a masseuse in the hotel’ as soon as I mentioned it they would scream ‘massage, massage’. Most of them couldn’t speak English. They would just say, ‘I come now.’ A tourist from another country would wait even two weeks but in Paradise they wanted it all right on the spot. Sometimes, even before breakfast. Someone would come and tell you, ‘I come for a massage akol kalul, if you don’t do akol kalul, I take another masseuse’.”

“They would say: “I want Harpaya, (ejaculation), I would then ask what this Harpaya means and they would answer, ‘not only harpaya but we want it ‘all inclusive’, full sex.’ I used to tell them that we don’t do it and he would reply, ‘Read my lips, ‘the women are all included’, the salesman in Tel Aviv promised us that it’s Akol Kalul!’ Sometimes one of the female managers would suggest for to us to follow the guests’ demands just as a guarantee that they would come back.”

Katherine Kaha, a masseuse, confesses that she had to follow the demands… “I would start doing a massage, and then the man would tell me, ‘do it all over, you must do it’. In case I wouldn’t they would complain to the management. I didn’t like it at all but I did it. They would give me $1 sometimes two, I felt horrible.”

A frequent Israeli guest to the hotel: “There was always this problem with the massage, the Israelis used to abuse the girls to the very limit. It was appalling and it gave Israel a bad name. There were some groups I was really embarrassed to stand near to. They were so bossy and arrogant, they did whatever they liked, and just had good time.”

“One of the Israelis told me,” says Rahima, “you know Rahima, last night they provided me with a little baby girl, only 13 years old, I fucked her and gave her $5 just because she was penniless.” I then asked him, “Wasn’t she the age of your granddaughter?” He didn’t answer. On the same night he might as well have come back to the hotel shouting, ‘African women are the best value for money.’ Let me tell you, here in Africa, it isn’t that common that once you sleep with a woman you go and inform the rest of the world about it. But the Israelis kept it all open, they used to say about us: Mechona Tova, Mechona Tova (Good machine, Good machine).”

The Power to Fuck

The passion for sex wasn’t only restricted to the massage rooms and wasn’t solely the business of the single male guests. It was rather prohibited to let local girls into the hotel. But a solution was found, just across the road, again in an Israeli partnership, a motel named Calypso was founded. This was where Israelis were hanging around in the nights. “Men used to come to our rooms asking us to go out with them,” tells Josef Katan, “but the worst happened in the morning when they shared the details of last night’s affairs with the entire dining room. They used to shout things like ‘ha, I went with her, I fucked and fucked and fucked her all night long and all for less than one dollar’. We understood exactly what they were talking about. When the first group arrived, I was telling myself that surely the second group would be better. But it was exactly the same. From tine to time they used to ask for room service, once the room service crew would enter their room, they would try to touch her. The waitresses were horrified, they never wanted to go with food to the rooms, but my personal case was different, they were afraid of me because I was rude to them. They used to call me ‘big ass’. This was Ok, it is better being ‘big ass’ rather than being their sex slave.”

“Even the married men used to find some ways to the girls’ rooms. For instance, one told his wife, ‘go to the dining room, I will be right there with you.’ Apparently he disappeared till the morning after. In the morning we were witnessing the woman screaming at her husband during breakfast. Once a man replied to his wife, ‘the women in Kenya are so great, they have a small hole, unlike you having such a silly big one’. All that at breakfast, in the dining room, in public. When the animosity went wild we always rushed to bring the hotel’s Rabbi in, he would do his best to make peace. Sometimes, the men used to sit in the dining room while the donkeys were having sex outside. As soon as the Israelis noticed the donkeys’ activity they would stand up and show their support: ‘good, good, good, forward, backward, good. good’.”

“Occasionally, one would come to me telling me in front of everyone else. ‘I will take Viagra and after that I will have the power to fuck. By the way, what’s your name?’ I would say Rahima. ‘Good, Rahima. I want to fuck you today!’” I asked myself what is going on. One guest asked me, ‘do you know Chartie? I went with her to the disco, I fucked her but she wasn’t good at all. Originally I planed to give her $10 but eventually I gave her $1 only. He was shouting like a madman and then Chartie arrived in the room. He then pointed at her with his finger and shouted ‘here she is, it was her’.”

Karen Tiglo, a room cleaner: “We couldn’t figure out whether the Israelis were wild animals or human beings. They would all the time offer me $10. I felt so humiliated. After a while they would know who amongst the female crew were desperate for money and would just go for them. Stela Matawa, a waitress: from time to time, a man would approach me abusively, in case I would refuse, the man would come to the dining room and shout, ‘leave out this girl she is crap, I took her to the room and she was useless’.”

Katherine Kaa experienced an especially traumatic event when a seventy-year-old man decided that he was in love with her. “I didn’t love him at all,” she says. “We went out to a discothèque, I was sure that I was just escorting him to assist him killing his boredom. On the way back, he and the taxi driver tricked me, rather than driving back to the hotel, we arrived at a place that hires rooms for the night. Violently, he tried to force me to sleep with him. But I couldn’t. When we went back to the hotel he told me that never wanted to see me again. And he would report to the management that I wasted his money without giving a thing back. After my refusal was reported, the hotel manager dismissed me for two weeks.”

According to a few of the crew members, not only did the Israeli management fail to denounce, some of the managers actually joined the party (their names are kept with the editors of the newspaper). Raymond, “At the time one of the managers learned to enjoy the massages. He started to demand: ‘do it here, here and there’ just like one of the guests. Another manager would pick girls from the entertainment team, he would say, ‘after all, I am a manager, no one would ask you where were you going.’ I had to accept it although it was rather horrible. The day after when he would pass by me, he would hardly acknowledge me. Every time, after our performances, one dancer would disappear into one of the manager s’ offices. The girls were afraid that this might be a professional issue to do with their performance but then, once in the manager’s office, they realised what it was all about.”

From Peacepalestine, October 24, 2005

See also our articles from Jewish Tribal Review

Black Invention Myths

Perhaps you’ve heard the claims: Were it not for the genius and energy of African-American inventors, we might find ourselves in a world without traffic lights, peanut butter, blood banks, light bulb filaments, and a vast number of other things we now take for granted but could hardly imagine life without.

Such beliefs usually originate in books or articles about black history. Since many of the authors have little interest in the history of technology outside of advertising black contributions to it, their stories tend to be fraught with misunderstandings, wishful thinking, or fanciful embellishments with no historical basis. The lack of historical perspective leads to extravagant overestimations of originality and importance: sometimes a slightly modified version of a pre-existing piece of technology is mistaken for the first invention of its type; sometimes a patent or innovation with little or no lasting value is portrayed as a major advance, even if there’s no real evidence it was ever used.

Unfortunately, some of the errors and exaggerations have acquired an illusion of credibility by repetition in mainstream outlets, especially during Black History Month (see examples for the traffic light and ironing board). When myths go unchallenged for too long, they begin to eclipse the truth. Thus I decided to put some records straight. Although this page does not cover every dubious invention claim floating around out there, it should at least serve as a warning never to take any such claim for granted.

Each item below is listed with its supposed black originator beneath it along with the year it was supposedly invented, followed by something about the real origin of the invention or at least an earlier instance of it.

• Bibliography

Traffic Signal

Invented by Garrett A. Morgan in 1923?
No!

The first known traffic signal appeared in London in 1868 near the Houses of Parliament. Designed by JP Knight, it featured two semaphore arms and two gas lamps. The earliest electric traffic lights include Lester Wire’s two-color version set up in Salt Lake City circa 1912, James Hoge’s system (US patent #1,251,666) installed in Cleveland by the American Traffic Signal Company in 1914, and William Potts’ 4-way red-yellow-green lights introduced in Detroit beginning in 1920. New York City traffic towers began flashing three-color signals also in 1920.

Garrett Morgan’s cross-shaped, crank-operated semaphore was not among the first half-hundred patented traffic signals, nor was it “automatic” as is sometimes claimed, nor did it play any part in the evolution of the modern traffic light. For details see Inventing History: Garrett Morgan and the Traffic Signal.

Gas Mask

Garrett Morgan in 1914?
No!

The invention of the gas mask predates Morgan’s breathing device by several decades. Early versions were constructed by the Scottish chemist John Stenhouse in 1854 and the physicist John Tyndall in the 1870s, among many other inventors prior to World War I. See The Invention of the Gas Mask.

Peanut Butter

George Washington Carver (who began his peanut research in 1903)?
No!

Peanuts, which are native to the New World tropics, were mashed into paste by Aztecs hundreds of years ago. Evidence of modern peanut butter comes from US patent #306727 issued to Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal, Quebec in 1884, for a process of milling roasted peanuts between heated surfaces until the peanuts reached “a fluid or semi-fluid state.” As the product cooled, it set into what Edson described as “a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment.” In 1890, George A. Bayle Jr., owner of a food business in St. Louis, manufactured peanut butter and sold it out of barrels. J.H. Kellogg, of cereal fame, secured US patent #580787 in 1897 for his “Process of Preparing Nutmeal,” which produced a “pasty adhesive substance” that Kellogg called “nut-butter.”

George Washington Carver

“Discovered” hundreds of new and important uses for the peanut? Fathered the peanut industry? Revolutionized southern US agriculture?
No!

Research by Barry Mackintosh, who served as bureau historian for the National Park Service (which manages the G.W. Carver National Monument), demonstrated the following:

• Most of Carver’s peanut and sweet potato creations were either unoriginal, impractical, or of uncertain effectiveness. No product born in his laboratory was widely adopted.
• The boom years for Southern peanut production came prior to, and not as a result of, Carver’s promotion of the crop.
• Carver’s work to improve regional farming practices was not of pioneering scientific importance and had little demonstrable impact.

To see how Carver gained “a popular reputation far transcending the significance of his accomplishments,” read Mackintosh’s excellent article George Washington Carver: The Making of a Myth.

Automatic Lubricator, “Real McCoy”

Elijah McCoy revolutionized industry in 1872 by inventing the first device to automatically oil machinery?
No!

The phrase “Real McCoy” arose to distinguish Elijah’s inventions from cheap imitations?
No!

The oil cup, which automatically delivers a steady trickle of lubricant to machine parts while the machine is running, predates McCoy’s career; a description of one appears in the May 6, 1848 issue of Scientific American. The automatic “displacement lubricator” for steam engines was developed in 1860 by John Ramsbottom of England, and notably improved in 1862 by James Roscoe of the same country. The “hydrostatic” lubricator originated no later than 1871.

Variants of the phrase Real McCoy appear in Scottish literature dating back to at least 1856 — well before Elijah McCoy could have been involved.

Detailed evidence: The not-so-real McCoy
Also see The Fake McCoy and Did Somebody Say McTrash?

Blood Bank

Dr. Charles Drew in 1940?
No!

During World War I, Dr. Oswald H. Robertson of the US army preserved blood in a citrate-glucose solution and stored it in cooled containers for later transfusion. This was the first use of “banked” blood. By the mid-1930s the Russians had set up a national network of facilities for the collection, typing, and storage of blood. Bernard Fantus, influenced by the Russian program, established the first hospital blood bank in the United States at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital in 1937. It was Fantus who coined the term “blood bank.” See highlights of transfusion history from the American Association of Blood Banks.

Blood Plasma

Did Charles Drew “discover” (in about 1940) that plasma could be separated and stored apart from the rest of the blood, thereby revolutionizing transfusion medicine?
No!

The possibility of using blood plasma for transfusion purposes was known at least since 1918, when English physician Gordon R. Ward suggested it in a medical journal. In the mid-1930s, John Elliott advanced the idea, emphasizing plasma’s advantages in shelf life and donor-recipient compatibility, and in 1939 he and two colleagues reported having used stored plasma in 191 transfusions. (See historical notes on plasma use.) Charles Drew was not responsible for any breakthrough scientific or medical discovery; his main career achievement lay in supervising or co-supervising major programs for the collection and shipment of blood and plasma.

More: Charles Drew Mythology

Washington DC city plan

Benjamin Banneker?
No!

Pierre-Charles L’Enfant created the layout of Washington DC. Banneker assisted Andrew Ellicott in the survey of the federal territory, but played no direct role in the actual planning of the city. The story of Banneker reconstructing the city design from memory after L’Enfant ran away with the plans (with the implication that the project would have failed if not for Banneker) has been debunked by historians.

Filament for Light Bulb

Lewis Latimer invented the carbon filament in 1881 or 1882?
No!

English chemist/physicist Joseph Swan experimented with a carbon-filament incandescent light all the way back in 1860, and by 1878 had developed a better design which he patented in Britain. On the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Edison developed a successful carbon-filament bulb, receiving a patent for it (#223898) in January 1880, before Lewis Latimer did any work in electric lighting. From 1880 onward, countless patents were issued for innovations in filament design and manufacture (Edison had over 50 of them). Neither of Latimer’s two filament-related patents in 1881 and 1882 were among the most important innovations, nor did they make the light bulb last longer, nor is there reason to believe they were adopted outside Hiram Maxim’s company where Latimer worked at the time. (He was not hired by Edison’s company until 1884, primarily as a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigations).

Latimer also did not come up with the first screw socket for the light bulb or the first book on electric lighting.

Heart Surgery (first successful)

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams in 1893?
No!

Dr. Williams repaired a wound not in the heart muscle itself, but in the sac surrounding it, the pericardium. This operation was not the first of its type: Henry Dalton of St. Louis performed a nearly identical operation two years earlier, with the patient fully recovering. Decades before that, the Spaniard Francisco Romero carried out the first successful pericardial surgery of any type, incising the pericardium to drain fluid compressing the heart.

Surgery on the actual human heart muscle, and not just the pericardium, was first successfully accomplished by Ludwig Rehn of Germany when he repaired a wounded right ventricle in 1896. More than 50 years later came surgery on the open heart, pioneered by John Lewis, C. Walton Lillehei (often called the “father of open heart surgery”) and John Gibbon (who invented the heart-lung machine).

What medical historians say…

“Third Rail”

Granville Woods in 1901?
No!

Werner von Siemens pioneered the use of an electrified third rail as a means for powering railway vehicles when he demonstrated an experimental electric train at the 1879 Berlin Industrial Exhibition. In the US, English-born Leo Daft used a third-rail system to electrify the Baltimore & Hampden lines in 1885. The first electrically powered subway trains, which debuted in London in the autumn of 1890, likewise drew power from a third rail. Details…

Railway Telegraph

Granville Woods prevented railway accidents and saved countless lives by inventing the train telegraph (patented in 1887), which allowed communication to and from moving trains?
No!

The earliest patents for train telegraphs go back to at least 1873. Lucius Phelps was the first inventor in the field to attract widespread notice, and the telegrams he exchanged on the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad in January 1885 were hailed in the Feb. 21, 1885 issue of Scientific American as “perhaps the first ever sent to and from a moving train.” Phelps remained at the forefront in developing the technology and by the end of 1887 already held 14 US patents on his system. He joined a team led by Thomas Edison, who had been working on his “grasshopper telegraph” for trains, and together they constructed on the Lehigh Valley Railroad one of the only induction telegraph systems ever put to commercial use. Although this telegraph was a technical success, it fulfilled no public need, and the market for on-board train telegraphy never took off. There is no evidence that any commercial railway telegraph based on Granville Woods’s patents was ever built. About the patent interference case

Refrigerated Truck

Frederick Jones (with Joseph Numero) in 1938?
No!

Did Jones change America’s eating habits by making possible the long-distance shipment of perishable foods?

No!

Refrigerated ships and railcars had been moving perishables across oceans and continents even before Jones was born (see refrigerated transport timeline). Trucks with mechanically refrigerated cargo spaces appeared on the roads at least as early as the late 1920s (see the proof). Further development of truck refrigeration was more a process of gradual evolution than radical change.

Air Brake / Automatic Air Brake

Granville Woods in 1904?
No!

In 1869, a 22-year-old George Westinghouse received US patent #88929 for a brake device operated by compressed air, and in the same year organized the Westinghouse Air Brake Company. Many of the 361 patents he accumulated during his career were for air brake variations and improvements, including his first “automatic” version in 1872 (US #124404).

Air Conditioner

Frederick Jones in 1949?
No!

Dr. Willis Carrier built the first machine to control both the temperature and humidity of indoor air. He received the first of many patents in 1906 (US patent #808897, for the “Apparatus for Treating Air”). In 1911 he published the formulae that became the scientific basis for air conditioning design, and four years later formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation to develop and manufacture AC systems.

Airship

J. F. Pickering in 1900?
No!

French engineer Henri Giffard successfully flew a powered navigable airship in 1852. The La France airship built by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs in 1884 featured an electric motor and improved steering capabilities. In 1900 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s first rigid-framed dirigible took to the air. Of the hundreds of inventors granted patents for early airship designs and modifications, few succeeded in building or flying their craft. There doesn’t appear to be any record of a “Pickering Airship” ever getting off the ground.

US Aviation Patent Database, 1799-1909

Automatic Railroad Car Coupler

Andrew Beard invented the “Jenny [sic] coupler” in 1897?
No!

The Janney coupler is named for US Civil War veteran Eli H. Janney, who in 1873 invented a device (US patent #138405) which automatically linked together two railroad cars upon their being brought into contact. Also known as the “knuckle coupler,” Janney’s invention superseded the dangerous link-and-pin coupler and became the basis for standard coupler design through the remainder of the millennium. Andrew Beard’s modified knuckle coupler was just one of approximately eight thousand coupler variations patented by 1900. See a history of the automatic coupler and also The Janney Coupler.

Automatic Transmission/Gearshift

Richard Spikes in 1932?
No!

The first automatic-transmission automobile to enter the market was designed by the Sturtevant brothers of Massachusetts in 1904. US Patent #766551 was the first of several patents on their gearshift mechanism. Automatic transmission technology continued to develop, spawning hundreds of patents and numerous experimental units; but because of cost, reliability issues and an initial lack of demand, several decades passed before vehicles with automatic transmission became common on the roads.

Bicycle Frame

Isaac R. Johnson in 1899?
No!

Comte Mede de Sivrac and Karl von Sauerbronn built primitive versions of the bicycle in 1791 and 1816 respectively. The frame of John Starley’s 1885 “safety bicycle” resembled that of a modern bicycle.

Cellular Phone

Henry T. Sampson in 1971?
No!

On July 6, 1971, Sampson and co-inventor George Miley received a patent on a “gamma electric cell” that converted a gamma ray input into an electrical output (Among the first to do that was Bernhard Gross, US patent #3122640, 1964). What, you ask, does gamma radiation have to do with cellular communications technology? The answer: nothing. Some multiculturalist pseudo-historian must have seen the words “electric” and “cell” and thought “cell phone.”

The father of the cell phone is Martin Cooper who first demonstrated the technology in 1973.

Clock or Watch (First in America)

Benjamin Banneker built the first American timepiece in 1753?
No!

Abel Cottey, a Quaker clockmaker from Philadelphia, built a clock that is dated 1709 (source: Six Quaker Clockmakers, by Edward C. Chandlee; Philadelphia, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1943). Banneker biographer Silvio Bedini further refutes the myth:

Several watch and clockmakers were already established in the colony [Maryland] prior to the time that Banneker made the clock. In Annapolis alone there were at least four such craftsmen prior to 1750. Among these may be mentioned John Batterson, a watchmaker who moved to Annapolis in 1723; James Newberry, a watch and clockmaker who advertised in the Maryland Gazette on July 20, 1748; John Powell, a watch and clockmaker believed to have been indentured and to have been working in 1745; and Powell’s master, William Roberts.

Silvio Bedini, The Life of Benjamin Banneker (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1999)

Clothes Dryer

George T. Sampson in 1892?
No!

The “clothes-drier” described in Sampson’s patent was actually a rack for holding clothes near a stove, and was intended as an “improvement” on similar contraptions:

My invention relates to improvements in clothes-driers…. The object of my invention is to suspend clothing in close relation to a stove by means of frames so constructed that they can be readily placed in proper position and put aside when not required for use.

US patent #476416, 1892

Nineteen years earlier, there were already over 300 US patents for such “clothes-driers” (Subject-Matter Index of Patents…1790 to 1873).

A Frenchman named Pochon in 1799 built the first known tumble dryer — a crank-driven, rotating metal drum pierced with ventilation holes and held over heat. Electric tumble dryers appeared in the first half of the 20th century.

Dustpan

Lloyd P. Ray in 1897?
No!

While the ultimate origin of the dustpan is lost in the mists (dusts?) of time, at least we know that US patent #20811 for “Dust-pan” was granted to T.E. McNeill in 1858. That was the first of about 164 US dustpan patents predating Lloyd Ray’s. See the dustpan patent list.

Egg Beater

Willie Johnson in 1884?
No!

The hand-cranked egg beater with two intermeshed, counter-rotating whisks was invented by Turner Williams of Providence, Rhode Island in 1870 (US Patent #103811). It was an improvement on earlier rotary egg beaters that had only one whisk.

Electric Trolley

Did Granville Woods invent the electric trolley car, the overhead wire that powers it, or the “troller” wheel that makes contact with the trolley wire, in 1888? No!

Dr. Werner von Siemens demonstrated his electric trolleybus, the Elektromote, near Berlin on April 29, 1882. The vehicle’s two electric motors collected power through contact wheels rolling atop a pair of overhead wires. The earliest patentee of an electric trolley in the United States appears to be Eugene Cowles (#252193 in 1881), followed by Dr. Joseph R. Finney (#268476 in 1882) who operated an experimental trolley car near Pittsburgh, PA in the summer of 1882. In early 1885, John C. Henry established in Kansas City, MO, the first overhead-wire electric transit system to enter regular service in the United States. Belgian-born Charles van Depoele, who earned 240+ patents in electric railway technology and other fields, set up trolley lines in several North American cities by 1887. In February 1888, a trolley system designed by Frank Sprague began operating in Richmond, Virginia. Sprague’s system became the lasting prototype for electric street railways in the US.

Elevator

Alexander Miles in 1887?
No!

Was Miles the first to patent a self-closing shaft door?
No!

Steam-powered hoisting devices were used in England by 1800. Elisha Graves Otis’ 1853 “safety elevator” prevented the car from falling if the cable broke, and thus paved the way for the first commercial passenger elevator, installed in New York City’s Haughwout Department Store in 1857. The first electric elevator appeared in Mannheim, Germany in 1880, built by the German firm of Siemens and Halske. A self-closing shaft door was invented by J.W. Meaker in 1874 (“Improvement in Self-closing Hatchways,” US Patent No. 147,853). See Elevator Timeline

Fastest Computer/Computation

Was Philip Emeagwali responsible for the world’s fastest computer or computation in 1989? Did he win the “Nobel Prize of computing”? Is he a “father of the Internet”?
No!

