Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (17 page)

Theories of racial origins proliferated during this era, becoming part of the earliest debates over evolution and the new disciplines of anthropology. Discussions of human origin were accompanied by popularized versions of ethnographic theory that claimed supremacy for the white race over other “mongrel races.” During the same time period,
what became known as the “freak show” attained enormous popularity in America’s traveling carnivals, popularity it would retain well into the twentieth century. These shows presented bodily difference as a source of entertaining terror.

Americans became obsessed with the nature of the human body between 1870 and the Second World War. Where the body came from, how black bodies differed from white bodies, and how women’s bodies could be controlled all entered into the political, religious, and pop cultural discourse of the newly dawning century. These bodies under discussion, especially African American bodies, became the targets of violence. This is hardly surprising in a nation that believed in the nobility of its violent origins and that monsters must be purged by violence. Sweets for the sweet indeed.

L
ightning jaggedly rips the sky as thunder rumbles in the distance. A steady rain beats on the old stone tower. The air has a faint metallic taste. Chemical vats bubble. Massive Victorian machinery sizzles with electric power that surges through the Thing on the table. The first signs of life are barely noticeable. Hands move. Dead eyes flutter open. It is alive.

James Whale’s 1931
Frankenstein
and 1935
Bride of Frankenstein
brought Mary Shelley’s creature to life in a way that would shock audiences and haunt the American imagination. Whale’s use of Shelley’s vision confirmed what the young author herself had hoped. After the 1818 publication of
Frankenstein
, Shelley wrote that she “bid her hideous progeny to go forth and prosper.” Prosper it did, and not only in Whale’s hands. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster became perhaps the central
metaphor of the last two centuries for anxieties over scientific modernity and the threat it posed to the human experience.
¹

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster

Mary Shelley sutured her creature together out of the ideas of what some historians call “a second scientific revolution,” a period in which Enlightenment-era experimentation explored the nature and origins of life. In late eighteenth-century England, Erasmus Darwin made a series of discoveries in chemistry, steam power, optics, and electricity. By the early nineteenth century, interest in geology and the biological sciences prepared the ground for Charles Darwin and the publication of
On the
Origin of Species
in 1859. Charles Darwin’s paradigm-shifting classic shows that scientific interest in the late nineteenth century turned to the nature of the physical self, asking deeply philosophical questions about the origin of the body and its relationship to the mind. Shelley became aware of the early discussions of these ideas through her friendship with the young physiologist William Lawrence.
²

Lawrence was a devotee of the French anatomical school and especially Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Saint-Hilaire became one of the founders of what became known as teratology, literally the “study of the monstrous.” Interested in why nature at times produced abnormalities when, at other times, there seemed to be little variation, French
anatomists like Saint-Hilaire and their English disciples collected malformed human fetuses and experimented with animal embryos in an effort to create “monstrous births” for further study.
³

Mary Shelley’s, and the French anatomical school’s, interest in science and its monsters had an unfortunate analogue in the United States. In a deeply racist society, indeed one in which the very structures of power depended on racist folk beliefs to survive, scientific investigation took on a racial cast. In a context of massive violence against African American people in the years following Reconstruction, questions about human origins and human difference informed what became known as “scientific racism.”

The idea that race was a scientifically definable concept had a long history by the time of the American Civil War. Englishman William Lawrence believed that experimentation with human breeding could lead to an evolutionary step forward. Southerner Josiah Nott had used medical theories about the origins of racial difference to argue for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. The end of the Civil War came with assurances from some white theorists that African Americans would die out quickly without the paternal care of slave owners. Their view assumed the biological inferiority of the formerly enslaved.
⁴

Although some observers thought alleged black inferiority meant the disappearance of African Americans, the most common view among whites seemed to be that emancipation unleashed the African American male to become a violent, sexually rapacious monster. By the 1870s the idea of racial monsters dominated the white American media and haunted the white imagination. The image of the black male as the “black beast” became the most common portrayal of African American men in sensationalist literature, political rhetoric, newspaper accounts of crime, and eventually film. This trend continued well into the twentieth century, even informing the earliest debates over evolution in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.
⁵

In popular culture, the monstrous found champions in carnival promoters who transformed human oddities into commercial exhibits. The freak show reached the height of its popularity in the early twentieth century, often working in tandem with racist concepts of white biological superiority and racial hierarchies. By the 1930s, the monster had become a central part of popular entertainment in films and at the sideshow.

During this same period, true monsters were at work in America’s hidden chambers and secret laboratories. The brutally racist assumptions of the years after the Civil War found expression in some of the most horrifying, and least known, events in American history. If the
bodies of African American people could be imagined as monsters and brutally murdered like monsters, they could also become lab experiments. America, to paraphrase a comment made by civil rights activist Dick Gregory, became a mad scientist’s laboratory.
⁶

American historians generally do not see from 1870 to the Second World War as a discrete era in national life. However, themes in cultural history explored in this chapter tie together the late nineteenth century, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. It was the era of Dr. Frankenstein.