The fastest performance of a computer application in 1989 was 6 billion floating point operations per second (6 Gflops), achieved by a team from Mobil and Thinking Machines Corp. on a 64,000-processor “Connection Machine” invented by Danny Hillis. That was almost double the 3.1 Gflops of Emeagwali’s computation. Computing’s Nobel Prize equivalent is the Turing Award, which Emeagwali has never won. More…

Fire Escape

Joseph Winters in 1878?
No!

Winters’ “fire escape” was a wagon-mounted ladder. The first such contraption patented in the US was the work of William P. Withey, 1840 (US patent #1599). The fire escape with a “lazy-tongs” type ladder, more similar to Winters’ patent, was pioneered by Hüttman and Kornelio in 1849 (US patent #6155). One of the first fire escapes of any type was invented in 18th-century England:

In 1784, Daniel Maseres, of England, invented a machine called a fire escape, which, being fastened to the window, would enable anyone to descend to the street without injury.

Benjamin Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art, 1888

By 1888 the US had granted 1,099 patents on fire escapes of “many forms, and of every possible material” (Butterworth).

Fire Extinguisher

Thomas J. Martin in 1872?
No!

In 1813, British army captain George Manby created the first known portable fire extinguisher: a two-foot-tall copper cylinder that held 3 gallons of water and used compressed air as a propellant. One of the earliest extinguishers to use a chemical extinguishing agent, and not just water, was invented in 1849 by the Englishman William Henry Phillips, who patented his “fire annihilator” in England and the United States (US patent #7,269).

Food Additives, Meat Curing

Lloyd Hall “is responsible for the meat curing products, seasonings, emulsions, bakery products, antioxidants, protein hydrolysates, and many other products that keep our food fresh and flavorable”?
No!

Hall “revolutionized the meatpacking industry”?
No!

Hall introduced no major class of additive, certainly not meat curing salts (which are ancient), protein hydrolysates (popularized by Julius Maggi as flavor enhancers in 1886), emulsifiers and antioxidants (lecithin, for example, was used in both roles before Lloyd Hall had any patents in food processing). The so-called revolutionary meat curing product marketed by Hall’s employer was invented primarily by Karl Max Seifert ; the number of Seifert’s patent was printed right on the containers. Hall’s main contribution to this product was to reduce its tendency to cake during storage. Details: Lloyd Hall myth.

Fountain Pen

W. B. Purvis in 1890?
No!

The first reference to what seems to be a fountain pen appears in an Arabic text from 969 AD; details of the instrument are not known. A French “Bion” pen, dated 1702, represents the oldest fountain pen that still survives. Later models included John Scheffer’s 1819 pen, possibly the first to be mass-produced; John Jacob Parker’s “self-filling” pen of 1832; and the famous Lewis Waterman pen of 1884 (US Patents #293545, #307735). Early History of the Fountain Pen

Golf Tee

Dr. George Grant in 1899?
No!

A small rubber platform invented by Scotsmen William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas was the world’s first patented golf tee (British patent #12941 of 1889). The first known tee to penetrate the ground, in contrast to earlier tees that sat on the surface, was the peg-like “Perfectum” patented in 1892 by Percy Ellis of England. American dentist William Lowell introduced the most common form of tee used today, the simple wooden peg with a flared top. Details…

Hairbrush

Lyda Newman in 1898?
No!

An early US patent for a recognizably modern hairbrush went to Hugh Rock in 1854 (US Design Patent no. D645), though surely there were hairbrushes long before there was a US Patent Office.

The claim that Lyda Newman’s brush was the first with “synthetic bristles” is false: her patent mentions nothing about synthetic bristles and is concerned only with a new way of making the handle detachable from the head. Besides, a hairbrush that included “elastic wire teeth” in combination with natural bristles had already been patented by Samuel Firey in 1870 (US, #106680). Nylon bristles weren’t possible until the invention of nylon in 1935.

Halogen Lamp

Frederick Mosby?
No!

The original patent for the tungsten halogen lamp (US #2,883,571; April 21, 1959) is recorded to Elmer G. Fridrich and Emmett H. Wiley of General Electric. The two had built a working prototype as early as 1953. Fred Mosby was part of the GE team charged with developing the prototype lamp into a marketable product, but was not responsible for the original halogen lamp or the concept behind it.

Hand Stamp

William Purvis in 1883?
No!

The earliest known postal handstamp was brought into use by Henry Bishop, Postmaster General of Great Britain, in the year 1661. The stamp imprinted the mail with a bisected circle containing the month and the date. See “Bishop marks”

Heating Furnace

Alice Parker in 1919?
No!

In the hypocaust heating systems built by the ancient Romans, hot air from a furnace circulated under the floor and up through channels inside the walls, thereby distributing heat evenly around the building. One of the most famous heating systems in recent centuries was the iron furnace stove known as the “Franklin stove,” named after its purported originator Benjamin Franklin around 1745 AD. The US had issued over 4000 patents for heating stoves and furnaces by 1888 (Benjamin Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art, 1888).

Horseshoe

Oscar E. Brown in 1892?
No!

Some sources on the web, if not ignorant enough to say Brown invented the first horseshoe ever, will at least try to credit him for the first double or compound horseshoe made of two layers: one permanently secured to the hoof, and one auxiliary layer that can be removed and replaced when it wears out. However, in the US there were already 39 earlier patents for horseshoes using that same concept. The first of these was issued to J.B. Kendall of Boston in 1861, patent #33709.

Ice Cream

Augustus Jackson in 1832?
No!

Flavored ices resembling sherbet were known in China in ancient times. In Europe, sherbet-like concoctions evolved into ice cream by the 16th century, and around 1670 or so, the Café Procope in Paris offered creamy frozen dairy desserts to the public. The first written record of ice cream in the New World comes from a letter dated 1700, attesting that Maryland Governor William Bladen served the treat to his guests. In 1777, the New York Gazette advertised the sale of ice cream by confectioner Philip Lenzi. History of Ice Cream

Ironing Board

Sarah Boone in 1892?
No!

Of the several hundred US patents on ironing boards granted prior to Sarah Boone’s, the first three went to William Vandenburg in 1858 (patents #19390, #19883, #20231). The first American female patentee of an ironing board is probably Sarah Mort of Dayton, Ohio, who received patent #57170 in 1866. In 1869, Henry Soggs of Columbus, Pennsylvania earned US patent #90966 for an ironing board resembling the modern type, with folding legs, adjustable height, and a cover. Another nice example of a modern-looking board was designed by J.H. Mallory in 1871, patent #120296. Details…

Laser Cataract Surgery

Patricia Bath “transformed eye surgery” by inventing the first laser device to treat cataracts in 1986?
No!

Use of lasers to treat cataracts in the eye began to develop in the mid 1970s. M.M. Krasnov of Russia reported the first such procedure in 1975. One of the earliest US patents for laser cataract removal (#3,982,541) was issued to Francis L’Esperance in 1976. In later years, a number of experimenters worked independently on laser devices for removing cataracts, including Daniel Eichenbaum, whose work became the basis of the Paradigm Photon™ device; and Jack Dodick, whose Dodick Laser PhotoLysis System eventually became the first laser unit to win FDA approval for cataract removal in the United States. Still, the majority of cataract surgeries continue to be performed using ultrasound devices, not lasers. Details…

Lawn Mower

John Burr in 1899?
No!

English engineer Edwin Budding invented the first reel-type lawn mower (with blades arranged in a cylindrical pattern) and had it patented in England in 1830. In 1868 the United States issued patent #73807 to Amariah M. Hills of Connecticut, who went on to establish the Archimedean Lawn Mower Co. in 1871. By 1888, the US Patent Office had granted 138 patents for lawn mowers (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art). Doubtlessly there were even more by the time Burr got his patent in 1899.

Some website authors want Burr to have invented the first “rotary blade” mower, with a centrally mounted spinning blade. But his patent #624749 shows yet another twist on the old reel mower, differing in only a few details with Budding’s original.

Lawn Sprinkler

J. H. Smith in 1897? Elijah McCoy?
No!

The first US patent with the title “lawn sprinkler” was issued to J. Lessler of Buffalo, New York in 1871 (#121949). Early examples of water-propelled, rotating lawn sprinklers were patented by J. Oswald in 1890 (#425340) and J. S. Woolsey in 1891 (#457099) among a gazillion others.

Smith’s patent shows just another rotating sprinkler, and McCoy’s 1899 patent was for a turtle-shaped sprinkler.

Mailbox (letter drop box)

P. Downing invented the street letter drop box in 1891?
No!

George Becket invented the private mailbox in 1892?
No!

The US Postal Service says that “Street boxes for mail collection began to appear in large [US] cities by 1858.” They appeared in Europe even earlier, according to historian Laurin Zilliacus:

Mail boxes as we understand them first appeared on the streets of Belgian towns in 1848. In Paris they came two years later, while the English received their ‘pillar boxes’ in 1855.

Laurin Zilliacus, Mail for the World, p. 178 (New York, J. Day Co., 1953)

From the same book (p.178), “Private mail boxes were invented in the United States in about 1860.”

Eventually, letter drop boxes came equipped with inner lids to prevent miscreants from rummaging through the mail pile. The first of many US patents for such a purpose was granted in 1860 to John North of Middletown, Connecticut (US Pat. #27466).

Mop

Thomas W. Stewart in 1893?
No!

Mops go back a long, long way before 1893. Just how long, is hard to determine. Restricting our view to the modern era, we find that the United States issued its first mop patent (#241) in 1837 to Jacob Howe, called “Construction of Mop-Heads and the Mode of Securing them upon Handles.” One of the first patented mops with a built-in wringer was the one H. & J. Morton invented in 1859 (US #24049).

The mop specified in Stewart’s patent #499402 has a lever-operated clamp for “holding the mop rags”; the lever is not a wringing mechanism as erroneously reported on certain websites. Other inventors had already patented mops with lever-operated clamps, one of the first being Greenleaf Stackpole in 1869 (US Pat. #89803).

Paper Punch (hand-held)

Charles Brooks in 1893?
No!

Was it the first with a hinged receptacle to catch the clippings?
No!

The first numbered US patent for a hand-held hole punch was #636, issued to Solyman Merrick in 1838. Robert James Kellett earned the first two US patents for a chad-catching hole punch, in 1867 (patent #65090) and 1868 (#79232).

Pencil Sharpener

John Lee Love in 1897?
No!

Bernard Lassimone of Limoges, France invented one of the earliest sharpeners, receiving French patent number 2444 in 1828. An apparent ancestor of the 20th-century hand-cranked sharpener was patented by G. F. Ballou in 1896 (US #556709) and marketed by the A.B. Dick Company as the “Planetary Pencil Pointer.” As the user held the pencil stationary and turned the crank, twin milling cutters revolved around the tip of the pencil and shaved it into a point.

Love’s patent #594114 shows a variation on a different kind of sharpener, in which one would crank the pencil itself around in a stirring motion. An earlier device of a similar type was devised in 1888 by G.H. Courson (patent #388533), and sold under the name “President Pencil Sharpener.”

Here are several other examples of 19th century sharpeners:
Early Mechanical Pencil Sharpeners
Mechanical Pencil Sharpener Gallery ~ 1884-1899

Permanent Wave Machine (for perming hair)

Marjorie Joyner in 1928?
No!

That would be German hairdresser Karl Ludwig Nessler (aka Charles Nestlé) no later than 1906.

Postmarking and Canceling Machine

William Barry in 1897?
No!

Try Pearson Hill of England, in 1857. Hill’s machine marked the postage stamp with vertical lines and postmark date. By 1892, US post offices were using several brands of machines, including one that could cancel, postmark, count and stack more than 20,000 pieces of mail per hour (Marshall Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, Boston: A. M. Thayer & co., 1892, pp.189-191).

Printing Press

W.A. Lavalette invented “the advanced printing press” in 1878?
No!

Movable-type printing first appeared in East Asia. In Europe, around 1455, Johann Gutenberg adapted the screw press used in other trades such as winemaking and combined it with type-metal alloy characters and oil-based printing ink. Major advances after Gutenberg include the cylinder printing press (c. 1811) by Frederick Koenig and Andreas Bauer, the rotary press (1846) by Richard M. Hoe, and the web press (1865) by William Bullock. Major advances do not include Lavalette’s patent, which was only one of 3,268 printing patents granted in the US by the year 1888 (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art). Improvements After Gutenberg

Propeller for Ship

George Tolivar or Benjamin Montgomery?
No!

John Stevens constructed a boat with twin steam-powered propellers in 1804 in the first known application of a screw propeller for marine propulsion. Other important pioneers in the early 1800s included Sir Francis Pettit Smith of England, and Swedish-born ship designer John Ericsson (US patent #588) who later designed the USS Monitor.

Refrigerator

Thomas Elkins in 1879?
No!

John Stanard in 1891?
No!

Oliver Evans proposed a mechanical refrigerator based on a vapor-compression cycle in 1805 and Jacob Perkins had a working machine built in 1834. Dr. John Gorrie created an air-cycle refrigeration system in about 1844, which he installed in a Florida hospital. In the 1850s Alexander Twining in the USA and James Harrison in Australia used mechanical refrigeration to produce ice on a commercial scale. Around the same time, the Carré brothers of France led the development of absorption refrigeration systems. A more detailed timeline

Stanard’s patent describes not a refrigeration machine, but an old-fashioned icebox — an insulated cabinet into which ice is placed to cool the interior. As such, it was a “refrigerator” only in the old sense of the term, which included non-mechanical coolers. Elkins created a similarly low-tech cooler, acknowledging in his patent #221222 that “I am aware that chilling substances inclosed within a porous box or jar by wetting its outer surface is an old and well-known process.”

Rotary Engine

Andrew Beard in 1892?
No!

The Subject Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists 394 “Rotary Engine” patents from 1810-1873. The Wankel engine, a rotary combustion engine with a four-stroke cycle, dates from 1954. History of the Rotary Engine from 1588 Onward

Screw Socket for Light Bulb

Lewis Latimer?
No!

The earliest evidence for a light bulb screw base design is a drawing in a Thomas Edison notebook dated Sept. 11, 1880. It is not the work of Latimer, though:

Edison’s long-time associates, Edward H. Johnson and John Ott, were principally responsible for designing fixtures in the fall of 1880. Their work resulted in the screw socket and base very much like those widely used today.

R. Friedel and P. Israel, Edison‘s Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986).

The 1880 sketch of the screw socket is reproduced in the book cited above.

Smallpox Vaccine

Onesimus the slave in 1721?
No!

Onesimus knew of variolation, an early inoculation technique practiced in several areas of the world before the discovery of vaccination.

English physician Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796 after finding that the relatively innocuous cowpox virus built immunity against the deadly smallpox. This discovery led to the eventual eradication of endemic smallpox throughout the world. Vaccination differs from the primitive inoculation method known as variolation, which involved the deliberate planting of live smallpox into a healthy person in hopes of inducing a mild form of the disease that would provide immunity from further infection. Variolation not only was risky to the patient but, more importantly, failed to prevent smallpox from spreading. Known in Asia by 1000 AD, the practice reached the West via more than one channel.

Smokestack for Locomotives

L. Bell in 1871?
No!

Even the first steam locomotives, such as the one built by Richard Trevithick in 1804, were equipped with smokestacks. Later smokestacks featured wire netting to prevent hazardous sparks from escaping. Page 115 of John H. White Jr.’s American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830-1880 (1997 edition) displays a composite picture showing 57 different types of spark-arresting smokestacks devised before 1860.

Steam Boiler Furnace

Granville Woods in 1884?
No!

The steam engine boiler is of course as old as the steam engine itself. The Subject Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists several hundred variations and improvements to the steam boiler, including the revolutionary water-tube boiler patented in 1867 by American inventors George Herman Babcock and Stephen Wilcox.

Street Sweeper

Charles Brooks in 1896?
No!

Brooks’ patent was for a modified version of a common type of street sweeper cart that had long been known, with a rotary brush that swept refuse onto an elevator belt and into a trash bin. In the United States, street sweepers started being patented in the 1840s, and by 1900 the Patent Office had issued about 300 patents for such machines. Details…

Supercharger for Automobiles

Joseph Gammel/Gamell in 1976?
No!

In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler received a German patent for supercharging an internal combustion engine. Louis Renault patented a centrifugal supercharger in France in 1902. An early supercharged racecar was built by Lee Chadwick of Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1908 and reportedly reached a speed of 100 miles per hour. History of Supercharging

Toilet

T. Elkins in 1897?
No!

The Minoans of Crete are said to have invented a flush toilet thousands of years ago; however, there is probably no direct ancestral relationship between it and the modern one that evolved primarily in England starting in the late 16th century, when Sir John Harrington devised a flushing device for his godmother Queen Elizabeth. In 1775 Alexander Cummings patented a toilet in which some water remained after each flush, thereby suppressing odors from below. The “water closet” continued to evolve, and in 1885, Thomas Twyford provided us with a single-piece ceramic toilet similar to the one we know today. Who Invented the Toilet?

Toilet for Railroad Cars

Lewis Latimer in 1874?
No!

William E. Marsh Jr. of New Jersey took out US patent #95597 for “Improvement in Water-closets for Railroad Cars” five years prior to Latimer’s 1874 patent with the same title. Marsh’s patent specification suggests that railroad-car water closets, i.e., toilets, were already in use:

In the closets or privies of railroad cars, the cold and wind, especially while the train is in motion, are very disagreeable… My invention is to remove these objectionable features….

W. Marsh, US patent #95597, 1869

Tricycle

M.A. Cherry in 1886?
No!

In Germany in the year 1680 or thereabouts, paraplegic watchmaker Stephan Farffler built his own tricycle at 22 years of age. He designed it to be pedaled with the hands, for obvious reasons. History of the tricycle

Turn Signals

Richard Spikes in 1913?
No!

Did the 1913 Pierce Arrow feature Spikes’ turn signals?
No!

Electric turn signal lights were devised as early as 1907 (U.S. Patent 912,831), but were not widely offered by major automobile manufacturers until the late 1930s, when GM developed its own version and made it standard on Buicks. The Pierce Arrow Museum in Buffalo, NY denies that directional signals were offered on 1913 Pierce Arrows.

Typewriter

L.S. Burridge & N.R. Marshman in 1885?
No!

Henry Mill, an English engineer, was the first person to patent the basic idea of the typewriter in 1714. The first working typewriter known to have actually been built was the work of Pellegrino Turri of Italy in 1808. The familiar QWERTY keyboard, developed by C. L. Sholes and C. Glidden, reached the market in 1874. In 1878 change-case keys were added that enabled the typing of both capital and small letters. Typewriter History

Louis de Bonald, 1754 - 1840

The French statesman, writer, and philosopher, Louis Vicomte de Bonald belongs to the theologist school of the Traditionalists. Bonald was born on October 2nd, 1754 at Monna, near Millau a town in the Rouergue region (Aveyron) of southern France, into an aristocratic family. He studied at the Oratorian Collège de Juilly. As an aristocrat, military service was expected, so in 1773 he joined the king’s musketeers. The musketeers were dissolved in 1776 by Louis XVI, thus freeing Bonald of his military duties. So he returned to his own province, where he became involved in public affairs. He was elected mayor of Millau in 1785, and in 1790 chosen member of the departmental Assembly for Aveyron.

During the early phases of the French Revolution he directed his efforts at the local and regional level to maintain order. Even after the National Assembly abolished the aristocracy, Bonald was reelected as mayor and then elected to the departmental assembly. The turning point in Bonald’s relation to the Revolution came with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which subordinated the Catholic Church to the new national government. Bonald believed it wrongly stripped the Church of its position in society. By refusing to force the clergy to take the oath of allegiance, Bonald disqualified himself from holding public office, though he was still largely supportive of the Revolution. By October 1791, however, Bonald had joined the counterrevolution and had emigrated from France. Hoping to overthrow the Revolution from without, he became a soldier in the army of Condé, and, when the army was disbanded, retired to Heidelberg, where he took charge of the education of his two elder sons.

Bonald published at Constance, in 1797, his first work: Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux, which was suppressed in France by order of the Directory. In 1797 Bonald returned to France under the name of Saint-Séverin, and published Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles de l’ordre social (1800); Du divorce (1801); and La législation primitive (1802). He also collaborated with Chateaubriand and others in the Mercure de France, contributing several articles which were published in book form with other studies in 1819 under the title Mélanges littéraires, politiques, et philosophiques.

His hiding continued until 1802, when he received a pardon from Napoleon. Later, Bonald entered the Napoleonic government, serving on the Great Council of the Imperial University. In 1808 he declined to be a member of the Council of the University, but finally accepted in 1810. He refused to take charge of the education of the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and of the King of Rome, the son of Napoleon I.

After Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, Bonald quickly joined the restoration monarchy of Louis XVIII. A monarchist and royalist by nature and by principles, Bonald welcomed the restoration of the Bourbons. He was appointed a member of the Academy by royal decree in 1816. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the national legislative body. From 1815 to 1822 he served as deputy from Aveyron, and in 1823 became a peer of France. He then directed his efforts against all attempts at liberalism in religion and politics. The law against divorce was proposed by him in 1815 and passed in 1816. He took a prominent part in the law of 1822 which did away with the liberty of the press and established a committee of censure of which he was the president. In 1815 he published his Réflexions sur l’intérêt général de l’Europe; in 1817, Pensées sur divers sujets in 2 vols. 8 vo. (2d., Paris, 1887); in 1818 Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaisances morales; in 1827, Démonstration philosophique du principe constitutif des sociétés. Meanwhile he collaborated with Chateaubriand, Lamennais, and Berryer, in the Conservateur, and later in the Défenseur founded by Lamennais. Bonald continued to serve under the next monarch, Charles X.

Bonald refused to serve under Louis Philippe, who had come to power in the Revolution of 1830. In 1830 he gave up his peerage and withdrew to his country home to lead a life of retirement in his native city. — “There is not to be found in the long career,” says Jules Simon, “one action which is not consistent with his principles, one expression which belies them.” He died in Paris, 23 November, 1840.

* * *

A number of thinkers have endeavored to comprehend the nature of modernity. Their analyses differ, but many thinkers agree about key points on the road to modernity: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, to name a few. To understand the modern world one has to examine one of those periods: the French Revolution. To some, the Revolution heralded political liberalism with cries of “liberté, egalité, and fraternité.” To others, the Revolution signified the rejection of the West’s heritage of the past two millennia. As the Revolution was occurring, a number of thinkers sensed its challenge to the old order (not only politically, but more importantly, philosophically). Louis De Bonald described the political problems of the Revolution. In doing so, however, he also developed a theory of language, interrelating with his theory of government. According to de Bonald, man is essentially a social being or, as Aristotle said, a zoon politicon. His development comes through society; and the continuity and progress of society have their principle in tradition. Since language is the instrument of sociability, speech is as natural to man as is his social nature itself. Language to Bonald meant the entire system of communication, not only words but syntax and relation of words. Man cannot think without language. Hence, language could not have been discovered by man, for “man needs signs or words in order to think as well as in order to speak”; that is “man thinks his verbal expression before he verbally expresses his thought”; but originally language, in its fundamental elements together with the thoughts which it expresses, was given him by God His Creator (cf. Législation primitive, I, ii). This thought is the basis for Bonald’s claim that language ultimately had a divine source. This claim rests upon his argument that if thought and language are co-dependent, one cannot begin without the other. Then to start the language process, some outside idea is necessary. If this is the case, language serves as a type of apologetic for the existence of God as the originator of language. Such an apologetic would not be airtight, and it might only demand a deistic first cause. Still, it is a large and important claim. The evolutionist claim is that through chance developments over time, the appearance of design can develop. To evolutionists, the evolution of language fits nicely into their account of the evolution of life and perception.

The above mentioned fundamental truths, absolutely necessary to the intellectual, moral, and religious life of man, must be first accepted by faith. They are communicated through society and education, and warranted by tradition or universal reason of mankind. Society, state and law are of divine origin and therefore subject to religion and the church. There is no other basis for certitude and there remains nothing, besides tradition, but human opinions, contradiction, and uncertainty (cf. Recherches philosophiques, i, ix).

From Euro-Synergies, October 12, 2009.

Editor’s Note: For Bonald’s work in English, see The True & Only Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Economy, & Society , On Divorce, and in Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition.

Gustave Le Bon, 1841 - 1931

Chapter 4

“A Religious Shape Assumed by all the Convictions of Crowds”

What is meant by the religious sentiment — It is independent of the worship of a divinity — Its characteristics — The strength of convictions assuming a religious shape — Various examples — Popular gods have never disappeared — New forms under which they are revived — Religious forms of atheism — Importance of these notions from the historical point of view — The Reformation, Saint Bartholomew, the Terror, and all analogous events are the result of the religious sentiments of crowds and not of the will of isolated individuals.

We have shown that crowds do not reason, that they accept or reject ideas as a whole, that they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction, and that the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts. We have shown that crowds suitably influenced are ready to sacrifice themselves for the ideal with which they have been inspired. We have also seen that they only entertain violent and extreme sentiments, that in their case sympathy quickly becomes adoration, and antipathy almost as soon as it is aroused is transformed into hatred. These general indications furnish us already with a presentiment of the nature of the convictions of crowds.

When these convictions are closely examined, whether at epochs marked by fervent religious faith, or by great political upheavals such as those of the last century, it is apparent that they always assume a peculiar form which I cannot better define than by giving it the name of a religious sentiment.

This sentiment has very simple characteristics, such as worship of a being supposed superior, fear of the power with which the being is credited, blind submission to its commands, inability to discuss its dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted. Whether such a sentiment apply to an invisible God, to a wooden or stone idol, to a hero or to a political conception, provided that it presents the preceding characteristics, its essence always remains religious. The supernatural and the miraculous are found to be present to the same extent. Crowds unconsciously accord a mysterious power to the political formula or the victorious leader that for the moment arouses their enthusiasm.

A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.

Intolerance and fanaticism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardor proceeded from the same source.

The convictions of crowds assume those characteristics of blind submission, fierce intolerance, and the need of violent propaganda which are inherent in the religious sentiment, and it is for this reason that it may be said that all their beliefs have a religious form. The hero acclaimed by a crowd is a veritable god for that crowd. Napoleon was such a god for fifteen years, and a divinity never had more fervent worshippers or sent men to their death with greater ease. The Christian and Pagan Gods never exercised a more absolute empire over the minds that had fallen under their sway.

All founders of religious or political creeds have established them solely because they were successful in inspiring crowds with those fanatical sentiments which have as result that men find their happiness in worship and obedience and are ready to lay down their lives for their idol. This has been the case at all epochs. Fustel de Coulanges, in his excellent work on Roman Gaul, justly remarks that the Roman Empire was in no wise maintained by force, but by the religious admiration it inspired.

It would be without a parallel in the history of the world,” he observes rightly, “that a form of government held in popular detestation should have lasted for five centuries. . . . It would be inexplicable that the thirty legions of the Empire should have constrained a hundred million men to obedience.

The reason of their obedience was that the Emperor, who personified the greatness of Rome, was worshipped like a divinity by unanimous consent. There were altars in honour of the Emperor in the smallest townships of his realm.

From one end of the Empire to the other a new religion was seen to arise in those days which had for its divinities the emperors themselves. Some years before the Christian era the whole of Gaul, represented by sixty cities, built in common a temple near the town of Lyons in honor of Augustus. . . . Its priests, elected by the united Gallic cities, were the principal personages in their country. . . . It is impossible to attribute all this to fear and servility. Whole nations are not servile, and especially for three centuries. It was not the courtiers who worshiped the prince, it was Rome, and it was not Rome merely, but it was Gaul, it was Spain, it was Greece and Asia.

Today the majority of the great men who have swayed men’s minds no longer have altars, but they have statues, or their portraits are in the hands of their admirers, and the cult of which they are the object is not notably different from that accorded to their predecessors. An understanding of the philosophy of history is only to be got by a thorough appreciation of this fundamental point of the psychology of crowds. The crowd demands a god before everything else.

It must not be supposed that these are the superstitions of a bygone age which reason has definitely banished. Sentiment has never been vanquished in its eternal conflict with reason. Crowds will hear no more of the words divinity and religion, in whose name they were so long enslaved; but they have never possessed so many fetishes as in the last hundred years, and the old divinities have never had so many statues and altars raised in their honour. Those who in recent years have studied the popular movement known under the name of Boulangism have been able to see with what ease the religious instincts of crowds are ready to revive. There was not a country inn that did not possess the hero’s portrait. He was credited with the power of remedying all injustices and all evils, and thousands of men would have given their lives for him. Great might have been his place in history had his character been at all on a level with his legendary reputation.

It is thus a very useless commonplace to assert that a religion is necessary for the masses, because all political, divine, and social creeds only take root among them on the condition of always assuming the religious shape — a shape which obviates the danger of discussion. Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardor of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult. The evolution of the small Positivist sect furnishes us a curious proof in point. What happened to the Nihilist whose story is related by that profound thinker Dostoevsky has quickly happened to the Positivists. Illumined one day by the light of reason he broke the images of divinities and saints that adorned the altar of a chapel, extinguished the candles, and, without losing a moment, replaced the destroyed objects by the works of atheistic philosophers such as Büchner and Moleschott, after which he piously relighted the candles. The object of his religious beliefs had been transformed, but can it be truthfully said that his religious sentiments had changed?

Certain historical events — and they are precisely the most important — I again repeat, are not to be understood unless one has attained to an appreciation of the religious form which the convictions of crowds always assume in the long run. There are social phenomena that need to be studied far more from the point of view of the psychologist than from that of the naturalist. The great historian Taine has only studied the Revolution as a naturalist, and on this account the real genesis of events has often escaped him. He has perfectly observed the facts, but from want of having studied the psychology of crowds he has not always been able to trace their causes. The facts having appalled him by their bloodthirsty, anarchic, and ferocious side, he has scarcely seen in the heroes of the great drama anything more than a horde of epileptic savages abandoning themselves without restraint to their instincts. The violence of the Revolution, its massacres, its need of propaganda, its declarations of war upon all things, are only to be properly explained by reflecting that the Revolution was merely the establishment of a new religious belief in the mind of the masses. The Reformation, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the French religious wars, the Inquisition, the Reign of Terror are phenomena of an identical kind, brought about by crowds animated by those religious sentiments which necessarily lead those imbued with them to pitilessly extirpate by fire and sword whoever is opposed to the establishment of the new faith. The methods of the Inquisition are those of all whose convictions are genuine and sturdy. Their convictions would not deserve these epithets did they resort to other methods.

Upheavals analogous to those I have just cited are only possible when it is the soul of the masses that brings them about. The most absolute despots could not cause them. When historians tell us that the massacre of Saint Bartholomew was the work of a king, they show themselves as ignorant of the psychology of crowds as of that of sovereigns. Manifestations of this order can only proceed from the soul of crowds. The most absolute power of the most despotic monarch can scarcely do more than hasten or retard the moment of their apparition. The massacre of Saint Bartholomew or the religious wars were no more the work of kings than the Reign of Terror was the work of Robespierre, Danton, or Saint Just. At the bottom of such events is always to be found the working of the soul of the masses, and never the power of potentates.

Gustave Le Bon, 1841 - 1931

Chapter 3

“The Ideas, Reasoning Power, and Imagination of Crowds”

§ 1. The ideas of crowds. Fundamental and accessory ideas — How contradictory ideas may exist simultaneously — The transformation that must be undergone by lofty ideas before they are accessible to crowds — The social influence of ideas is independent of the degree of truth they may contain. § 2. The reasoning power of crowds. Crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning — The reasoning of crowds is always of a very inferior order — There is only the appearance of analogy or succession in the ideas they associate. § 3. The imagination of crowds. Strength of the imagination of crowds — Crowds think in images, and these images succeed each other without any connecting link — Crowds are especially impressed by the marvelous — Legends and the marvelous are the real pillars of civilization — The popular imagination has always been the basis of the power of statesmen — The manner in which facts capable of striking the imagination of crowds present themselves for observation.

§ 1. THE IDEAS OF CROWDS.

WHEN studying in a preceding work the part played by ideas in the evolution of nations, we showed that every civilization is the outcome of a small number of fundamental ideas that are very rarely renewed. We showed how these ideas are implanted in the minds of crowds, with what difficulty the process is effected, and the power possessed by the ideas in question when once it has been accomplished. Finally we saw that great historical perturbations are the result, as a rule, of changes in these fundamental ideas.

Having treated this subject at sufficient length, I shall not return to it now, but shall confine myself to saying a few words on the subject of such ideas as are accessible to crowds, and of the forms under which they conceive them.

They may be divided into two classes. In one we shall place accidental and passing ideas created by the influences of the moment: infatuation for an individual or a doctrine, for instance. In the other will be classed the fundamental ideas, to which the environment, the laws of heredity and public opinion give a very great stability; such ideas are the religious beliefs of the past and the social and democratic ideas of today.

These fundamental ideas resemble the volume of the water of a stream slowly pursuing its course; the transitory ideas are like the small waves, forever changing, which agitate its surface, and are more visible than the progress of the stream itself although without real importance.

At the present day the great fundamental ideas which were the mainstay of our fathers are tottering more and more. They have lost all solidity, and at the same time the institutions resting upon them are severely shaken. Every day there are formed a great many of those transitory minor ideas of which I have just been speaking; but very few of them to all appearance seem endowed with vitality and destined to acquire a preponderating influence.

Whatever be the ideas suggested to crowds they can only exercise effective influence on condition that they assume a very absolute, uncompromising, and simple shape. They present themselves then in the guise of images, and are only accessible to the masses under this form. These image-like ideas are not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession, and may take each other’s place like the slides of a magic-lantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in which they were placed one above the other. This explains how it is that the most contradictory ideas may be seen to be simultaneously current in crowds. According to the chances of the moment, a crowd will come under the influence of one of the various ideas stored up in its understanding, and is capable, in consequence, of committing the most dissimilar acts. Its complete lack of the critical spirit does not allow of its perceiving these contradictions.

This phenomenon is not peculiar to crowds. It is to be observed in many isolated individuals, not only among primitive beings, but in the case of all those — the fervent sectaries of a religious faith, for instance — who by one side or another of their intelligence are akin to primitive beings. I have observed its presence to a curious extent in the case of educated Hindus brought up at our European universities and having taken their degree. A number of Western ideas had been superposed on their unchangeable and fundamental hereditary or social ideas. According to the chances of the moment, the one or the other set of ideas showed themselves each with their special accompaniment of acts or utterances, the same individual presenting in this way the most flagrant contradictions. These contradictions are more apparent than real, for it is only hereditary ideas that have sufficient influence over the isolated individual to become motives of conduct. It is only when, as the result of the intermingling of different races, a man is placed between different hereditary tendencies that his acts from one moment to another may be really entirely contradictory. It would be useless to insist here on these phenomena, although their psychological importance is capital. I am of opinion that at least ten years of travel and observation would be necessary to arrive at a comprehension of them.

Ideas being only accessible to crowds after having assumed a very simple shape must often undergo the most thoroughgoing transformations to become popular. It is especially when we are dealing with somewhat lofty philosophic or scientific ideas that we see how far-reaching are the modifications they require in order to lower them to the level of the intelligence of crowds. These modifications are dependent on the nature of the crowds, or of the race to which the crowds belong, but their tendency is always belittling and in the direction of simplification. This explains the fact that, from the social point of view, there is in reality scarcely any such thing as a hierarchy of ideas — that is to say, as ideas of greater or less elevation. However great or true an idea may have been to begin with, it is deprived of almost all that which constituted its elevation and its greatness by the mere fact that it has come within the intellectual range of crowds and exerts an influence upon them.

Moreover, from the social point of view the hierarchical value of an idea, its intrinsic worth, is without importance. The necessary point to consider is the effects it produces. The Christian ideas of the Middle Ages, the democratic ideas of the last century, or the social ideas of today are assuredly not very elevated. Philosophically considered, they can only be regarded as somewhat sorry errors, and yet their power has been and will be immense, and they will count for a long time to come among the most essential factors that determine the conduct of States.

Even when an idea has undergone the transformations which render it accessible to crowds, it only exerts influence when, by various processes which we shall examine elsewhere, it has entered the domain of the unconscious, when indeed it has become a sentiment, for which much time is required.

For it must not be supposed that merely because the justness of an idea has been proved it can be productive of effective action even on cultivated minds. This fact may be quickly appreciated by noting how slight is the influence of the clearest demonstration on the majority of men. Evidence, if it be very plain, may be accepted by an educated person, but the convert will be quickly brought back by his unconscious self to his original conceptions. See him again after the lapse of a few days and he will put forward afresh his old arguments in exactly the same terms. He is in reality under the influence of anterior ideas, that have become sentiments, and it is such ideas alone that influence the more recondite motives of our acts and utterances. It cannot be otherwise in the case of crowds.

When by various processes an idea has ended by penetrating into the minds of crowds, it possesses an irresistible power, and brings about a series of effects, opposition to which is bootless. The philosophical ideas which resulted in the French Revolution took nearly a century to implant themselves in the mind of the crowd. Their irresistible force, when once they had taken root, is known. The striving of an entire nation towards the conquest of social equality, and the realization of abstract rights and ideal liberties, caused the tottering of all thrones and profoundly disturbed the Western world. During twenty years the nations were engaged in internecine conflict, and Europe witnessed hecatombs that would have terrified Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. The world had never seen on such a scale what may result from the promulgation of an idea.

A long time is necessary for ideas to establish themselves in the minds of crowds, but just as long a time is needed for them to be eradicated. For this reason crowds, as far as ideas are concerned, are always several generations behind learned men and philosophers. All statesmen are well aware today of the admixture of error contained in the fundamental ideas I referred to a short while back, but as the influence of these ideas is still very powerful they are obliged to govern in accordance with principles in the truth of which they have ceased to believe.

§ 2. THE REASONING POWER OF CROWDS.

It cannot absolutely be said that crowds do not reason and are not to be influenced by reasoning.

However, the arguments they employ and those which are capable of influencing them are, from a logical point of view, of such an inferior kind that it is only by way of analogy that they can be described as reasoning.

The inferior reasoning of crowds is based, just as is reasoning of a high order, on the association of ideas, but between the ideas associated by crowds there are only apparent bonds of analogy or succession. The mode of reasoning of crowds resembles that of the Eskimo who, knowing from experience that ice, a transparent body, melts in the mouth, concludes that glass, also a transparent body, should also melt in the mouth; or that of the savage who imagines that by eating the heart of a courageous foe he acquires his bravery; or of the workman who, having been exploited by one employer of labor, immediately concludes that all employers exploit their men.

The characteristics of the reasoning of crowds are the association of dissimilar things possessing a merely apparent connection between each other, and the immediate generalization of particular cases. It is arguments of this kind that are always presented to crowds by those who know how to manage them. They are the only arguments by which crowds are to be influenced. A chain of logical argumentation is totally incomprehensible to crowds, and for this reason it is permissible to say that they do not reason or that they reason falsely and are not to be influenced by reasoning. Astonishment is felt at times on reading certain speeches at their weakness, and yet they had an enormous influence on the crowds which listened to them, but it is forgotten that they were intended to persuade collectivities and not to be read by philosophers. An orator in intimate communication with a crowd can evoke images by which it will be seduced. If he is successful his object has been attained, and twenty volumes of harangues — always the outcome of reflection — are not worth the few phrases which appealed to the brains it was required to convince.

It would be superfluous to add that the powerlessness of crowds to reason aright prevents them displaying any trace of the critical spirit, prevents them, that is, from being capable of discerning truth from error, or of forming a precise judgment on any matter. Judgments accepted by crowds are merely judgments forced upon them and never judgments adopted after discussion. In regard to this matter the individuals who do not rise above the level of a crowd are numerous. The ease with which certain opinions obtain general acceptance results more especially from the impossibility experienced by the majority of men of forming an opinion peculiar to themselves and based on reasoning of their own.

§ 3. THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS.

Just as is the case with respect to persons in whom the reasoning power is absent, the figurative imagination of crowds is very powerful, very active and very susceptible of being keenly impressed. The images evoked in their mind by a personage, an event, an accident, are almost as lifelike as the reality. Crowds are to some extent in the position of the sleeper whose reason, suspended for the time being, allows the arousing in his mind of images of extreme intensity which would quickly be dissipated could they be submitted to the action of reflection. Crowds, being incapable both of reflection and of reasoning, are devoid of the notion of improbability; and it is to be noted that in a general way it is the most improbable things that are the most striking.

This is why it happens that it is always the marvelous and legendary side of events that more specially strike crowds. When a civilization is analyzed it is seen that, in reality, it is the marvelous and the legendary that are its true supports. Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real.

Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.

For this reason theatrical representations, in which the image is shown in its most clearly visible shape, always have an enormous influence on crowds. Bread and spectacular shows constituted for the plebeians of ancient Rome the ideal of happiness, and they asked for nothing more. Throughout the successive ages this ideal has scarcely varied. Nothing has a greater effect on the imagination of crowds of every category than theatrical representations. The entire audience experiences at the same time the same emotions, and if these emotions are not at once transformed into acts, it is because the most unconscious spectator cannot ignore that he is the victim of illusions, and that he has laughed or wept over imaginary adventures. Sometimes, however, the sentiments suggested by the images are so strong that they tend, like habitual suggestions, to transform themselves into acts. The story has often been told of the manager of a popular theater who, in consequence of his only playing somber dramas, was obliged to have the actor who took the part of the traitor protected on his leaving the theater, to defend him against the violence of the spectators, indignant at the crimes, imaginary though they were, which the traitor had committed. We have here, in my opinion, one of the most remarkable indications of the mental state of crowds, and especially of the facility with which they are suggestioned. The unreal has almost as much influence on them as the real. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two.

The power of conquerors and the strength of States is based on the popular imagination. It is more particularly by working upon this imagination that crowds are led. All great historical facts, the rise of Buddhism, of Christianity, of Islam, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and, in our own time, the threatening invasion of Socialism are the direct or indirect consequences of strong impressions produced on the imagination of the crowd.

Moreover, all the great statesmen of every age and every country, including the most absolute despots, have regarded the popular imagination as the basis of their power, and they have never attempted to govern in opposition to it “It was by becoming a Catholic,” said Napoleon to the Council of State, “that I terminated the Vendéen war. By becoming a Muslim that I obtained a footing in Egypt. By becoming an Ultramontane that I won over the Italian priests, and had I to govern a nation of Jews I would rebuild Solomon’s temple.” Never perhaps since Alexander and Cæsar has any great man better understood how the imagination of the crowd should be impressed. His constant preoccupation was to strike it. He bore it in mind in his victories, in his harangues, in his speeches, in all his acts. On his deathbed it was still in his thoughts.

How is the imagination of crowds to be impressed? We shall soon see. Let us confine ourselves for the moment to saying that the feat is never to be achieved by attempting to work upon the intelligence or reasoning faculty, that is to say, by way of demonstration. It was not by means of cunning rhetoric that Antony succeeded in making the populace rise against the murderers of Cæsar; it was by reading his will to the multitude and pointing to his corpse.

Whatever strikes the imagination of crowds presents itself under the shape of a startling and very clear image, freed from all accessory explanation, or merely having as accompaniment a few marvelous or mysterious facts: examples in point are a great victory, a great miracle, a great crime, or a great hope. Things must be laid before the crowd as a whole, and their genesis must never be indicated. A hundred petty crimes or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in the least, whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will profoundly impress them, even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put together. The epidemic of influenza, which caused the death but a few years ago of five thousand persons in Paris alone, made very little impression on the popular imagination. The reason was that this veritable hecatomb was not embodied in any visible image, but was only learnt from statistical information furnished weekly. An accident which should have caused the death of only five hundred instead of five thousand persons, but on the same day and in public, as the outcome of an accident appealing strongly to the eye, by the fall, for instance, of the Eiffel Tower, would have produced, on the contrary, an immense impression on the imagination of the crowd. The probable loss of a transatlantic steamer that was supposed, in the absence of news, to have gone down in mid-ocean profoundly impressed the imagination of the crowd for a whole week. Yet official statistics show that 850 sailing vessels and 203 steamers were lost in the year 1894 alone. The crowd, however, was never for a moment concerned by these successive losses, much more important though they were as far as regards the destruction of life and property, than the loss of the Atlantic liner in question could possibly have been.

It is not, then, the facts in themselves that strike the popular imagination, but the way in which they take place and are brought under notice. It is necessary that by their condensation, if I may thus express myself, they should produce a startling image which fills and besets the mind. To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them.