“Angry Villagers”

In 1910 Thomas Edison Kinetograph Company produced the first film version of
Frankenstein
. Focusing heavily on the emotional drama of the relationship between monster and creator, it provoked both feelings of terror and sympathy for the misshapen creature. The monster’s makeup, wild hair, and patchwork clothing gave him some resemblance to a sideshow performer.
⁷

Edison’s
Frankenstein
became one of the first films to introduce classical narrative into cinema. Prior to 1910 the earliest “moving pictures” entertained their audiences with short set pieces called “the cinema of attractions.” These short films recorded everything from natural disasters to tourist scenes to sexually suggestive tableaux. Many of these early short films first appeared in the context of carnivals, right beside the sideshow display of human “freaks.” By the first years of the twentieth century, theaters became a fixture of urban areas and even small towns. The modern movie audience was born.
⁸

Hangings and executions provided this new type of audience with part of its entertainment. In 1898 the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company distributed a film documenting the execution of an African American prisoner in Florida. This was not a singular event. The 1897 inaugural showing of the Edison Company’s Vitascope in Dallas featured images billed as “a hanging scene” and a “lynching scene.” Reenacted lynchings also became common fare, most notably a 1904 production called “Avenging a Crime; or, Burned at the Stake.”
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Contemporary moralists worry a great deal about the popularity of the “torture porn” genre, a now common description for films in the mode of Eli Roth’s
Hostel
or the
Saw
franchise. But motion pictures that employ grisly themes of torture and death as entertainment are not at all new. Public executions filmed for public enjoyment functioned as the first horror films, bundling together pleasure and fright for all age groups. Of course, a crucial distinction existed between these films and the horror
film tradition. The cinema of attractions showed violence against actual human beings, real snuff films enjoyed by kids and adults alike.

In a study of lynching as a type of public spectacle, historian Amy Louise Wood notes that, since these early short films were shown in batches to audiences, racist caricature films shared the same bill as images of African Americans being lynched. Groupings of short films seen by early moviegoers included minstrel shows as well as depictions of African American people “stealing chickens, dancing and eating watermelon.” Images of African American men voraciously eating watermelon became a very common motif for these racist short features. Wood notes that these representations made black men appear “ravenous and voracious” and thus “captured white fears of black sexuality but neutralized them by setting them in a comic setting.”
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At the turn of the century, a public discourse about the African American man as monster existed at all levels of white society. Ministers, politicians, and other cultural leaders could be counted on for horrific images of the black male as a horrific beast, utterly uncontrollable, and bent on rape and murder. United States Senator Ben Tillman, in a speech defending the practice of lynching, referred to the black male as “a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour.” George T. Winston, president of the University of North Carolina, editorialized on the necessity of lynching to northern audiences using the language of Mary Shelley. “When a knock is heard at the door,” he wrote, “the southern woman shudders with nameless horror. The black brute is lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. His ferocity is almost demoniacal.”
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Some white apologists for lynching went beyond using monstrous imagery and created new monstrous mythologies.
The Negro a Beast
, a religious tome written by the Reverend Charles Carroll, offered a new interpretation of the creation accounts of the Book of Genesis. In it, he imagined African Americans as literal monsters, allied with Satan from the beginning of human history. Drawing on centuries of racist folklore that gained new life in the age of scientific racism, Carrol described a creature that tempted Eve as an “ape-like being” who promised her a new form of sexuality. Interracial sex became the original sin in this account. By extension, all African American people descended from this original foul tempter.
¹²

Racialized images of monsters with uncontrollable sexual desires appear not only in sermons and political speeches but also in major medical journals. It seemed that when scientific thinkers were not measuring craniums, they were measuring sexual organs. In a 1903 issue of the respectable journal
Medicine
, a writer asserted that “the large size
of the negro penis” gave African American men a monstrous desire that could not be satisfied by the women of their own race. These uncontrollable desires meant that “sexual madness and excess” were the “African birthright.”
¹³

By the early twentieth century, every area of authority in American life—medicine, religion and politics, and the press—told monster tales about African American people. The American public eagerly listened. Anxieties over the uncontrollable black male resulted in one of the most terrifying periods of American history in which African Americans were regularly assaulted and murdered by angry white mobs. Statistical studies have found that lynch mobs between the 1880s and 1960s murdered over five thousand African American men, generally in the most grotesque ways imaginable. Frequently accused of rape, innocents became victims of the white image of the racial monster. These were not backwoods affairs perpetrated by “rednecks.” The most likely locale was a small town with a degree of urbanization. The violent acts of torture and murder involved the entire community, including all social and economic classes.
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