Gustave Le Bon, 1841 - 1931

Chapter 2

“The Sentiments and Morality of Crowds,”
Continued

§ 3. The exaggeration and ingenuousness of the sentiments of crowds. Crowds do not admit doubt or uncertainty, and always go to extremes — Their sentiments always excessive. § 4. The intolerance, dictatorialness, and conservatism of crowds. The reasons of these sentiments — The servility of crowds in the face of a strong authority — The momentary revolutionary instincts of crowds do not prevent them from being extremely conservative — Crowds instinctively hostile to changes and progress. § 5. The morality of crowds. The morality of crowds, according to the suggestions under which they act, may be much lower or much higher than that of the individuals composing them — Explanation and examples — Crowds rarely guided by those considerations of interest which are most often the exclusive motives of the isolated individual — The moralizing role of crowds.

§ 3. THE EXAGGERATION AND INGENUOUSNESS OF THE SENTIMENTS OF CROWDS.

Whether the feelings exhibited by a crowd be good or bad, they present the double character of being very simple and very exaggerated. On this point, as on so many others, an individual in a crowd resembles primitive beings. Inaccessible to fine distinctions, he sees things as a whole, and is blind to their intermediate phases. The exaggeration of the sentiments of a crowd is heightened by the fact that any feeling when once it is exhibited communicating itself very quickly by a process of suggestion and contagion, the evident approbation of which it is the object considerably increases its force.

The simplicity and exaggeration of the sentiments of crowds have for result that a throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women, it goes at once to extremes. A suspicion transforms itself as soon as announced into incontrovertible evidence. A commencement of antipathy or disapprobation, which in the case of an isolated individual would not gain strength, becomes at once furious hatred in the case of an individual in a crowd.

The violence of the feelings of crowds is also increased, especially in heterogeneous crowds, by the absence of all sense of responsibility. The certainty of impunity, a certainty the stronger as the crowd is more numerous, and the notion of a considerable momentary force due to number, make possible in the case of crowds sentiments and acts impossible for the isolated individual. In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.

Unfortunately, this tendency of crowds towards exaggeration is often brought to bear upon bad sentiments. These sentiments are atavistic residuum of the instincts of the primitive man, which the fear of punishment obliges the isolated and responsible individual to curb. Thus it is that crowds are so easily led into the worst excesses.

Still this does not mean that crowds, skilfully influenced, are not capable of heroism and devotion and of evincing the loftiest virtues; they are even more capable of showing these qualities than the isolated individual. We shall soon have occasion to revert to this point when we come to study the morality of crowds.

Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.

Moreover, a crowd exacts a like exaggeration in the sentiments of its heroes. Their apparent qualities and virtues must always be amplified. It has been justly remarked that on the stage a crowd demands from the hero of the piece a degree of courage, morality, and virtue that is never to be found in real life.

Quite rightly importance has been laid on the special standpoint from which matters are viewed in the theatre. Such a standpoint exists no doubt, but its rules for the most part have nothing to do with common sense and logic. The art of appealing to crowds is no doubt of an inferior order, but it demands quite special aptitudes. It is often impossible on reading plays to explain their success. Managers of theatres when accepting pieces are themselves, as a rule, very uncertain of their success, because to judge the matter it would be necessary that they should be able to transform themselves into a crowd.
Note: [6]

[6]

Note:

It is understandable for this reason why it sometimes happens that pieces refused by all theatrical managers obtain a prodigious success when by a stroke of chance they are put on the stage. The recent success of Francois Coppée’s play “Pour la Couronne” is well known, and yet, in spite of the name of its author, it was refused during ten years by the managers of the principal Parisian theaters.

“Charley’s Aunt,” refused at every theater, and finally staged at the expense of a stockbroker, has had two hundred representations in France, and more than a thousand in London. Without the explanation given above of the impossibility for theatrical managers to mentally substitute themselves for a crowd, such mistakes in judgment on the part of competent individuals, who are most interested not to commit such grave blunders, would be inexplicable. This is a subject that I cannot deal with here, but it might worthily tempt the pen of a writer acquainted with theatrical matters, and at the same time a subtle psychologist — of such a writer, for instance, as M. Francisque Sarcey.

Here, once more, were we able to embark on more extensive explanations, we should show the preponderating influence of racial considerations. A play which provokes the enthusiasm of the crowd in one country has sometimes no success in another, or has only a partial and conventional success, because it does not put in operation influences capable of working on an altered public.

I need not add that the tendency to exaggeration in crowds is only present in the case of sentiments and not at all in the matter of intelligence. I have already shown that, by the mere fact that an individual forms part of a crowd, his intellectual standard is immediately and considerably lowered. A learned magistrate, M. Tarde, has also verified this fact in his researches on the crimes of crowds. It is only, then, with respect to sentiment that crowds can rise to a very high or, on the contrary, descend to a very low level.

§ 4. THE INTOLERANCE, DICTATORIALNESS AND CONSERVATISM OF CROWDS.

Crowds are only cognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions, ideas, and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected as a whole, and considered as absolute truths or as not less absolute errors. This is always the case with beliefs induced by a process of suggestion instead of engendered by reasoning. Every one is aware of the intolerance that accompanies religious beliefs, and of the despotic empire they exercise on men’s minds.

Being in doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and having, on the other hand, a clear notion of its strength, a crowd is as disposed to give authoritative effect to its inspirations as it is intolerant. An individual may accept contradiction and discussion; a crowd will never do so. At public meetings the slightest contradiction on the part of an orator is immediately received with howls of fury and violent invective, soon followed by blows, and expulsion should the orator stick to his point. Without the restraining presence of the representatives of authority the contradictor, indeed, would often be done to death.

Dictatorialness and intolerance are common to all categories of crowds, but they are met with in a varying degree of intensity. Here, once more, reappears that fundamental notion of race which dominates all the feelings and all the thoughts of men. It is more especially in Latin crowds that authoritativeness and intolerance are found developed in the highest measure. In fact, their development is such in crowds of Latin origin that they have entirely destroyed that sentiment of the independence of the individual so powerful in the Anglo-Saxon. Latin crowds are only concerned with the collective independence of the sect to which they belong, and the characteristic feature of their conception of independence is the need they experience of bringing those who are in disagreement with themselves into immediate and violent subjection to their beliefs. Among the Latin races the Jacobins of every epoch, from those of the Inquisition downwards, have never been able to attain to a different conception of liberty.

Authoritativeness and intolerance are sentiments of which crowds have a very clear notion, which they easily conceive and which they entertain as readily as they put them in practice when once they are imposed upon them. Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, and are but slightly impressed by kindness, which for them is scarcely other than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed on easy-going masters, but on tyrants who vigorously oppressed them. It is to these latter that they always erect the loftiest statues.

It is true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his power, but it is because, having lost his strength, he has resumed his place among the feeble, who are to be despised because they are not to be feared. The type of hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instils them with fear.

A crowd is always ready to revolt against a feeble, and to bow down servilely before a strong authority. Should the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.

However, to believe in the predominance among crowds of revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their psychology. It is merely their tendency to violence that deceives us on this point. Their rebellious and destructive outbursts are always very transitory. Crowds are too much governed by unconscious considerations, and too much subject in consequence to secular hereditary influences not to be extremely conservative. Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary of disorder, and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron severely felt.

It is difficult to understand history, and popular revolutions in particular, if one does not take sufficiently into account the profoundly conservative instincts of crowds. They may be desirous, it is true, of changing the names of their institutions, and to obtain these changes they accomplish at times even violent revolutions, but the essence of these institutions is too much the expression of the hereditary needs of the race for them not invariably to abide by it. Their incessant mobility only exerts its influence on quite superficial matters. In fact they possess conservative instincts as indestructible as those of all primitive beings. Their fetish like respect for all traditions is absolute; their unconscious horror of all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted. Had democracies possessed the power they wield to-day at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realization of these inventions would have been impossible, or would have been achieved at the cost of revolutions and repeated massacres. It is fortunate for the progress of civilization that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.

§ 5. THE MORALITY OF CROWDS.

Taking the word “morality” to mean constant respect for certain social conventions, and the permanent repression of selfish impulses, it is quite evident that crowds are too impulsive and too mobile to be moral. If, however, we include in the term morality the transitory display of certain qualities such as abnegation, self-sacrifice, disinterestedness, devotion, and the need of equity, we may say, on the contrary, that crowds may exhibit at times a very lofty morality.

The few psychologists who have studied crowds have only considered them from the point of view of their criminal acts, and noticing how frequent these acts are, they have come to the conclusion that the moral standard of crowds is very low.

Doubtless this is often the case; but why? Simply because our savage, destructive instincts are the inheritance left dormant in all of us from the primitive ages. In the life of the isolated individual it would be dangerous for him to gratify these instincts, while his absorption in an irresponsible crowd, in which in consequence he is assured of impunity, gives him entire liberty to follow them. Being unable, in the ordinary course of events, to exercise these destructive instincts on our fellow-men, we confine ourselves to exercising them on animals. The passion, so widespread, for the chase and the acts of ferocity of crowds proceed from one and the same source. A crowd which slowly slaughters a defenseless victim displays a very cowardly ferocity; but for the philosopher this ferocity is very closely related to that of the huntsmen who gather in dozens for the pleasure of taking part in the pursuit and killing of a luckless stag by their hounds.

A crowd may be guilty of murder, incendiarism, and every kind of crime, but it is also capable of very lofty acts of devotion, sacrifice, and disinterestedness, of acts much loftier indeed than those of which the isolated individual is capable. Appeals to sentiments of glory, honour, and patriotism are particularly likely to influence the individual forming part of a crowd, and often to the extent of obtaining from him the sacrifice of his life. History is rich in examples analogous to those furnished by the Crusaders and the volunteers of 1793. Collectivities alone are capable of great disinterestedness and great devotion. How numerous are the crowds that have heroically faced death for beliefs, ideas, and phrases that they scarcely understood! The crowds that go on strike do so far more in obedience to an order than to obtain an increase of the slender salary with which they make shift. Personal interest is very rarely a powerful motive force with crowds, while it is almost the exclusive motive of the conduct of the isolated individual. It is assuredly not self-interest that has guided crowds in so many wars, incomprehensible as a rule to their intelligence — wars in which they have allowed themselves to be massacred as easily as the larks hypnotized by the mirror of the hunter.

Even in the case of absolute scoundrels it often happens that the mere fact of their being in a crowd endows them for the moment with very strict principles of morality. Taine calls attention to the fact that the perpetrators of the September massacres deposited on the table of the committees the pocket-books and jewels they had found on their victims, and with which they could easily have been able to make away. The howling, swarming, ragged crowd which invaded the Tuileries during the revolution of 1848 did not lay hands on any of the objects that excited its astonishment, and one of which would have meant bread for many days.

This moralisation of the individual by the crowd is not certainly a constant rule, but it is a rule frequently observed. It is even observed in circumstances much less grave than those I have just cited. I have remarked that in the theatre a crowd exacts from the hero of the piece exaggerated virtues, and it is a commonplace observation that an assembly, even though composed of inferior elements, shows itself as a rule very prudish. The debauchee, the souteneur, the rough often break out into murmurs at a slightly risky scene or expression, though they be very harmless in comparison with their customary conversation.

If, then, crowds often abandon themselves to low instincts, they also set the example at times of acts of lofty morality. If disinterestedness, resignation, and absolute devotion to a real or chimerical ideal are moral virtues, it may be said that crowds often possess these virtues to a degree rarely attained by the wisest philosophers. Doubtless they practice them unconsciously, but that is of small import. We should not complain too much that crowds are more especially guided by unconscious considerations and are not given to reasoning. Had they, in certain cases, reasoned and consulted their immediate interests, it is possible that no civilisation would have grown up on our planet and humanity would have had no history.

Gustave Le Bon, 1841 - 1931

Chapter 2

“The Sentiments and Morality of Crowds”

§ 1. Impulsiveness, mobility, and irritability of crowds. The crowd is at the mercy of all exterior exciting causes, and reflects their incessant variations — The impulses which the crowd obeys are so imperious as to annihilate the feeling of personal interest — Premeditation is absent from crowds — Racial influence. § 2. Crowds are credulous and readily influenced by suggestion. The obedience of crowds to suggestions — The images evoked in the mind of crowds are accepted by them as realities — Why these images are identical for all the individuals composing a crowd — The equality of the educated and the ignorant man in a crowd — Various examples of the illusions to which the individuals in a crowd are subject — The impossibility of according belief to the testimony of crowds — The unanimity of numerous witnesses is one of the worst proofs that can be invoked to establish a fact — The slight value of works of history.

Having indicated in a general way the principal characteristics of crowds, it remains to study these characteristics in detail.

It will be remarked that among the special characteristics of crowds there are several — such as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others besides — which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution — in women, savages, and children, for instance. However, I merely indicate this analogy in passing; its demonstration is outside the scope of this work. It would, moreover, be useless for persons acquainted with the psychology of primitive beings, and would scarcely carry conviction to those in ignorance of this matter.

I now proceed to the successive consideration of the different characteristics that may be observed in the majority of crowds.

§ 1. IMPULSIVENESS, MOBILITY, AND IRRITABILITY OF CROWDS.

When studying the fundamental characteristics of a crowd we stated that it is guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives. Its acts are far more under the influence of the spinal cord than of the brain. In this respect a crowd is closely akin to quite primitive beings. The acts performed may be perfect so far as their execution is concerned, but as they are not directed by the brain, the individual conducts himself according as the exciting causes to which he is submitted may happen to decide. A crowd is at the mercy of all external exciting causes, and reflects their incessant variations. It is the slave of the impulses which it receives. The isolated individual may be submitted to the same exciting causes as the man in a crowd, but as his brain shows him the inadvisability of yielding to them, he refrains from yielding. This truth may be physiologically expressed by saying that the isolated individual possesses the capacity of dominating his reflex actions, while a crowd is devoid of this capacity.

The varying impulses to which crowds obey may be, according to their exciting causes, generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly, but they will always be so imperious that the interest of the individual, even the interest of self-preservation, will not dominate them. The exciting causes that may act on crowds being so varied, and crowds always obeying them, crowds are in consequence extremely mobile. This explains how it is that we see them pass in a moment from the most bloodthirsty ferocity to the most extreme generosity and heroism. A crowd may easily enact the part of an executioner, but not less easily that of a martyr. It is crowds that have furnished the torrents of blood requisite for the triumph of every belief. It is not necessary to go back to the heroic ages to see what crowds are capable of in this latter direction. They are never sparing of their life in an insurrection, and not long since a general [2], becoming suddenly popular, might easily have found a hundred thousand men ready to sacrifice their lives for his cause had he demanded it.

Any display of premeditation by crowds is in consequence out of the question. They may be animated in succession by the most contrary sentiments, but they will always be under the influence of the exciting causes of the moment. They are like the leaves which a tempest whirls up and scatters in every direction and then allows to fall. When studying later on certain revolutionary crowds we shall give some examples of the variability of their sentiments.

This mobility of crowds renders them very difficult to govern, especially when a measure of public authority has fallen into their hands. Did not the necessities of everyday life constitute a sort of invisible regulator of existence, it would scarcely be possible for democracies to last. Still, though the wishes of crowds are frenzied they are not durable. Crowds are as incapable of willing as of thinking for any length of time.

A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realization of its desire. It is the less capable of understanding such an intervention, in consequence of the feeling of irresistible power given it by its numerical strength. The notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a crowd. An isolated individual knows well enough that alone he cannot set fire to a palace or loot a shop, and should he be tempted to do so, he will easily resist the temptation. Making part of a crowd, he is conscious of the power given him by number, and it is sufficient to suggest to him ideas of murder or pillage for him to yield immediately to temptation. An unexpected obstacle will be destroyed with frenzied rage. Did the human organism allow of the perpetuity of furious passion, it might be said that the normal condition of a crowd balked in its wishes is just such a state of furious passion.

The fundamental characteristics of the race, which constitute the unvarying source from which all our sentiments spring, always exert an influence on the irritability of crowds, their impulsiveness and their mobility, as on all the popular sentiments we shall have to study. All crowds are doubtless always irritable and impulsive, but with great variations of degree. For instance, the difference between a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon crowd is striking. The most recent facts in French history throw a vivid light on this point. The mere publication, twenty-five years ago, of a telegram, relating an insult supposed to have been offered an ambassador, was sufficient to determine an explosion of fury, whence followed immediately a terrible war. Some years later the telegraphic announcement of an insignificant reverse at Langson provoked a fresh explosion which brought about the instantaneous overthrow of the government. At the same moment a much more serious reverse undergone by the English expedition to Khartoum produced only a slight emotion in England, and no ministry was overturned. Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics, but Latin crowds are the most feminine of all. Whoever trusts in them may rapidly attain a lofty destiny, but to do so is to be perpetually skirting the brink of a Tarpeian rock, with the certainty of one day being precipitated from it.

§ 2. THE SUGGESTIBILITY AND CREDULITY OF CROWDS.

When defining crowds, we said that one of their general characteristics was an excessive suggestibility, and we have shown to what an extent suggestions are contagious in every human agglomeration; a fact which explains the rapid turning of the sentiments of a crowd in a definite direction. However indifferent it may be supposed, a crowd, as a rule, is in a state of expectant attention, which renders suggestion easy. The first suggestion formulated which arises implants itself immediately by a process of contagion in the brains of all assembled, and the identical bent of the sentiments of the crowd is immediately an accomplished fact.

As is the case with all persons under the influence of suggestion, the idea which has entered the brain tends to transform itself into an act. Whether the act is that of setting fire to a palace, or involves self-sacrifice, a crowd lends itself to it with equal facility. All will depend on the nature of the exciting cause, and no longer, as in the case of the isolated individual, on the relations existing between the act suggested and the sum total of the reasons which may be urged against its realization.

In consequence, a crowd perpetually hovering on the borderland of unconsciousness, readily yielding to all suggestions, having all the violence of feeling peculiar to beings who cannot appeal to the influence of reason, deprived of all critical faculty, cannot be otherwise than excessively credulous. The improbable does not exist for a crowd, and it is necessary to bear this circumstance well in mind to understand the facility with which are created and propagated the most improbable legends and stories. [3]

The creation of the legends which so easily obtain circulation in crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity. It is also the result of the prodigious perversions that events undergo in the imagination of a throng. The simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally transformed. A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first. We can easily conceive this state by thinking of the fantastic succession of ideas to which we are sometimes led by calling up in our minds any fact. Our reason shows us the incoherence there is in these images, but a crowd is almost blind to this truth, and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.

The ways in which a crowd perverts any event of which it is a witness ought, it would seem, to be innumerable and unlike each other, since the individuals composing the gathering are of very different temperaments. But this is not the case. As the result of contagion the perversions are of the same kind, and take the same shape in the case of all the assembled individuals.

The first perversion of the truth effected by one of the individuals of the gathering is the starting-point of the contagious suggestion. Before St. George appeared on the walls of Jerusalem to all the Crusaders he was certainly perceived in the first instance by one of those present. By dint of suggestion and contagion the miracle signalized by a single person was immediately accepted by all.

Such is always the mechanism of the collective hallucinations so frequent in history — hallucinations which seem to have all the recognized characteristics of authenticity, since they are phenomena observed by thousands of persons.

To combat what precedes, the mental quality of the individuals composing a crowd must not be brought into consideration. This quality is without importance. From the moment that they form part of a crowd the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation.

This thesis may seem paradoxical. To demonstrate it beyond doubt it would be necessary to investigate a great number of historical facts, and several volumes would be insufficient for the purpose.

Still, as I do not wish to leave the reader under the impression of unproved assertions, I shall give him some examples taken at hazard from the immense number of those that might be quoted.

The following fact is one of the most typical, because chosen from among collective hallucinations of which a crowd is the victim, in which are to be found individuals of every kind, from the most ignorant to the most highly educated. It is related incidentally by Julian Felix, a naval lieutenant, in his book on “Sea Currents,” and has been previously cited by the Revue Scientique.

The frigate, the Belle Poule, was cruising in the open sea for the purpose of finding the cruiser Le Berceau, from which she had been separated by a violent storm. It was broad daylight and in full sunshine. Suddenly the watch signaled a disabled vessel; the crew looked in the direction signaled, and every one, officers and sailors, clearly perceived a raft covered with men towed by boats which were displaying signals of distress. Yet this was nothing more than a collective hallucination. Admiral Desfosses lowered a boat to go to the rescue of the wrecked sailors. On nearing the object sighted, the sailors and officers on board the boat saw “masses of men in motion, stretching out their hands, and heard the dull and confused noise of a great number of voices.” When the object was reached those in the boat found themselves simply and solely in the presence of a few branches of trees covered with leaves that had been swept out from the neighboring coast. Before evidence so palpable the hallucination vanished.

The mechanism of a collective hallucination of the kind we have explained is clearly seen at work in this example. On the one hand we have a crowd in a state of expectant attention, on the other a suggestion made by the watch signaling a disabled vessel at sea, a suggestion which, by a process of contagion, was accepted by all those present, both officers and sailors.

It is not necessary that a crowd should be numerous for the faculty of seeing what is taking place before its eyes to be destroyed and for the real facts to be replaced by hallucinations unrelated to them. As soon as a few individuals are gathered together they constitute a crowd, and, though they should be distinguished men of learning, they assume all the characteristics of crowds with regard to matters outside their specialty. The faculty of observation and the critical spirit possessed by each of them individually at once disappears. An ingenious psychologist, Mr. Davey, supplies us with a very curious example in point, recently cited in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, and deserving of relation here. Mr. Davey, having convoked a gathering of distinguished observers, among them one of the most prominent of English scientific men, Mr. Wallace, executed in their presence, and after having allowed them to examine the objects and to place seals where they wished, all the regulation spiritualistic phenomena, the materialization of spirits, writing on slates, etc. Having subsequently obtained from these distinguished observers written reports admitting that the phenomena observed could only have been obtained by supernatural means, he revealed to them that they were the result of very simple tricks. “The most astonishing feature of Monsieur Davey’s investigation,” writes the author of this account, “is not the marvelousness of the tricks themselves, but the extreme weakness of the reports made with respect to them by the non-initiated witnesses. It is clear, then,” he says, “that witnesses even in number may give circumstantial relations which are completely erroneous, but whose result is that, if their descriptions are accepted as exact, the phenomena they describe are inexplicable by trickery. The methods invented by Mr. Davey were so simple that one is astonished that he should have had the boldness to employ them; but he had such a power over the mind of the crowd that he could persuade it that it saw what it did not see.” Here, as always, we have the power of the hypnotist over the hypnotized. Moreover, when this power is seen in action on minds of a superior order and previously invited to be suspicious, it is understandable how easy it is to deceive ordinary crowds.

Analogous examples are innumerable. As I write these lines the papers are full of the story of two little girls found drowned in the Seine. These children, to begin with, were recognized in the most unmistakable manner by half a dozen witnesses. All the affirmations were in such entire concordance that no doubt remained in the mind of the juge d’instruction. He had the certificate of death drawn up, but just as the burial of the children was to have been proceeded with, a mere chance brought about the discovery that the supposed victims were alive, and had, moreover, but a remote resemblance to the drowned girls. As in several of the examples previously cited, the affirmation of the first witness, himself a victim of illusion, had sufficed to influence the other witnesses.

In parallel cases the starting-point of the suggestion is always the illusion produced in an individual by more or less vague reminiscences, contagion following as the result of the affirmation of this initial illusion. If the first observer be very impressionable, it will often be sufficient that the corpse he believes he recognizes should present — apart from all real resemblance — some peculiarity, a scar, or some detail of toilet which may evoke the idea of another person. The idea evoked may then become the nucleus of a sort of crystallization which invades the understanding and paralyzes all critical faculty. What the observer then sees is no longer the object itself, but the image-evoked in his mind. In this way are to be explained erroneous recognitions of the dead bodies of children by their own mother, as occurred in the following case, already old, but which has been recently recalled by the newspapers. In it are to be traced precisely the two kinds of suggestion of which I have just pointed out the mechanism.

“The child was recognized by another child, who was mistaken. The series of unwarranted recognitions then began.

“An extraordinary thing occurred. The day after a schoolboy had recognized the corpse a woman exclaimed, ‘Good Heavens, it is my child!’

“She was taken up to the corpse; she examined the clothing, and noted a scar on the forehead. ‘It is certainly,’ she said, ‘my son who disappeared last July. He has been stolen from me and murdered.’

“The woman was concierge in the Rue du Four; her name was Chavandret. Her brother-in-law was summoned, and when questioned he said, ‘That is the little Filibert.’ Several persons living in the street recognized the child found at La Villette as Filibert Chavandret, among them being the boy’s schoolmaster, who based his opinion on a medal worn by the lad.

“Nevertheless, the neighbors, the brother-in-law, the schoolmaster, and the mother were mistaken. Six weeks later the identity of the child was established. The boy, belonging to Bordeaux, had been murdered there and brought by a carrying company to Paris.” [4]

It will be remarked that these recognitions are most often made by women and children — that is to say, by precisely the most impressionable persons. They show us at the same time what is the worth in law courts of such witnesses. As far as children, more especially, are concerned, their statements ought never to be invoked. Magistrates are in the habit of repeating that children do not lie. Did they possess a psychological culture a little less rudimentary than is the case they would know that, on the contrary, children invariably lie; the lie is doubtless innocent, but it is none the less a lie. It would be better to decide the fate of an accused person by the toss of a coin than, as has been so often done, by the evidence of a child.

To return to the faculty of observation possessed by crowds, our conclusion is that their collective observations are as erroneous as possible, and that most often they merely represent the illusion of an individual who, by a process of contagion, has suggestioned his fellows. Facts proving that the most utter mistrust of the evidence of crowds is advisable might be multiplied to any extent. Thousands of men were present twenty-five years ago at the celebrated cavalry charge during the battle of Sedan, and yet it is impossible, in the face of the most contradictory ocular testimony, to decide by whom it was commanded. The English general, Lord Wolseley, has proved in a recent book that up to now the gravest errors of fact have been committed with regard to the most important incidents of the battle of Waterloo — facts that hundreds of witnesses had nevertheless attested. [5]

Such facts show us what is the value of the testimony of crowds. Treatises on logic include the unanimity of numerous witnesses in the category of the strongest proofs that can be invoked in support of the exactness of a fact. Yet what we know of the psychology of crowds shows that treatises on logic need on this point to be rewritten. The events with regard to which there exists the most doubt are certainly those which have been observed by the greatest number of persons. To say that a fact has been simultaneously verified by thousands of witnesses is to say, as a rule, that the real fact is very different from the accepted account of it.

It clearly results from what precedes that works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination. They are fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts, accompanied by explanations the result of reflection. To write such books is the most absolute waste of time. Had not the past left us its literary, artistic, and monumental works, we should know absolutely nothing in reality with regard to bygone times. Are we in possession of a single word of truth concerning the lives of the great men who have played preponderating parts in the history of humanity — men such as Hercules, Buddha, or Mahomet? In all probability we are not. In point of fact, moreover, their real lives are of slight importance to us. Our interest is to know what our great men were as they are presented by popular legend. It is legendary heroes, and not for a moment real heroes, who have impressed the minds of crowds.

Unfortunately, legends — even although they have been definitely put on record by books — have in themselves no stability. The imagination of the crowd continually transforms them as the result of the lapse of time and especially in consequence of racial causes. There is a great gulf fixed between the sanguinary Jehovah of the Old Testament and the God of Love of Sainte Thérèse, and the Buddha worshiped in China has no traits in common with that venerated in India.

It is not even necessary that heroes should be separated from us by centuries for their legend to be transformed by the imagination of the crowd. The transformation occasionally takes place within a few years. In our own day we have seen the legend of one of the greatest heroes of history modified several times in less than fifty years. Under the Bourbons Napoleon became a sort of idyllic and liberal philanthropist, a friend of the humble who, according to the poets, was destined to be long remembered in the cottage. Thirty years afterward this easy-going hero had become a sanguinary despot, who, after having usurped power and destroyed liberty, caused the slaughter of three million men solely to satisfy his ambition. At present we are witnessing a fresh transformation of the legend. When it has undergone the influence of some dozens of centuries the learned men of the future, face to face with these contradictory accounts, will perhaps doubt the very existence of the hero, as some of them now doubt that of Buddha, and will see in him nothing more than a solar myth or a development of the legend of Hercules. They will doubtless console themselves easily for this uncertainty, for, better initiated than we are to-day in the characteristics and psychology of crowds, they will know that history is scarcely capable of preserving the memory of anything except myths.

NOTES

[2] General Boulanger.

[3] Persons who went through the siege of Paris saw numerous examples of this credulity of crowds. A candle alight in an upper story was immediately looked upon as a signal given the besiegers, although it was evident, after a moment of reflection, that it was utterly impossible to catch sight of the light of the candle at a distance of several miles.

[4] L’Eclair, April 21, 1895.

[5] Do we know in the case of one single battle exactly how it took place? I am very doubtful on the point. We know who were the conquerors and the conquered, but this is probably all. What M. D’Harcourt has said with respect to the battle of Solferino, which he witnessed and in which he was personally engaged, may be applied to all battles — “The generals (informed, of course, by the evidence of hundreds of witnesses) forward their official reports; the orderly officers modify these documents and draw up a definite narrative; the chief of the staff raises objections and re�writes the whole on a fresh basis. It is carried to the Marshal, who exclaims, `You are entirely in error,’ and he substitutes a fresh edition. Scarcely anything remains of the original report.” M. D’Harcourt relates this fact as proof of the impossibility of establishing the truth in connection with the most striking, the best observed events.

Gustave Le Bon, 1841 - 1931

Chapter 1

“General Characteristics of Crowds — Psychological Law of their Mental Unity”

What constitutes a crowd from the psychological point of view — A numerically strong agglomeration of individuals does not suffice to form a crowd — Special characteristics of psychological crowds — The turning in a fixed direction of the ideas and sentiments of individuals composing such a crowd, and the disappearance of their personality — The crowd is always dominated by considerations of which it is unconscious — The disappearance of brain activity and the predominance of medullar activity — The lowering of the intelligence and the complete transformation of the sentiments — The transformed sentiments may be better or worse than those of the individuals of which the crowd is composed — A crowd is as easily heroic as criminal.

In its ordinary sense the word “crowd” means a gathering of individuals of whatever nationality, profession, or sex, and whatever be the chances that have brought them together. From the psychological point of view the expression “crowd” assumes quite a different signification. Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organized crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds.

It is evident that it is not by the mere fact of a number of individuals finding themselves accidentally side by side that they acquire the character of an organized crowd. A thousand individuals accidentally gathered in a public place without any determined object in no way constitute a crowd from the psychological point of view. To acquire the special characteristics of such a crowd, the influence is necessary of certain predisposing causes of which we shall have to determine the nature.

The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organized, do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot. Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments, and under the influence of certain violent emotions — such, for example, as a great national event — the characteristics of a psychological crowd. It will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them together for their acts to at once assume the characteristics peculiar to the acts of a crowd. At certain moments half a dozen men might constitute a psychological crowd, which may not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered together by accident. On the other hand, an entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become a crowd under the action of certain influences.

A psychological crowd once constituted, it acquires certain provisional but determinable general characteristics. To these general characteristics there are adjoined particular characteristics which vary according to the elements of which the crowd is composed, and may modify its mental constitution. Psychological crowds, then, are susceptible of classification; and when we come to occupy ourselves with this matter, we shall see that a heterogeneous crowd — that is, a crowd composed of dissimilar elements — presents certain characteristics in common with homogeneous crowds — that is, with crowds composed of elements more or less akin (sects, castes, and classes) — and side by side with these common characteristics particularities which permit of the two kinds of crowds being differentiated.

But before occupying ourselves with the different categories of crowds, we must first of all examine the characteristics common to them all. We shall set to work like the naturalist, who begins by describing the general characteristics common to all the members of a family before concerning himself with the particular characteristics which allow the differentiation of the genera and species that the family includes.

It is not easy to describe the mind of crowds with exactness, because its organization varies not only according to race and composition, but also according to the nature and intensity of the exciting causes to which crowds are subjected. The same difficulty, however, presents itself in the psychological study of an individual. It is only in novels that individuals are found to traverse their whole life with an unvarying character. It is only the uniformity of the environment that creates the apparent uniformity of characters. I have shown elsewhere that all mental constitutions contain possibilities of character which may be manifested in consequence of a sudden change of environment. This explains how it was that among the most savage members of the French Convention were to be found inoffensive citizens who, under ordinary circumstances, would have been peaceable notaries or virtuous magistrates. The storm past, they resumed their normal character of quiet, law-abiding citizens. Napoleon found amongst them his most docile servants.

It being impossible to study here all the successive degrees of organization of crowds, we shall concern ourselves more especially with such crowds as have attained to the phase of complete organization. In this way we shall see what crowds may become, but not what they invariably are. It is only in this advanced phase of organization that certain new and special characteristics are superposed on the unvarying and dominant character of the race; then takes place that turning already alluded to of all the feelings and thoughts of the collectivity in an identical direction. It is only under such circumstances, too, that what I have called above the psychological law of the mental unity of crowds comes into play.

Among the psychological characteristics of crowds there are some that they may present in common with isolated individuals, and others, on the contrary, which are absolutely peculiar to them and are only to be met with in collectivities. It is these special characteristics that we shall study, first of all, in order to show their importance.

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.

Contrary to an opinion which one is astonished to find coming from the pen of so acute a philosopher as Herbert Spencer, in the aggregate which constitutes a crowd there is in no sort a summing-up of or an average struck between its elements. What really takes place is a combination followed by the creation of new characteristics, just as in chemistry certain elements, when brought into contact — bases and acids, for example — combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.

It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.

To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology, that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life, but also in the operations of the intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the unconscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still which we ourselves ignore. The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.

It is more especially with respect to those unconscious elements which constitute the genius of a race that all the individuals belonging to it resemble each other, while it is principally in respect to the conscious elements of their character — the fruit of education, and yet more of exceptional hereditary conditions — that they differ from each other. Men the most unlike in the matter of their intelligence possess instincts, passions, and feelings that are very similar. In the case of every thing that belongs to the realm of sentiment — religion, politics, morality, the affections and antipathies, &c. — the most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals. From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent.

It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious, and possessed by the majority of the normal individuals of a race in much the same degree — it is precisely these qualities, I say, that in crowds become common property. In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand.

This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. The decisions affecting matters of general interest come to by an assembly of men of distinction, but specialists in different walks of life, are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles. The truth is, they can only bring to bear in common on the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual. In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated. It is not all the world, as is so often repeated, that has more wit than Voltaire, but assuredly Voltaire that has more wit than all the world, if by “all the world” crowds are to be understood.

If the individuals of a crowd confined themselves to putting in common the ordinary qualities of which each of them has his share, there would merely result the striking of an average, and not, as we have said is actually the case, the creation of new characteristics. How is it that these new characteristics are created? This is what we are now to investigate.

Different causes determine the appearance of these characteristics peculiar to crowds, and not possessed by isolated individuals. The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.

The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a crowd.

A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is neither more nor less than an effect.

To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself — either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant — in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotist. The activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotized subject, the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the hypnotist directs at will. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotist.

Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotized subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of crowds than in that of the hypnotized subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the crowd, it gains in strength by reciprocity. The individualities in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are too few in number to struggle against the current. At the utmost, they may be able to attempt a diversion by means of different suggestions. It is in this way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image opportunely evoked, have occasionally deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.

We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.

Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian — that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images — which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd — and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.

It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to give their adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine individuals most clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interests, to renounce their inviolability and to decimate themselves.

It is not only by his acts that the individual in a crowd differs essentially from himself. Even before he has entirely lost his independence, his ideas and feelings have undergone a transformation, and the transformation is so profound as to change the miser into a spendthrift, the sceptic into a believer, the honest man into a criminal, and the coward into a hero. The renunciation of all its privileges which the nobility voted in a moment of enthusiasm during the celebrated night of August 4, 1789, would certainly never have been consented to by any of its members taken singly.

The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is, that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, but that, from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, he better or worse than the individual. All depends on the nature of the suggestion to which the crowd is exposed. This is the point that has been completely misunderstood by writers who have only studied crowds from the criminal point of view. Doubtless a crowd is often criminal, but also it is often heroic. It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honour, that are led on — almost without bread and without arms, as in the age of the Crusades — to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel, or, as in ’93, to defend the fatherland. Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made. Were peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them.

Gustave Le Bon, 1841 - 1931

The evolution of the present age — The great changes in civilization are the consequence of changes in National thought — Modern belief in the power of crowds — It transforms the traditional policy of the European states — How the rise of the popular classes comes about, and the manner in which they exercise their power — The necessary consequences of the power of the crowd — Crowds unable to play a part other than destructive — The dissolution of worn-out civilizations is the work of the crowd — General ignorance of the psychology of crowds — Importance of the study of crowds for legislators and statesmen.

THE great upheavals which precede changes of civilizations such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the foundation of the Arabian Empire, seem at first sight determined more especially by political transformations, foreign invasion, or the overthrow of dynasties. But a more attentive study of these events shows that behind their apparent causes the real cause is generally seen to be a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples. The true historical upheavals are not those which astonish us by their grandeur and violence. The only important changes whence the renewal of civilizations results, affect ideas, conceptions, and beliefs. The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought. The reason these great events are so rare is that there is nothing so stable in a race as the inherited groundwork of its thoughts.

The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.

Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilization are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.

The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.

It is not easy to say as yet what will one day be evolved from this necessarily somewhat chaotic period. What will be the fundamental ideas on which the societies that are to succeed our own will be built up? We do not at present know. Still it is already clear that on whatever lines the societies of the future are organized, they will have to count with a new power, with the last surviving sovereign force of modern times, the power of crowds. On the ruins of so many ideas formerly considered beyond discussion, and to-day decayed or decaying, of so many sources of authority that successive revolutions have destroyed, this power, which alone has arisen in their stead, seems soon destined to absorb the others. While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS.

Scarcely a century ago the traditional policy of European states and the rivalries of sovereigns were the principal factors that shaped events. The opinion of the masses scarcely counted, and most frequently indeed did not count at all. To-day it is the traditions which used to obtain in politics, and the individual tendencies and rivalries of rulers which do not count; while, on the contrary, the voice of the masses has become preponderant. It is this voice that dictates their conduct to kings, whose endeavor is to take note of its utterances. The destinies of nations are elaborated at present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes.

The entry of the popular classes into political life — that is to say, in reality, their progressive transformation into governing classes — is one of the most striking characteristics of our epoch of transition. The introduction of universal suffrage, which exercised for a long time but little influence, is not, as might be thought, the distinguishing feature of this transference of political power. The progressive growth of the power of the masses took place at first by the propagation of certain ideas, which have slowly implanted themselves in men’s minds, and afterwards by the gradual association of individuals bent on bringing about the realization of theoretical conceptions. It is by association that crowds have come to procure ideas with respect to their interests which are very clearly defined if not particularly just, and have arrived at a consciousness of their strength. The masses are founding syndicates before which the authorities capitulate one after the other; they are also founding labor unions, which in spite of all economic laws tend to regulate the conditions of labour and wages. They return to assemblies in which the Government is vested, representatives utterly lacking initiative and independence, and reduced most often to nothing else than the spokesmen of the committees that have chosen them.

To-day the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization. Limitations of the hours of labor, the nationalization of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of all the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, &c., such are these claims.

Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act. As the result of their present organization their strength has become immense. The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion. The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.

The writers who enjoy the favor of our middle classes, those who best represent their rather narrow ideas, their somewhat prescribed views, their rather superficial skepticism, and their at times somewhat excessive egoism, display profound alarm at this new power which they see growing; and to combat the disorder in men’s minds they are addressing despairing appeals to those moral forces of the Church for which they formerly professed so much disdain. They talk to us of the bankruptcy of science, go back in penitence to Rome, and remind us of the teachings of revealed truth. These new converts forget that it is too late. Had they been really touched by grace, a like operation could not have the same influence on minds less concerned with the preoccupations which beset these recent adherents to religion. The masses repudiate to-day the gods which their admonishers repudiated yesterday and helped to destroy. There is no power, Divine or human, that can oblige a stream to flow back to its source.

There has been no bankruptcy of science, and science has had no share in the present intellectual anarchy, nor in the making of the new power which is springing up in the midst of this anarchy. Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness. Sovereignly indifferent to our feelings, it is deaf to our lamentations. It is for us to endeavor to live with science, since nothing can bring back the illusions it has destroyed.

Universal symptoms, visible in all nations, show us the rapid growth of the power of crowds, and do not admit of our supposing that it is destined to cease growing at an early date. Whatever fate it may reserve for us, we shall have to submit to it. All reasoning against it is a mere vain war of words. Certainly it is possible that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilization, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society. But may this result be prevented?

Up to now these thoroughgoing destructions of a worn-out civilization have constituted the most obvious task of the masses. It is not indeed to-day merely that this can be traced. History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilization rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians. Civilizations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilization involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture — all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realizing. In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilization is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall. It is at such a juncture that their chief mission is plainly visible, and that for a while the philosophy of number seems the only philosophy of history.

Is the same fate in store for our civilization? There is ground to fear that this is the case, but we are not as yet in a position to be certain of it.

However this may be, we are bound to resign ourselves to the reign of the masses, since want of foresight has in succession overthrown all the barriers that might have kept the crowd in check.

We have a very slight knowledge of these crowds which are beginning to be the object of so much discussion. Professional students of psychology, having lived far from them, have always ignored them, and when, as of late, they have turned their attention in this direction it has only been to consider the crimes crowds are capable of committing. Without a doubt criminal crowds exist, but virtuous and heroic crowds, and crowds of many other kinds, are also to be met with. The crimes of crowds only constitute a particular phase of their psychology. The mental constitution of crowds is not to be learnt merely by a study of their crimes, any more than that of an individual by a mere description of his vices.

However, in point of fact, all the world’s masters, all the founders of religions or empires, the apostles of all beliefs, eminent statesmen, and, in a more modest sphere, the mere chiefs of small groups of men have always been unconscious psychologists, possessed of an instinctive and often very sure knowledge of the character of crowds, and it is their accurate knowledge of this character that has enabled them to so easily establish their mastery. Napoleon had a marvelous insight into the psychology of the masses of the country over which he reigned, but he, at times, completely misunderstood the psychology of crowds belonging to other races [1]; and it is because he thus misunderstood it that he engaged in Spain, and notably in Russia, in conflicts in which his power received blows which were destined within a brief space of time to ruin it. A knowledge of the psychology of crowds is to-day the last resource of the statesman who wishes not to govern them — that is becoming a very difficult matter — but at any rate not to be too much governed by them.

It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds that it can be understood how slight is the action upon them of laws and institutions, how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them, and that it is not with rules based on theories of pure equity that they are to be led, but by seeking what produces an impression on them and what seduces them. For instance, should a legislator, wishing to impose a new tax, choose that which would be theoretically the most just? By no means. In practice the most unjust may be the best for the masses. Should it at the same time be the least obvious, and apparently the least burdensome, it will be the most easily tolerated. It is for this reason that an indirect tax, however exorbitant it be, will always be accepted by the crowd, because, being paid daily in fractions of a farthing on objects of consumption, it will not interfere with the habits of the crowd, and will pass unperceived. Replace it by a proportional tax on wages or income of any other kind, to be paid in a lump sum, and were this new imposition theoretically ten times less burdensome than the other, it would give rise to unanimous protest. This arises from the fact that a sum relatively high, which will appear immense, and will in consequence strike the imagination, has been substituted for the unperceived fractions of a farthing. The new tax would only appear light had it been saved farthing by farthing, but this economic proceeding involves an amount of foresight of which the masses are incapable.

The example which precedes is of the simplest. Its appositeness will be easily perceived. It did not escape the attention of such a psychologist as Napoleon, but our modern legislators, ignorant as they are of the characteristics of a crowd, are unable to appreciate it. Experience has not taught them as yet to a sufficient degree that men never shape their conduct upon the teaching of pure reason.

Many other practical applications might be made of the psychology of crowds. A knowledge of this science throws the most vivid light on a great number of historical and economic phenomena totally incomprehensible without it. I shall have occasion to show that the reason why the most remarkable of modern historians, Taine, has at times so imperfectly understood the events of the great French Revolution is, that it never occurred to him to study the genius of crowds. He took as his guide in the study of this complicated period the descriptive method resorted to by naturalists; but the moral forces are almost absent in the case of the phenomena which naturalists have to study. Yet it is precisely these forces that constitute the true mainsprings of history.

In consequence, merely looked at from its practical side, the study of the psychology of crowds deserved to be attempted. Were its interest that resulting from pure curiosity only, it would still merit attention. It is as interesting to decipher the motives of the actions of men as to determine the characteristics of a mineral or a plant. Our study of the genius of crowds can merely be a brief synthesis, a simple summary of our investigations. Nothing more must be demanded of it than a few suggestive views. Others will work the ground more thoroughly. To-day we only touch the surface of a still almost virgin soil.

[1] His most subtle advisers, moreover, did not understand this psychology any better. Talleyrand wrote him that “Spain would receive his soldiers as liberators.” It received them as beasts of prey. A psychologist acquainted with the hereditary instincts of the Spanish race would have easily foreseen this reception.

Gustave Le Bon, 1841 - 1931

The following work is devoted to an account of the characteristics of crowds.

The whole of the common characteristics with which heredity endows the individuals of a race constitute the genius of the race. When, however, a certain number of these individuals are gathered together in a crowd for purposes of action, observation proves that, from the mere fact of their being assembled, there result certain new psychological characteristics, which are added to the racial characteristics and differ from them at times to a very considerable degree.

Organized crowds have always played an important part in the life of peoples, but this part has never been of such moment as at present. The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.

I have endeavored to examine the difficult problem presented by crowds in a purely scientific manner — that is, by making an effort to proceed with method, and without being influenced by opinions, theories, and doctrines. This, I believe, is the only mode of arriving at the discovery of some few particles of truth, especially when dealing, as is the case here, with a question that is the subject of impassioned controversy. A man of science bent on verifying a phenomenon is not called upon to concern himself with the interests his verifications may hurt. In a recent publication an eminent thinker, M. Goblet d’Alviela, made the remark that, belonging to none of the contemporary schools, I am occasionally found in opposition of sundry of the conclusions of all of them. I hope this new work will merit a similar observation. To belong to a school is necessarily to espouse its prejudices and preconceived opinions.

Still I should explain to the reader why he will find me draw conclusions from my investigations which it might be thought at first sight they do not bear; why, for instance, after noting the extreme mental inferiority of crowds, picked assemblies included, I yet affirm it would be dangerous to meddle with their organization, notwithstanding this inferiority.

The reason is, that the most attentive observation of the facts of history has invariably demonstrated to me that social organisms being every whit as complicated as those of all beings, it is in no wise in our power to force them to undergo on a sudden far-reaching transformations. Nature has recourse at times to radical measures, but never after our fashion, which explains how it is that nothing is more fatal to a people than the mania for great reforms, however excellent these reforms may appear theoretically. They would only be useful were it possible to change instantaneously the genius of nations. This power, however, is only possessed by time. Men are ruled by ideas, sentiments, and customs — matters which are of the essence of ourselves. Institutions and laws are the outward manifestation of our character, the expression of its needs. Being its outcome, institutions and laws cannot change this character.

The study of social phenomena cannot be separated from that of the peoples among whom they have come into existence. From the philosophic point of view these phenomena may have an absolute value; in practice they have only a relative value.

It is necessary, in consequence, when studying a social phenomenon, to consider it successively under two very different aspects. It will then be seen that the teachings of pure reason are very often contrary to those of practical reason. There are scarcely any data, even physical, to which this distinction is not applicable. From the point of view of absolute truth a cube or a circle are invariable geometrical figures, rigorously defined by certain formulas. From the point of view of the impression they make on our eye these geometrical figures may assume very varied shapes. By perspective the cube may be transformed into a pyramid or a square, the circle into an ellipse or a straight line. Moreover, the consideration of these fictitious shapes is far more important than that of the real shapes, for it is they and they alone that we see and that can be reproduced by photography or in pictures. In certain cases there is more truth in the unreal than in the real. To present objects with their exact geometrical forms would be to distort nature and render it unrecognizable. If we imagine a world whose inhabitants could only copy or photograph objects, but were unable to touch them, it would be very difficult for such persons to attain to an exact idea of their form. Moreover, the knowledge of this form, accessible only to a small number of learned men, would present but a very minor interest.

The philosopher who studies social phenomena should bear in mind that side by side with their theoretical value they possess a practical value, and that this latter, so far as the evolution of civilization is concerned, is alone of importance. The recognition of this fact should render him very circumspect with regard to the conclusions that logic would seem at first to enforce upon him.

There are other motives that dictate to him a like reserve. The complexity of social facts is such, that it is impossible to grasp them as a whole and to foresee the effects of their reciprocal influence. It seems, too, that behind the visible facts are hidden at times thousands of invisible causes. Visible social phenomena appear to be the result of an immense, unconscious working, that as a rule is beyond the reach of our analysis. Perceptible phenomena may be compared to the waves, which are the expression on the surface of the ocean of deep-lying disturbances of which we know nothing. So far as the majority of their acts are considered, crowds display a singularly inferior mentality; yet there are other acts in which they appear to be guided by those mysterious forces which the ancients denominated destiny, nature, or providence, which we call the voices of the dead, and whose power it is impossible to overlook, although we ignore their essence. It would seem, at times, as if there were latent forces in the inner being of nations which serve to guide them. What, for instance, can be more complicated, more logical, more marvelous than a language? Yet whence can this admirably organized production have arisen, except it be the outcome of the unconscious genius of crowds? The most learned academics, the most esteemed grammarians can do no more than note down the laws that govern languages; they would be utterly incapable of creating them. Even with respect to the ideas of great men are we certain that they are exclusively the offspring of their brains? No doubt such ideas are always created by solitary minds, but is it not the genius of crowds that has furnished the thousands of grains of dust forming the soil in which they have sprung up?

Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength. In the natural world beings exclusively governed by instinct accomplish acts whose marvelous complexity astounds us. Reason is an attribute of humanity of too recent date and still too imperfect to reveal to us the laws of the unconscious, and still more to take its place. The part played by the unconscious in all our acts is immense, and that played by reason very small. The unconscious acts like a force still unknown.

If we wish, then, to remain within the narrow but safe limits within which science can attain to knowledge, and not to wander in the domain of vague conjecture and vain hypothesis, all we must do is simply to take note of such phenomena as are accessible to us, and confine ourselves to their consideration. Every conclusion drawn from our observation is, as a rule, premature, for behind the phenomena which we see clearly are other phenomena that we see indistinctly, and perhaps behind these latter, yet others which we do not see at all.

rom section no. 57 of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ. The translation is by H. L. Menken. The paragraph breaks have been introduced for online readability. The ellipses are Nietzsche’s.

A book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates.

The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained truth are fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shall,” on which obedience is based.

The problem lies exactly here.—At a certain point in the evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall live—or can live—has come to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard experience.

In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentation—the continuation of the state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infinitum.

Against this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human origin, that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and after many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle . . . ; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one’s forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it.

The higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been proved to be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism—a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu’s means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection—it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the thing must be made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.

The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea,” can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of perfection.

It is not Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity—the last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select.

The superior caste—I call it the fewest—has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum [few men are noble]: goodness is a privilege.

Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness—or indignation against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. “The world is perfect”—so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life. “Imperfection, whatever is inferior to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of this perfection.”

The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct.

They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others . . . . Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most honorable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because they are; they are not at liberty to play second.

The second caste: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from them all that is rough in the business of ruling—their followers, their right hand, their most apt disciples.

In all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing “made up”; whatever is to the contrary is made up—by it nature is brought to shame. . . . The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.

A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.

The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism.

The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization.

It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty . . . .

Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge . . . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights . . . . What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.

is section no. 43 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols.

43. Whispered to the conservatives. — What was not known formerly, what is known, or might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern “progress”). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.

First published in Cosmopolitan, January, 1936

Oswald Spengler, 1880 - 1936

The question whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.

Life is a struggle involving plants, animals, and humans. It is a struggle between individuals, social classes, peoples, and nations, and it can take the form of economic, social, political, and military competition. It is a struggle for the power to make one’s will prevail, to exploit one’s advantage, or to advance one’s opinion of what is just or expedient. When other means fail, recourse will be taken time and again to the ultimate means: violence. An individual who uses violence can be branded a criminal, a class can be called revolutionary or traitorous, a people bloodthirsty. But that does not alter the facts. Modern world-communism calls its wars “uprisings,” imperialist nations describe theirs as “pacification of foreign peoples.” And if the world existed as a unified state, wars would likewise be referred to as “uprisings.” The distinctions here are purely verbal.

Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous colored races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is always negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a static, terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence.

As long as man continues to evolve there will be wars. Should the white peoples ever become so tired of war that their governments can no longer incite them to wage it, the earth will inevitably fall a victim to the colored men, just as the Roman Empire succumbed to the Teutons. Pacifism means yielding power to the inveterate nonpacifists. Among the latter there will always be white men — adventurers, conquerors, leader-types — whose following increases with every success. If a revolt against the whites were to occur today in Asia, countless whites would join the rebels simply because they are tired of peaceful living.

Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage war again, the colored will act differently and be rulers of the world.

is section no. 38 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols. A discussion question: How might Nietzsche be used to explain why America’s founding generation and the presidents drawn from it were greater than every subsequent generation brought up under the system they created?

38. My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one’s cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of “pleasure.” The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.

How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by “tyrants” are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar. This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong.

Those large hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.

is section no. 39 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols.

39. Critique of modernity. — Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good enough for them. Democracy has ever been the form of decline in organizing power: in Human, All-Too-Human (I, 472) I already characterized modern democracy, together with its hybrids such as the “German Reich,” as the form of decline of the state. In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum. When this will is present, something like the imperium Romanum is founded; or like Russia, the only power today which has endurance, which can wait, which can still promise something — Russia, the concept that suggests the opposite of the wretched European nervousness and system of small states, which has entered a critical phase with the founding of the German Reich.

The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its “modern spirit” so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called “freedom.” That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the word “authority” is even spoken out loud. That is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political parties: instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end.

Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity. The rationality of marriage — that lay in the husband’s sole juridical responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage — that lay in its indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely momentary. It also lay in the family’s responsibility for the choice of a spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on “love” — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast — physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it.

James Fenimore Cooper, 1789 - 1851

In his Leatherstocking books, Fenimore is off on another track. He is no longer concerned with social white Americans that buzz with pins through them, buzz loudly against every mortal thing except the pin itself. The pin of the Great Ideal.

One gets irritated with Cooper because he never for once snarls at the Great Ideal Pin which transfixes him. No, indeed. Rather he tries to push it through the very heart of the Continent.

But I have loved the Leatherstocking books so dearly. Wish-fulfilment!

Anyhow, one is not supposed to take LOVE seriously, in these books. Eve Effingham, impaled on the social pin, conscious all the time of her own ego and of nothing else, suddenly fluttering in throes of love: no, it makes me sick. LOVE is never LOVE until it has a pin pushed through it and becomes an IDEAL. The ego, turning on a pin, is wildly IN LOVE, always. Because that’s the thing to be.

Cooper was a GENTLEMAN, in the worst sense of the word. In the Nineteenth Century sense of the word. A correct, clock-work man.

Not altogether, of course.

The great national Grouch was grinding inside him. Probably he called it COSMIC URGE. Americans usually do: in capital letters.

Best stick to National Grouch. The great American grouch.

Cooper had it, gentleman that he was. That is why he flitted round Europe so uneasily. Of course, in Europe he could be, and was, a gentleman to his heart’s content.

‘In short,’ he says in one of his letters, ‘we were at table two counts, one monsignore, an English Lord, an Ambassador, and my humble self.’

Were we really!

How nice it must have been to know that one self, at least, was humble.

And he felt the democratic American tomahawk wheeling over his uncomfortable scalp all the time.

The great American grouch.

Two monsters loomed on Cooper’s horizon.

MRS COOPER MY WORK
MY WORK MY WIFE
MY WIFE MY WORK
THE DEAR CHILDREN
MY WORK !!!

There you have the essential keyboard of Cooper’s soul.

If there is one thing that annoys me more than a business man and his BUSINESS, it is an artist, a writer, painter, musician, and MY WORK. When an artist says MY WORK, the flesh goes tired on my bones. When he says MY WIFE, I want to hit him.

Cooper grizzled about his work. Oh, heaven, he cared so much whether it was good or bad, and what the French thought, and what Mr Snippy Knowall said, and how Mrs Cooper took it. The pin, the pin!

But he was truly an artist: then an American: then a gentleman.

And the grouch grouched inside him, through all.

They seem to have been specially fertile in imagining themselves ‘under the wigwam’, do these Americans, just when their knees were comfortably under the mahogany, in Paris, along with the knees of

4 Counts
2 Cardinals
1 Milord
5 Cocottes
1 Humble self

You bet, though, that when the cocottes were being raffled off, Fenimore went home to his WIFE.

Wish Fulfilment Actuality

THE WIGWAM vs MY HOTEL

CHINGACHGOOK vs MY WIFE

NATTY BUMPPO vs MY HUMBLE SELF

Fenimore, lying in his Louis Quatorze hotel in Paris, passionately musing about Natty Bumppo and the pathless forest, and mixing his imagination with the Cupids and Butterflies on the painted ceiling, while Mrs Cooper was struggling with her latest gown in the next room, and the déjeuner was with the Countess at eleven . .

Men live by lies.

In actuality, Fenimore loved the genteel continent of Europe, and waited gasping for the newspapers to praise his WORK.

In another actuality he loved the tomahawking continent of America, and imagined himself Natty Bumppo.

His actual desire was to be: Monsieur Fenimore Cooper, le grand écrivain américain.

His innermost wish was to be: Natty Bumppo.

Now Natty and Fenimore, arm-in-arm, are an odd couple.

You can see Fenimore: blue coat, silver buttons, silver-and- diamond buckle shoes, ruffles.

You see Natty Bumppo: a grizzled, uncouth old renegade, with gaps in his old teeth and a drop on the end of his nose.

But Natty was Fenimore’s great wish: his wish-fulfilment.

‘It was a matter of course,’ says Mrs Cooper, ‘that he should dwell on the better traits of the picture rather than on the coarser and more revolting, though more common points. Like West, he could see Apollo in the young Mohawk.’

The coarser and more revolting, though more common points.

You see now why he depended so absolutely on MY WIFE. She had to look things in the face for him. The coarser and more revolting, and certainly more common points, she had to see.

He himself did so love seeing pretty-pretty, with the thrill of a red scalp now and then.

Fenimore, in his imagination, wanted to be Natty Bumppo, who, I am sure, belched after he had eaten his dinner. At the same time Mr Cooper was nothing if not a gentleman. So he decided to stay in France and have it all his own way.

In France, Natty would not belch after eating, and Chingachgook could be all the Apollo he liked.

As if ever any Indian was like Apollo. The Indians, with their curious female quality, their archaic figures, with high shoulders and deep, archaic waists, like a sort of woman! And their natural devilishness, their natural insidiousness.

But men see what they want to see: especially if they look from a long distance, across the ocean, for example.

Yet the Leatherstocking books are lovely. Lovely half-lies.

They form a sort of American Odyssey, with Natty Bumppo for Odysseus.

Only, in the original Odyssey, there is plenty of devil, Circes and swine and all. And Ithacus is devil enough to outwit the devils. But Natty is a saint with a gun, and the Indians are gentlemen through and through, though they may take an occasional scalp.

There are five Leatherstocking novels: a decrescendo of reality, and a crescendo of beauty.

I. Pioneers: A raw frontier-village on Lake Champlain, at the end of the eighteenth century. Must be a picture of Cooper’s home, as he knew it when a boy. A very lovely book. Natty Bumppo an old man, an old hunter half civilized.

2. The Last of the Mohicans: A historical fight between the British and the French, with Indians on both sides, at a Fort by Lake Champlain. Romantic flight of the British general’s two daughters, conducted by the scout, Natty, who is in the prime of life; romantic death of the last of the Delawares.

3. The Prairie: A wagon of some huge, sinister Kentuckians trekking west into the unbroken prairie. Prairie Indians, and Natty, an old, old man; he dies seated on a chair on the Rocky Mountains, looking east.

4. The Pathfinder: The Great Lakes. Natty, a man of about thirty-five, makes an abortive proposal to a bouncing damsel, daughter of the Sergeant at the Fort.

5. Deerslayer: Natty and Hurry Harry, both quite young, are hunting in the virgin wild. They meet two white women. Lake Champlain again.

These are the five Leatherstocking books: Natty Bumppo being Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, Deerslayer, according to his ages.

Now let me put aside my impatience at the unreality of this vision, and accept it as a wish-fulfilment vision, a kind of yearning myth. Because it seems to me that the things in Cooper that make one so savage, when one compares them with actuality, are perhaps, when one considers them as presentations of a deep subjective desire, real in their way, and almost prophetic.

The passionate love for America, for the soil of America, for example. As I say, it is perhaps easier to love America passionately, when you look at it through the wrong end of the telescope, across all the Atlantic water, as Cooper did so often, than when you are right there. When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and deep fear of what might be if they were not commonsensical.

Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape.

But probably, one day America will be as beautiful in actuality as it is in Cooper. Not yet, however. When the factories have fallen down again.

And again, this perpetual blood-brother theme of the Leatherstocking novels, Natty and Chingachgook, the Great Serpent. At present it is a sheer myth. The Red Man and the White Man are not blood-brothers: even when they are most friendly. When they are most friendly, it is as a rule the one betraying his race-spirit to the other. In the white man — rather high-brow — who ‘loves’ the Indian, one feels the white man betraying his own race. There is something unproud, underhand in it. Renegade. The same with the Americanized Indian who believes absolutely in the white mode. It is a betrayal. Renegade again.

In the actual flesh, it seems to me the white man and the red man cause a feeling of oppression, the one to the other, no matter what the good will. The red life flows in a different direction from the white life. You can’t make two streams that flow in opposite directions meet and mingle soothingly.

Certainly, if Cooper had had to spend his whole life in the backwoods, side by side with a Noble Red Brother, he would have screamed with the oppression of suffocation. He had to have Mrs Cooper, a straight strong pillar of society, to hang on to. And he had to have the culture of France to turn back to, or he would just have been stifled. The Noble Red Brother would have smothered him and driven him mad.

So that the Natty and Chingachgook myth must remain a myth. It is wish-fulfilment, an evasion of actuality. As we have said before, the folds of the Great Serpent would have been heavy, very heavy, too heavy, on any white man. Unless the white man were a true renegade, hating himself and his own race-spirit, as sometimes happens.

It seems there can be no fusion in the flesh. But the spirit can change. The white man’s spirit can never become as the red man’s spirit. It doesn’t want to. But it can cease to be the opposite and the negative of the red man’s spirit. It can open out a new great area of consciousness, in which there is room for the red spirit too.

To open out a new wide area of consciousness means to slough the old consciousness. The old consciousness has  become a tight-fitting prison to us, in which we are going rotten.

You can’t have a new, easy skin before you have sloughed the old, tight skin.

You can’t.

And you just can’t, so you may as well leave off pretending.

Now the essential history of the people of the United States seems to me just this: At the Renaissance the old consciousness was becoming a little tight. Europe sloughed her last skin, and started a new, final phase.

But some Europeans recoiled from the last final phase. They wouldn’t enter the cul de sac of post-Renaissance, ‘liberal’ Europe. They came to America.

They came to America for two reasons:

(1) To slough the old European consciousness completely.

(2) To grow a new skin underneath, a new form. This second is a hidden process.

The two processes go on, of course, simultaneously. The slow forming of the new skin underneath is the slow sloughing of the old skin. And sometimes this immortal serpent feels very happy, feeling a new golden glow of a strangely-patterned skin envelop him: and sometimes he feels very sick, as if his very entrails were being torn out of him, as he wrenches once more at his old skin, to get out of it.

Out! Out! he cries, in all kinds of euphemisms.

He’s got to have his new skin on him before ever he can get out.

And he’s got to get out before his new skin can ever be his own skin.

So there he is, a torn divided monster.

The true American, who writhes and writhes like a snake that is long in sloughing.

Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern.

It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.

It also needs a real belief in the new skin. Otherwise you are likely never to make the effort. Then you gradually sicken and go rotten and die in the old skin.

Now Fenimore stayed very safe inside the old skin: a gentleman, almost a European, as proper as proper can be. And, safe inside the odd skin, he imagined the gorgeous American pattern of a new skin.

He hated democracy. So he evaded it, and had a nice dream of something beyond democracy. But he belonged to democracy all the while.

Evasion! — Yet even that doesn’t make the dream worthless.

Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else.

Necessarily. It was a pis aller. It was the pis aller to European Liberty. It was a cruel form of sloughing. Men murdered themselves into this democracy. Democracy is the utter hardening of the old skin, the old form, the old psyche. It hardens till it is tight and fixed and inorganic. Then it must burst, like a chrysalis shell. And out must come the soft grub, or the soft damp butterfly of the American-at-last.

America has gone the pis aller of her democracy. Now she must slough even that, chiefly that, indeed. What did Cooper dream beyond democracy? Why, in his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo he dreamed the nucleus of a new society. That is, he dreamed a new human relationship. A stark, stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than love. So deep that it is loveless. The stark, loveless, wordless unison of two men who have come to the bottom of themselves  This is the new nucleus of a new society, the clue to a new world-epoch. It asks for a great and cruel sloughing first of all. Then it finds a great release into a new world, a new moral, a new landscape.

Natty and the Great Serpent are neither equals nor un- equals. Each obeys the other when the moment arrives. And each is stark and dumb in the other’s presence, starkly himself without illusion created. Each is just the crude pillar of a man, the crude living column of his own manhood. And each knows the godhead of this crude column of manhood. A new relationship.

The Leatherstocking novels create the myth of this new relation. And they go backwards, from old age to golden youth. That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth. It is the myth of America.

You start with actuality. Pioneers is no doubt Cooperstown when Cooperstown was in the stage of inception: a village of one wild street of log cabins under the forest hills by Lake Champlain: a village of crude, wild frontiersmen, reacting against civilization.

Towards this frontier-village in the winter time, a negro slave drives a sledge through the mountains, over deep snow. In the sledge sits a fair damsel, Miss Temple, with her handsome pioneer father, Judge Temple. They hear a shot in the trees. It is the old hunter and backwoodsman, Natty Bumppo, long and lean and uncouth, with a long rifle and gaps in his teeth.

Judge Temple, is ‘squire’ of the village, and he has a ridiculous, commodious ‘hall’ for his residence. It is still the old English form. Miss Temple is a pattern young lady, like Eve Effingham: in fact, she gets a young and very genteel but impoverished Effingham for a husband. The old world holding its own on the edge of the wild. A bit tiresomely too, with rather more prunes and prisms than one can digest. Too romantic.

Against the ‘hall’ and the gentry, the real frontiers-folk, the rebels. The two groups meet at the village inn, and at the frozen church, and at the Christmas sports, and on the ice of the lake, and at the great pigeon shoot. It is a beautiful, resplendent picture of life. Fenimore puts in only the glamour.

Perhaps my taste is childish, but these scenes in Pioneers seem to me marvellously beautiful. The raw village street, with woodfires blinking through the unglazed window-chinks, on a winter’s night. The inn, with the rough woodsman and the drunken Indian John; the church, with the snowy congregation crowding to the fire. Then the lavish abundance of Christmas cheer, and turkey-shooting in the snow. Spring coming, forests all green, maple sugar taken from the trees: and clouds of pigeons flying from the south, myriads of pigeons shot in heaps; and night-fishing on the teeming, virgin lake; and deer-hunting.

Pictures! Some of the loveliest, most glamorous pictures in  all literature.

Alas, without the cruel iron of reality. It is all real enough. Except that one realizes that Fenimore was writing from a safe distance, where he would idealize and have his wish-fulfilment.

Because, when one comes to America, one finds that there is always a certain slightly devilish resistance in the American landscape, and a certain slightly bitter resistance in the white man’s heart. Hawthorne gives this. But Cooper glosses it over.

The American landscape has never been at one with the white man. Never. And white men have probably never felt so bitter anywhere, as here in America, where the very landscape, in its very beauty, seems a bit devilish and grinning, opposed to us.

Cooper, however, glosses over this resistance, which in actuality can never quite be glossed over. He wants the landscape to be at one with him. So he goes away to Europe and sees it as such. It is a sort of vision.

And, nevertheless, the oneing will surely take place — some day.  The myth is the story of Natty. The old, lean hunter and backwoodsman lives with his friend, the gray-haired Indian John, an old Delaware chief, in a hut within reach of the village. The Delaware is christianized and bears the Christian name of John. He is tribeless and lost. He humiliates his grey hairs in drunkenness, and dies, thankful to be dead, in a forest fire, passing back to the fire whence he derived.

And this is Chingachgook, the splendid Great Serpent of the later novels.

No doubt Cooper, as a boy, knew both Natty and the Indian John. No doubt they fired his imagination even then. When he is a man, crystallized in society and sheltering behind the safe pillar of Mrs Cooper, these two old fellows become a myth to his soul. He traces himself to a new youth in them.

As for the story: Judge Temple has just been instrumental in passing the wise game laws. But Natty has lived by his gun all his life in the wild woods, and simply childishly cannot understand how he can be poaching on the Judge’s land among the pine trees. He shoots a deer in the close season. The Judge is all sympathy, but the law must be enforced. Bewildered Natty, an old man of seventy, is put in stocks and in prison. They release him as soon as possible. But the thing was done.

The letter killeth.

Natty’s last connection with his own race is broken. John, the Indian, is dead. The old hunter disappears, lonely and severed, into the forest, away, away from his race.

In the new epoch that is coming, there will be no letter of the law.

Chronologically, The Last of the Mohicans follows Pioneers. But in the myth, The Prairie comes next.

Cooper of course knew his own America. He travelled west and saw the prairies, and camped with the Indians of the prairie.

The Prairie, like Pioneers, bears a good deal the stamp of actuality. It is a strange, splendid book, full of sense of doom. The figures of the great Kentuckian men, with their wolf-women, loom colossal on the vast prairie, as they camp with their wagons. These are different pioneers from Judge Temple. Lurid, brutal, tinged with the sinisterness of crime; these are the gaunt white men who push west, push on and on against the natural opposition of the continent. On towards a doom. Great wings of vengeful doom seem spread over the west, grim against the intruder. You feel them again in Frank Norris’s novel, The Octopus. While in the West of Bret Harte there is a very devil in the air, and beneath him are sentimental self-conscious people being wicked and goody by evasion.

In The Prairie there is a shadow of violence and dark cruelty flickering in the air. It is the aboriginal demon hovering over the core of the continent. It hovers still, and the dread is still there.

Into such a prairie enters the huge figure of Ishmael, ponderous, pariah-like Ishmael and his huge sons and his were-wolf wife. With their wagons they roll on from the frontiers of Kentucky, like Cyclops into the savage wilderness. Day after day they seem to force their way into oblivion. But their force of penetration ebbs. They are brought to a stop. They recoil in the throes of murder and entrench themselves in isolation on a hillock in the midst of the prairie. There they hold out like demi-gods against the elements and the subtle Indian.

The pioneering brute invasion of the West, crime-tinged! And into this setting, as a sort of minister of peace, enters the old hunter Natty, and his suave, horse-riding Sioux Indians. But he seems like a shadow.

The hills rise softly west, to the Rockies. There seems a new peace: or is it only suspense, abstraction, waiting? Is it only a sort of beyond ?

Natty lives in these hills, in a village of the suave, horse-riding Sioux. They revere him as an old wise father.

In these hills he dies, sitting in his chair and looking far east, to the forest and great sweet waters, whence he came. He dies gently, in physical peace with the land and the Indians. He is an old, old man.

Cooper could see no further than the foothills where Natty died, beyond the prairie.

The other novels bring us back east.

The Last of the Mohicans is divided between real historical narrative and true ‘romance’. For myself, I prefer the romance. It has a myth meaning, whereas the narrative is chiefly record.

For the first time we get actual women: the dark, handsome Cora and her frail sister, the White Lily. The good old division, the dark sensual woman and the clinging, submissive little blonde, who is so ‘pure’.

These sisters are fugitives through the forest, under the protection of a Major Heyward, a young American officer and Englishman. He is just a ‘white’ man, very good and brave and generous, etc., but limited, most definitely borne. He would probably love Cora, if he dared, but he finds it safer to adore the clinging White Lily of a younger sister.

This trio is escorted by Natty, now Leatherstocking, a hunter and scout in the prime of life, accompanied by his inseparable friend Chingachgook, and the Delaware’s beautiful son — Adonis rather than Apollo — Uncas, The last of the Mohicans.

There is also a ‘wicked’ Indian, Magua, handsome and injured incarnation of evil.

Cora is the scarlet flower of womanhood, fierce, passionate offspring of some mysterious union between the British officer and a Creole woman in the West Indies. Cora loves Uncas, Uncas loves Cora. But Magua also desires Cora, violently desires her. A lurid little circle of sensual fire. So Fenimore kills them all off, Cora, Uncas, and Magua, and leaves the White Lily to carry on the race. She will breed plenty of white children to Major Heyward. These tiresome ‘lilies that fester’, of our day.

Evidently Cooper — or the artist in him — has decided that there can be no blood-mixing of the two races, white and red. He kills ‘em off.

Beyond all this heart-beating stand the figures of Natty and Chingachgook: two childless, womanless men, of opposite races. They are the abiding thing. Each of them is alone, and final in his race. And they stand side by side, stark, abstract, beyond emotion, yet eternally together. All the other loves seem frivolous. This is the new great thing, the clue, the inception of a new humanity.

And Natty, what sort of a white man is he? Why, he is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer.

Twice, in the book, he brings an enemy down hurtling in death through the air, downwards. Once it is the beautiful, wicked Magua — shot from a height, and hurtling down ghastly through space, into death.

This is Natty, the white forerunner. A killer. As in Deerslayer, he shoots the bird that flies in the high, high sky so that the bird falls out of the invisible into the visible, dead, he symbolizes himself. He will bring the bird of the spirit out of the high air. He is the stoic American killer of the old great life. But he kills, as he says, only to live.

Pathfinder takes us to the Great Lakes, and the glamour and beauty of sailing the great sweet waters. Natty is now called Pathfinder. He is about thirty-five years old, and he falls in love. The damsel is Mabel Dunham, daughter of Sergeant Dunham of the Fort garrison. She is blonde and in all things admirable. No doubt Mrs Cooper was very much like Mabel.

And Pathfinder doesn’t marry her. She won’t have him. She wisely prefers a more comfortable Jasper. So Natty goes off to grouch, and to end by thanking his stars. When he had got right dear, and sat by the campfire with Chingachgook, in the forest, didn’t he just thank his stars ! A lucky escape!

Men of an uncertain age are liable to these infatuations. They aren’t always lucky enough to be rejected.

Whatever would poor Mabel have done, had she been Mrs Bumppo?

Natty had no business marrying. His mission was elsewhere.

The most fascinating Leatherstocking book is the last, Deerslayer. Natty is now a fresh youth, called Deerslayer. But  the kind of silent prim youth who is never quite young, but reserves himself for different things.

It is a gem of a book. Or a bit of perfect paste. And myself, I like a bit of perfect paste in a perfect setting, so long as I am not fooled by presence of reality. And the setting of Deerslayer could not be more exquisite. Lake Champlain again.

Of course it never rains: it is never cold and muddy and dreary: no one has wet feet or toothache: no one ever feels filthy, when they can’t wash for a week. God knows what the women would really have looked like, for they fled through the wilds without soap, comb, or towel. They breakfasted off a chunk of meat, or nothing, lunched the same and supped the same.

Yet at every moment they are elegant, perfect ladies, in correct toilet.

Which isn’t quite fair. You need only go camping for a week, and you’ll see.

But it is a myth, not a realistic tale. Read it as a lovely myth. Lake Glimmerglass.

Deerslayer, the youth with the long rifle, is found in the woods with a big, handsome, blonde-bearded backwoodsman called Hurry Harry. Deerslayer seems to have been born under a hemlock tree out of a pine-cone: a young man of the woods. He is silent, simple, philosophic, moralistic, and an unerring shot. His simplicity is the simplicity of age rather than of youth. He is race-old. All his reactions and impulses are fixed, static. Almost he is sexless, so race-old. Yet intelligent, hardy, dauntless.

Hurry Harry is a big blusterer, just the opposite of Deerslayer. Deerslayer keeps the centre of his own consciousness steady and unperturbed. Hurry Harry is one of those floundering people who bluster from one emotion to another, very self-conscious, without any centre to them.

These two young men are making their way to a lovely, smallish lake, Lake Glimmerglass. On this water the Hutter family has established itself. Old Hutter, it is suggested, has a criminal, coarse, buccaneering past, and is a sort of fugitive from justice. But he is a good enough father to his two grown-up girls. The family lives in a log hut ‘castle’, built on piles in the water, and the old man has also constructed an ‘ark’, a sort of house-boat, in which he can take his daughters when he goes on his rounds to trap the beaver.

The two girls are the inevitable dark and light. Judith, dark, fearless, passionate, a little lurid with sin, is the scarlet-and-black blossom. Hetty, the younger, blonde, frail and innocent, is the white lily again. But alas, the lily has begun to fester. She is slightly imbecile.

The two hunters arrive at the lake among the woods just as war has been declared. The Hutters are unaware of the fact. And hostile Indians are on the lake already. So, the story of thrills and perils.

Thomas Hardy’s inevitable division of women into dark and fair, sinful and innocent, sensual and pure, is Cooper’s division too. It is indicative of the desire in the man. He wants sensuality and sin, and he wants purity end ‘innocence’. If the innocence goes a little rotten, slightly imbecile, bad luck!

Hurry Harry, of course, like a handsome impetuous meat fly, at once wants Judith, the lurid poppy-blossom. Judith rejects him with scorn.

Judith, the sensual woman, at once wants the quiet, reserved, unmastered Deerslayer. She wants to master him. And Deerslayer is half tempted, but never more than half. He is not going to be mastered. A philosophic old soul, he does not give much for the temptations of sex. Probably he dies virgin.

And he is right of it. Rather than be dragged into a false heat of deliberate sensuality, he will remain alone. His soul is alone, for ever alone. So he will preserve his integrity, and remain alone in the flesh. It is a stoicism which is honest and fearless, and from which Deerslayer never lapses, except when, approaching middle age, he proposes to the buxom Mabel.

He lets his consciousness penetrate in loneliness into the new continent. His contacts are not human. He wrestles with the spirits of the forest and the American wild, as a hermit wrestles with God and Satan. His one meeting is with Chingachgook, and this meeting is silent, reserved, across an unpassable distance.

Hetty, the White Lily, being imbecile, although full of vaporous religion and the dear, good God, ‘who governs all things by his providence’, is hopelessly infatuated with Hurry Harry. Being innocence gone imbecile, like Dostoevsky’s Idiot, she longs to give herself to the handsome meat-fly. Of course he doesn’t want her.

And so nothing happens: in that direction. Deerslayer goes off to meet Chingachgook, and help him woo an Indian maid. Vicarious.

It is the miserable story of the collapse of the white psyche. The white man’s mind and soul are divided between these two things: innocence and lust, the Spirit and Sensuality. Sensuality always carries a stigma, and is therefore more deeply desired, or lusted after. But spirituality alone gives the sense of uplift, exaltation, and ‘winged life’, with the inevitable reaction into sin and spite. So the white man is divided against himself. He plays off one side of himself against the other side, till it is really a tale told by an idiot, and nauseating.

Against this, one is forced to admire the stark, enduring figure of Deerslayer. He is neither spiritual nor sensual. He is a moralizer, but he always tries to moralize from actual experience, not from theory. He says: ‘Hurt nothing unless you’re forced to.’ Yet he gets his deepest thrill of gratification, perhaps, when he puts a bullet through the heart of a beautiful buck, as it stoops to drink at the lake. Or when he brings the invisible bird fluttering down in death, out of the high blue. ‘Hurt nothing unless you’re forced to.’ And yet he lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth.

It’s not good enough.

But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Of course, the soul often breaks down into disintegration, and you have lurid sin and Judith, imbecile innocence lusting, in Hetty, and bluster, bragging, and self-conscious strength, in Harry. But there are the disintegration products.

What true myth concerns itself with is not the disintegration product. True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of the integral soul. And this, for America, is Deerslayer. A man who turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white.

This is the very intrinsic — most American. He is at the core of all the other flux and fluff. And when this man breaks from his static isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening.

Studies in Classic American Literature

Benjamin Franklin, 1706 - 1790

The Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man? I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanical contrivance.

Education! Which of the various me’s do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress?

Anyhow, I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to supress me, according to your dummy standards.

The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio D¡az?

There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this patience?

Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you want to be?

Is Yale College going to educate the self that is in the dark of you, or Harvard College?

The ideal self! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red eyes in the dark? This is the self who is coming into his own.

The perfectibility of man, dear God! When every man as long as he remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men. Which of these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other?

Old Daddy Franklin will tell you. He’ll rig him up for you, the pattern American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American. He knew what he was about, the sharp little man. He set up the first dummy American.

At the beginning of his career this cunning little Benjamin  drew up for himself a creed that should ‘satisfy the professors of every religion, but shock none’.

Now wasn’t that a real American thing to do ?

‘ That there is One God, who made all things.’

(But Benjamin made Him.)

‘That He governs the world by His Providence.’

(Benjamin knowing all about Providence.)

‘ That He ought to be worshipped with adoration, prayer, and thanks- giving.’

(Which cost nothing.)

‘But–’ But me no buts, Benjamin, saith the Lord.

‘But that the most acceptable service of God is doing good to men.’

(God having no choice in the matter.)

‘ That the soul is immortal.’

(You’ll see why, in the next clause.)

‘And that God will certainly reward virtue and punish vice, either here or hereafter.’

Now if Mr Andrew Carnegie, or any other millionaire, had wished to invent a God to suit his ends, he could not have done better. Benjamin did it for him in the eighteenth century. God is the supreme servant of men who want to get on, to produce. Providence. The provider. The heavenly storekeeper. The everlasting Wanamaker.

And this is all the God the grandsons of the Pilgrim Fathers had left. Aloft on a pillar of dollars.

‘ That the soul is immortal.’

The trite way Benjamin says it!

But man has a soul, though you can’t locate it either in his purse or his pocket-book or his heart or his stomach or his head. The wholeness of a man is his soul. Not merely that nice little comfortable bit which Benjamin marks out.

It’s a queer thing is a man’s soul. It is the whole of him. Which means it is the unknown him, as well as the known. It seems to me just funny, professors and Benjamins fixing the functions of the soul. Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden. And we’ve all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of things. Hail Columbia !

The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the Romans so, and out of which came the white-skinned hordes of the next civilization.

Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!

Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man, and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsoothl And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound for ever? More fools they.

This is Benjamin’s barbed wire fence. He made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a grey nag in a paddock.

1. TEMPERANCE

Eat not to fulness; drink not to elevation.

2. SILENCE

Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. ORDER

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. RESOLUTION

Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. FRUGALITY

Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself i.e., waste nothing.

6. INDUSTRY

Lose no time, be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary action.

7. SINCERITY

Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. JUSTICE

Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. MODERATION

Avoid extremes, forbear resenting injuries as much as you think they deserve.

10. CLEANLINESS

Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.

11. TRANQUILLITY

Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. CHASTITY

Rarely use venery but for health and offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

13. HUMILITY

Imitate Jesus and Socrates.A Quaker friend told Franklin that he, Benjamin, was generally considered proud, so Benjamin put in the Humility touch as an afterthought. The amusing part is the sort of humility it displays. ‘Imitate Jesus and Socrates,’ and mind you don’t outshine either of these two. One can just imagine Socrates and Alcibiades roaring in their cups over Philadel- phian Benjamin, and Jesus looking at him a little puzzled, and murmuring: ‘Aren’t you wise in your own conceit, Ben?’

Henceforth be masterless,’ retorts Ben. ‘ Be ye each one his own master unto himself, and don’t let even the Lord put His spoke in.’ ‘Each man his own master’ is but a puffing up of masterlessness.

Well, the first of Americans practiced this enticing list with assiduity, setting a national example. He had the virtues in columns, and gave himself good and bad marks according as he thought his behaviour deserved. Pity these conduct charts are lost to us. He only remarks that Order was his stumbling  block. He could not learn to be neat and tidy.

Isn’t it nice to have nothing worse to confess ?

He was a little model, was Benjamin. Doctor Franklin. Snuff-coloured little man! Immortal soul and all!

The immortal soul part was a sort of cheap insurance policy.

Benjamin had no concern, really, with the immortal soul. He was too busy with social man.

(1) He swept and lighted the streets of young Philadelphia.

(2) He invented electrical appliances.

(3) He was the centre of a moralizing club in Philadelphia, and he wrote the moral humorisms of Poor Richard.

(4) He was a member of all the important councils of Philadelphia, and then of the American colonies.

(5) He won the cause of American Independence at the French Court, and was the economic father of the United States.

Now what more can you want of a man? And yet he is infra dig., even in Philadelphia.

I admire him. I admire his sturdy courage first of all, then his sagacity, then his glimpsing into the thunders of electricity, then his common-sense humour. All the qualities of a great man, and never more than a great citizen. Middle-sized, sturdy, snuff-coloured Doctor Franklin, one of the soundest citizens that ever trod or ‘used venery’.

I do not like him.

And, by the way, I always thought books of Venery were about hunting deer.

There is a certain earnest naivet‚ about him. Like a child. And like a little old man. He has again become as a little child, always as wise as his grandfather, or wiser.

Perhaps, as I say, the most complete citizen that ever ‘used venery’.

Printer, philosopher, scientist, author and patriot, impeccable husband and citizen, why isn’t he an archetype?

Pioneer, Oh Pioneers! Benjamin was one of the greatest pioneers of the United States. Yet we just can’t do with him.

What’s wrong with him then ? Or what’s wrong with us ?

I can remember, when I was a little boy, my father used to buy a scrubby yearly almanac with the sun and moon and stars on the cover. And it used to prophesy bloodshed and famine. But also crammed in corners it had little anecdotes and humorisms, with a moral tag. And I used to have my little priggish laugh at the woman who counted her chickens before they were hatched and so forth, and I was convinced that honesty was the best policy, also a little priggishly. The author of these bits was Poor Richard, and Poor Richard was Benjamin Franklin, writing in Philadelphia well over a hundred years before.

And probably I haven’t got over those Poor Richard tags yet. I rankle still with them. They are thorns in young flesh.

Because, although I still believe that honesty is the best policy, I dislike policy altogether; though it is just as well not to count your chickens before they are hatched, it’s still more hateful to count them with gloating when they are hatched. It has taken me many years and countless smarts to get out of that barbed wire moral enclosure that Poor Richard rigged up. Here am I now in tatters and scratched to ribbons, sitting in the middle of Benjamin’s America looking at the barbed wire, and the fat sheep crawling under the fence to get fat outside, and the watch-dogs yelling at the gate lest by chance anyone should get out by the proper exit. Oh America! Oh Benjamin! And I just utter a long loud curse against Benjamin and the American corral.

Moral America! Most moral Benjamin. Sound, satisfied Ben!

He had to go to the frontiers of his State to settle some disturbance among the Indians. On this occasion he writes:

We found that they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women quarrelling and fighting. Their dark-coloured bodies, half-naked, seen only by the  gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with fire-brands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could be well imagined. There was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice.

The next day, sensible they had misbehaved in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their counsellors to make their apology. The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum, and then endeavoured to excuse the rum by saying: ‘The Great Spirit, who made all things, made everything for some use; and whatever he designed anything for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he had made the rum, he said: ” Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with.” And it must be so.’

And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited all the seacoast . . .

This, from the good doctor with such suave complacency, is a little disenchanting. Almost too good to bc true.

But there you are! The barbed wire fence. ‘Extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth.’ Oh, Benjamin Franklin! He even ‘ used venery’ as a cultivator of seed.

Cultivate the earth, ye gods! The Indians did that, as much as they needed. And they left off there. Who built Chicago? Who cultivated the earth until it spawned Pittsburgh, Pa?

The moral issue! Just look at it! Cultivation included. If it’s a mere choice of Kultur or cultivation, I give it up.

Which brings us right back to our question, what’s wrong with Benjamin, that we can’t stand him? Or else, what’s wrong with us, that we kind fault with such a paragon?

Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I’m going to remain such. I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. ‘This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,’ saith Benjamin, and all America with him. ‘But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on the bad tap.’

I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don’t work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance- silence-order- resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity – justice- moderation-cleanliness-tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I’m really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me.

Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s. This is what I believe:

‘That I am I.’

‘ That my soul is a dark forest.’

‘That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.’

‘That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.’

‘ That I must have the courage to let them come and go.’

‘ That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.’

There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.

Then for a ‘list’. It is rather fun to play at Benjamin.

1. TEMPERANCE

Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don’t sit down without one of the gods.

2. SILENCE

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

3. ORDER

Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest. Recognize your superiors and your inferiors, according to the gods. This is  the root of all order.

4. RESOLUTION

Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to sacrifice the smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be killed the same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the men in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost.

5. FRUGALITY

Demand nothing; accept what you see fit. Don’t waste your pride or squander your emotion.

6. INDUSTRY

Lose no time with ideals; serve the Holy Ghost; never serve mankind.

7. SINCERITY

To be sincere is to remember that I am I, and that the other man is not me.

8. JUSTICE

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

9. MODERATION

Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.

10. CLEANLINESS

Don’t be too clean. It impoverishes the blood.

11. TRANQUILITY

The soul has many motions, many gods come and go. Try and find your deepest issue, in every confusion, and abide by that. Obey the man in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost; command when your honour comes to command.

12. CHASTITY

Never ‘use’ venery at all. Follow your passional impulse, if it be answered in the other being; but never have any motive in mind, neither offspring nor health nor even pleasure, nor even service. Only know that ‘venery’ is of the great gods. An offering-up of yourself to the very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else.

13. HUMILITY

See all men and women according to the Holy Ghost that is within them. Never yield before the barren.There’s my list. I have been trying dimly to realize it for a long time, and only America and old Benjamin have at last goaded me into trying to formulate it.

And now I, at least, know why I can’t stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom. For how can any man be free, without an illimitable background? And Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes.

And how can I be free, without gods that come and go? But Benjamin won’t let anything exist except my useful fellow men, and I’m sick of them; as for his Godhead, his Providence, He is Head of nothing except a vast heavenly store that keeps every imaginable line of goods, from victrolas to cat-o’-nine tails.

And how can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes in and won’t sell at any price? But Benjamin doesn’t let me have a soul of my own. He says I am nothing but a servant of mankind — galley-slave I call it — and if I don’t get my wages here below — that is, if Mr Pierpont Morgan or Mr Nosey Hebrew or the grand United States Government, the great US, US or SOMEOFUS, manages to scoop in my bit, along with their lump — why, never mind, I shall get my wages HEREAFTER.

Oh Benjamin! Oh Binjum! You do NOT suck me in any longer.

And why, oh why should the snuff-coloured little trap have wanted to take us all in? Why did he do it?

Out of sheer human cussedness, in the first place. We do all like to get things inside a barbed wire corral. Especially our fellow men. We love to round them up inside the barbed wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make ‘em work. ‘ Work, you free jewel, WORK!’ shouts the liberator, cracking his whip. Benjamin, I will not work. I do not choose to be a free democrat. I am absolutely a servant of my own Holy Ghost.

Sheer cussedness! But there was as well the salt of a subtler purpose. Benjamin was just in his eyeholes — to use an English vulgarism, meaning he was just delighted — when he was at Paris judiciously milking money out of the French monarchy for the overthrow of all monarchy. If you want to ride your horse to somewhere you must put a bit in his mouth. And Benjamin wanted to ride his horse so that it would upset the whole apple-cart of the old masters. He wanted the whole European apple-cart upset. So he had to put a strong bit in the mouth of his ass.

‘Henceforth be masterless.’

That is, he had to break-in the human ass completely, so that much more might be broken, in the long run. For the moment it was the British Government that had to have a hole knocked in it. The first real hole it ever had: the breach of the American rebellion.

Benjamin, in his sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world was a long process. In the depths of his own underconsciousness he hated England, he hated Europe, he hated  the whole corpus of the European being. He wanted to be American. But you can’t change your nature and mode of consciousness like changing your shoes. It is a gradual shedding. Years must go by, and centuries must elapse before you have finished. Like a son escaping from the domination of his parents. The escape is not just one rupture. It is a long and half-secret process.

So with the American. He was a European when he first went over the Atlantic. He is in the main a recreant European still. From Benjamin Franklin to Woodrow Wilson may be a long stride, but it is a stride along the same road. There is no new road. The same old road, become dreary and futile. Theoretic and materialistic.

Why then did Benjamin set up this dummy of a perfect citizen as a pattern to America ? Of course, he did it in perfect good faith, as far as he knew. He thought it simply was the true ideal. But what we think we do is not very important. We never really know what we are doing. Either we are materialistic instruments, like Benjamin, or we move in the gesture of creation, from our deepest self, usually unconscious. We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. IT is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us. The best we can do is to try to hold ourselves in unison with the deeps which are inside us. And the worst we can do is to try to have things our own way, when we run counter to IT, and in the long run get our knuckles rapped for our presumption.

So Benjamin contriving money out of the Court of France. He was contriving the first steps of the overthrow of all Europe, France included. You can never have a new thing without breaking an old. Europe happens to be the old thing. America, unless the people in America assert themselves too much in opposition to the inner gods, should be the new thing. The new thing is the death of the old. But you can’t cut the throat of an epoch. You’ve got to steal the life from it through several centuries.

And Benjamin worked for this both directly and indirectly. Directly, at the Court of France, making a small but very dangerous hole in the side of England, through which hole Europe has by now almost bled to death. And indirectly in Philadelphia, setting up this unlovely, snuff-coloured little ideal, or automaton, of a pattern American. The pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat, has done more to ruin the old Europe than any Russian nihilist. He has done it by slow attrition, like a son who has stayed at home and obeyed his parents, all the while silently hating their authority, and silently, in his soul, destroying not only their authority but their whole existence. For the American spiritually stayed at home in Europe. The spiritual home of America was, and still is, Europe. This is the galling bondage, in spite of several billions of heaped-up gold. Your heaps of gold are only so many muck-heaps, America, and will remain so till  you become a reality to yourselves.

All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-nots, and shut up fast in her own ‘productive’ machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce.

Now is your chance, Europe. Now let Hell loose and get your own back, and paddle your own canoe on a new sea, while clever America lies on her muck-heaps of gold, strangled in her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shalt-not moralisms. While she goes out to work like millions of squirrels in millions of cages. Production!

Let Hell loose, and get your own back, Europe!

James Fenimore Cooper, 1789 - 1851

Benjamin Franklin had a specious little equation in providential mathematics:

Rum + Savage = 0. Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on.

Rum plus Savage may equal a dead savage. But is a dead savage nought? Can you make a land virgin by killing off its aborigines ?

The Aztec is gone, and the Incas. The Red lndian, the Esquimo, the Patagonian are reduced to negligible numbers.

0u sont les neiges d’antan?

My dear, wherever they are, they will come down again next winter, sure as houses.

Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.

The Red Man died hating the white man. What remnant of him lives, lives hating the white man. Go near the Indians, and you just feel it. As far as we are concerned, the Red Man is subtly and unremittingly diabolic. Even when he doesn’t know it. He is dispossessed in life, and unforgiving. He doesn’t believe in us and our civilization, and so is our mystic enemy, for we push him off the face of the earth.

Belief is a mysterious thing. It is the only healer of the soul’s wounds. There is no belief in the world.

The Red Man is dead, disbelieving in us. He is dead and unappeased. Do not imagine him happy in his Happy Hunting Ground. No. Only those that die in belief die happy. Those that are pushed out of life in chagrin come back unappeased, for revenge.

A curious thing about the Spirit of Place is the fact that no place exerts its full influence upon a new-comer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America. While the Red Indian existed in fairly large numbers, the new colonials were in a great measure immune from the daimon, or demon, of America. The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. At present the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act within the unconscious or under-conscious soul of the white American, causing the great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness, sometimes. The Mexican is macabre and disintegrated in his own way. Up till now, the unexpressed spirit of America has worked covertly in the American, the white American soul. But within the present generation the surviving Red Indians are due to merge in the great white swamp. Then the Daimon of America will work overtly, and we shall see real changes.

There has been all the time, in the white American soul, a dual feeling about the Indian. First was Franklin’s feeling, that a wise Providence no doubt intended the extirpation of these savages. Then came Crevecoeur’s contradictory feeling about the noble Red Man and the innocent life of the wigwam. Now we hate to subscribe to Benjamin’s belief in a Providence that wisely extirpates the Indian to make room for ‘cultivators of the soil’. In Crevecoeur we meet a sentimental desire for the glorification of the savages. Absolutely sentimental. Hector pops over to Paris to enthuse about the wigwam.

The desire to extirpate the Indian. And the contradictory desire to glorify him. Both are rampant still, today.

The bulk of the white people who live in contact with the Indian today would like to see this Red brother exterminated; not only for the sake of grabbing his land, but because of the silent, invisible, but deadly hostility between the spirit of the two races. The minority of whites intellectualize the Red Man and laud him to the skies. But this minority of whites is mostly a high-brow minority with a big grouch against its own whiteness. So there you are.

I doubt if there is possible any real reconciliation, in the flesh, between the white and the red. For instance, a Red Indian girl who is servant in the white man’s home, if she is treated with natural consideration, will probably serve well, even happily. She is happy with the new power over the white woman’s kitchen. The white world makes her feel prouder, so long as she is free to go back to her own people at the given times. But she is happy because she is playing at being a white woman. There are other Indian women who would never serve the white people, and who would rather die than have a white man for a lover.

In either case, there is no reconciliation. There is no mystic conjunction between the spirit of the two races. The Indian girl who happily serves white people leaves out her own race-consideration, for the time being.

Supposing a white man goes out hunting in the mountains with an Indian. The two will probably get on like brothers. But let the same white man go alone with two Indians, and there will start a most subtle persecution of the unsuspecting white. If they, the Indians, discover that he has a natural fear of steep places, then over every precipice in the country will the trail lead. And so on. Malice! That is the basic feeling in the Indian heart, towards the white. It may even be purely unconscious.

Supposing an Indian loves a white woman, and lives with her. He will probably be very proud of it, for he will be a big man among his own people, especially if the white mistress has money. He will never get over the feeling of pride at dining in a white dining-room and smoking in a white drawing-room. But at the same time he will subtly jeer at his white mistress, try to destroy her white pride. He will submit to her, if he is forced to, with a kind of false, unwilling childishness, and even love her with the same childlike gentleness, sometimes beautiful. But at the bottom of his heart he is gibing, gibing, gibing at her. Not only is it the sex resistance, but the race resistance as well.

There seems to be no reconciliation in the flesh. That leaves us only expiation, and then reconciliation in the soul. Some strange atonement: expiation and oneing.

Fenimore Cooper has probably done more than any writer to present the Red Man to the white man. But Cooper’s presentment is indeed a wish-fulfilment. That is why Fenimore is such a success still.

Modern critics begrudge Cooper his success. I think I resent it a little myself. This popular wish-fulfilment stuff makes it so hard for the real thing to come through, later.

Cooper was a rich American of good family. His father founded Cooperstown, by Lake Champlain. And Fenimore was a gentleman of culture. No denying it.

It is amazing how cultured these Americans of the first half of the eighteenth century were. Most intensely so. Austin Dobson and Andrew Lang are flea-bites in comparison. Volumes of very raffine light verse and finely drawn familiar literature will prove it to anyone who cares to commit himself to these elderly books. The English and French writers of the same period were clumsy and hoydenish, judged by the same standards.

Truly, European decadence was anticipated in America; and American influence passed over to Europe, was assimilated there, and then returned to this land of innocence as something purplish in its modernity and a little wicked. So absurd things are.

Cooper quotes a Frenchman, who says, ‘L’Am‚rique est pourrie avant d’etre mure.’ And there is a great deal in it. America was not taught by France — by Baudelaire, for example. Baudelaire learned his lesson from America.

Cooper’s novels fall into two classes: his white novels, such asHomeward Bound, Eve Effingham, The Spy, The Pilot, and then the Leatherstocking Series. Let us look at the white novels first.

The Effinghams are three extremely refined, genteel Americans who are ‘Homeward Bound’ from England to the States. Their party consists of father, daughter, and uncle, and faithful nurse. The daughter has just finished her education in Europe. She has, indeed, skimmed the cream off Europe. England, France, Italy, and Germany have nothing more to teach her. She is bright and charming, admirable creature; a real modern heroine; intrepid, calm, and self-collected, yet admirably impulsive, always in perfectly good taste; clever and assured in her speech, like a man, but withal charmingly deferential and modest before the stronger sex. It is the perfection of the ideal female. We have learned to shudder at her, but Cooper still admired.

On board is the other type of American, the parvenu, the demagogue, who has ‘done’ Europe and put it in his breeches pocket, in a month. Oh, Septimus Dodge, if a European had drawn you, that European would never have been forgiven by America. But an American drew you, so Americans wisely ignore you.

Septimus is the American self-made man. God had no hand in his make-up. He made himself. He has been to Europe, no doubt seen everything, including the Venus de Milo. ‘What, is that the Venus de Milo?’ And he turns his back on the lady. He’s seen her. He’s got her. She’s a fish he has hooked, and he’s off to America with her, leaving the scum of a statue standing in the Louvre.

That is one American way of Vandalism. The original Vandals would have given the complacent dame a knock with a battle-axe, and ended her. The insatiable American looks at her. ‘Is that the Venus de Milo? – come on!’ And the Venus de Milo stands there like a naked slave in a market-place, whom someone has spat on. Spat on!

I have often thought, hearing American tourists in Europe — in the Bargello in Florence, for example, or in the Piazza di San Marco in Venice – exclaiming, ‘Isn’t that just too cunning!’ or else, ‘Aren’t you perfectly crazy about Saint Mark’s! Don’t you think those cupolas are like the loveliest turnips upside down, you know’ — as if the beautiful things of Europe were just having their guts pulled out by these American admirers. They admire so wholesale. Sometimes they even seem to grovel. But the golden cupolas of St Mark’s in Venice are turnips upside down in a stale stew, after enough American tourists have looked at them. Turnips upside down in a stale stew. Poor Europe!

And there you are. When a few German bombs fell upon Rheims Cathedral up went a howl of execration. But there are more ways than one of vandalism. I should think the American admiration of five-minutes tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.

But there you are. Europe has got to fall, and peace hath her victories.

Behold then Mr Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.

Now the aristocratic Effinghams, Homeward Bound from Europe to America, are at the mercy of Mr Dodge: Septimus. He is their compatriot, so they may not disown him. Had they been English, of course, they would never once have let themselves become aware of his existence. But no. They are American democrats, and therefore, if Mr Dodge marches up and says: ‘Mr Effingham? Pleased to meet you, Mr Effingham’ — why, then Mr Effingham is forced to reply: ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Dodge.’ If he didn’t he would have the terrible hounds of democracy on his heels and at his throat, the moment he landed in the Land of the Free. An Englishman is free to continue unaware of the existence of a fellowcountryman, if the looks of that fellow-countryman are distasteful. But every American citizen is free to force his presence upon you, no matter how unwilling you may be.

Freedom!

The Effinghams detest Mr Dodge. They abhor him. They loathe and despise him. They have an unmitigated contempt for him. Everything he is, says, and does, seems to them too vulgar, too despicable. Yet they are forced to answer, when he presents himself: ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Dodge.’

Freedom !

Mr Dodge, of Dodge-town, alternately fawns and intrudes, cringes and bullies. And the Effinghams, terribly ‘superior’ in a land of equality, writhe helpless. They would fain snub Septimus out of existence. But Septimus is not to be snubbed. As a true democrat, he is unsnubbable. As a true democrat, he has right on his side. And right is might.

Right is might. It is the old struggle for power.

Septimus, as a true democrat, is the equal of any man. As a true democrat with a full pocket, he is, by the amount that fills his pocket, so much the superior of the democrats with empty pockets. Because, though all men are born equal and die equal, you will not get anybody to admit that ten dollars equal ten thousand dollars. No, no, there’s a difference there, however far you may push equality.

Septimus has the Effinghams on the hip. He has them fast, and they will not escape. What tortures await them at home, in the Land of the Free, at the hands of the hideously affable Dodge, we do not care to disclose. What was the persecution of a haughty Lord or a marauding Baron or an inquisitorial Abbot compared to the persecution of a million Dodges ? The proud Effinghams are like men buried naked to the chin in ant-heaps, to be bitten into extinction by a myriad ants. Stoically, as good democrats and idealists, they writhe and endure, without making too much moan.

They writhe and endure. There is no escape. Not from that time to this. No escape. They writhed on the horns of the Dodge dilemma.

Since then Ford has gone one worse.

Through these white novels of Cooper runs this acid of ant-bites, the formic acid of democratic poisoning. The Effinghams feel superior. Cooper felt superior. Mrs Cooper felt superior too. And bitten.

For they were democrats. They didn’t believe in kings, or lords, or masters, or real superiority of any sort. Before God, of course. In the sight of God, of course, all men were equal. This they believed. And therefore, though they felt terribly superior to Mr Dodge, yet, since they were his equals in the sight of God, they could not feel free to say to him: ‘ Mr Dodge, please go to the devil.’ They had to say: ‘Pleased to meet you.’

What a lie to tell! Democratic lies.

What a dilemma! To feel so superior. To know you are superior. And yet to believe that, in the sight of God, you are equal. Can’t help yourself.

Why couldn’t they let the Lord Almighty look after the equality, since it seems to happen specifically in His sight, and stick themselves to their own superiority. Why couldn’t they ?

Somehow they daren’t.

They were Americans, idealists. How dare they balance a mere intense feeling against an IDEA and an IDEAL?

Ideally — i.e., in the sight of God, Mr Dodge was their equal.

What a low opinion they held of the Almighty’s faculty for discrimination.

But it was so. The IDEAL of EQUALITY.

Pleased to meet you, Mr Dodge.

We are equal in the sight of God, of course. But er –

Very glad to meet you, Miss Effingham. Did you say — er? Well now, I think my bank balance will bear it.

Poor Eve Effingham.

Eve! Think of it. Eve! And birds of paradise. And apples.

And Mr Dodge.

This is where apples of knowledge get you, Miss Eve. You should leave ‘em alone.

‘Mr Dodge, you are a hopeless and insufferable inferior.’

Why couldn’t she say it? She felt it. And she was a heroine.

Alas, she was an American heroine. She was an EDUCATED WOMAN. She KNEW all about IDEALS. She swallowed the IDEAL of EQUALITY with her first mouthful of KNOWLEDGE. Alas for her and that apple of Sodom that looked so rosy. Alas for all her knowing.

Mr Dodge (in check knickerbockers): Well, feeling a little uncomfortable below the belt, are you, Miss Effingham?

Miss Effingham (with difficulty withdrawing her gaze from the INFINITE OCEAN): Good morning, Mr Dodge. I was admiring the dark blue distance.

Mr Dodge: Say, couldn’t you admire something a bit nearer ?

Think how easy it would have been for her to say ‘Go away! ‘ or ‘Leave me, varlet!’ — or ‘Hence, base-born knave!’ Or just to turn her back on him.

But then he would simply have marched round to the other side of her.

Was she his superior, or wasn’t she?

Why surely, intrinsically, she was. Intrinsically Fenimore Cooper was the superior of the Dodges of his day. He felt it. But he felt he ought not to feel it. And he never had it out with himself.

That is why one rather gets impatient with him. He feels he is superior, and feels he ought not to feel so, and is therefore rather snobbish, and at the same time a little apologetic. Which is surely tiresome.

If a man feels superior, he should have it out with himself. ‘Do I feel superior because I am superior? Or is it just the snobbishness of class, or education, or money?’

Class, education, money won’t make a man superior. But if he’s just born superior, in himself, there it is. Why deny it ?

It is a nasty sight to see the Effinghams putting themselves at the mercy of a Dodge, just because of a mere idea or ideal. Fools. They ruin more than they know. Because at the same time they are snobbish.

Septimus at the Court of King Arthur.

Septimus: Hello, Arthur! Pleased to meet you. By the way, what’s all that great long sword about?

Arthur: This is Excalibur, the sword of my knighthood and my kingship.

Septimus: That so! We’re all equal in the sight of God, you know, Arthur.

Arthur: Yes.

Septimus: Then I guess it’s about time I had that yard-and- a-half of Excalibur to play with. Don’t you think so ? We’re equal in the sight of God, and you’ve had it for quite a while.

Arthur: Yes, I agree. (Hands him Excalibur.)

Septimus (prodding Arthur with Excalibur): Say, Art, which is your fifth rib?

Superiority is a sword. Hand it over to Septimus, and you’ll get it back between your ribs. — The whole moral of democracy.

But there you are. Eve Effingham had pinned herself down on the Contrat Social, and she was prouder of that pin through her body than of any mortal thing else. Her IDEAL. Her IDEAL of DEMOCRACY.

When America set out to destroy Kings and Lords and Masters, and the whole paraphernalia of European superiority, it pushed a pin right through its own body, and on that pin it still flaps and buzzes and twists in misery. The pin of democratic equality. Freedom.

There’ll never be any life in America till you pull the pin out and admit natural inequality. Natural superiority, natural inferiority. Till such time, Americans just buzz round like various sorts of propellers, pinned down by their freedom and equality.

That’s why these white novels of Fenimore Cooper are only historically and sardonically interesting. The people are all pinned down by some social pin, and buzzing away in social importance or friction, round and round on the pin. Never real human beings. Always things pinned down, choosing to be pinned down, transfixed by the idea or ideal of equality and democracy, on which they turn loudly and importantly, like propellers propelling. These States. Humanly, it is boring. As a historic phenomenon, it is amazing, ludicrous, and irritating.

If you don’t pull the pin out in time, you’ll never be able to pull it out. You must turn on it for ever, or bleed to death.

Naked to the waist was I
And deep within my breast did lie,
Though no man any blood could spy,
The truncheon of a spear –

It is already too late?

Oh God, the democratic pin!

Freedom, Equality, Equal Opportunity, Education, Rights of Man.

The pin! The pin!

Well, there buzzes Eve Effingham, snobbishly impaled. She is a perfect American heroine, and I’m sure she wore the first smartly-tailored ‘suit’ that ever woman wore. I’m sure she spoke several languages. I’m sure she was hopelessly competent. I’m sure she ‘adored’ her husband, and spent masses of his money, and divorced him because he didn’t understand LOVE.

American women in their perfect ‘suits’. American men in their perfect coats and skirts!

I feel I’m the superior of most men I meet. Not in birth, because I never had a great-grandfather. Not in money, because I’ve got none. Not in education, because I’m merely scrappy. And certainly not in beauty or in manly strength.

Well, what then?

Just in myself.

When I’m challenged, I do feel myself superior to most of the men I meet. Just a natural superiority.

But not till there enters an element of challenge.

When I meet another man, and he is just himself — even if he is an ignorant Mexican pitted with small-pox — then there is no question between us of superiority or inferiority. He is a man and I am a man. We are ourselves. There is no question between us.

But let a question arise, let there be a challenge, and then I feel he should do reverence to the gods in me, because they are more than the gods in him. And he should give reverence to the very me, because it is more at one with the gods than is his very self.

If this is conceit, I am sorry. But it’s the gods in me that matter. And in other men.

As for me, I am so glad to salute the brave, reckless gods in another man. So glad to meet a man who will abide by his very self.

Ideas! Ideals! All this paper between us. What a weariness.

If only people would meet in their very selves, without wanting to put some idea over one another, or some ideal.

Damn all ideas and all ideals. Damn all the false stress, and the pins.

I am I. Here am I. Where are you?

Ah, there you are! Now, damn the consequences, we have met.

That’s my idea of democracy, if you can call it an idea.