Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  Racist science linked brain size, ethnic origin, and criminality. An early scene in the film version of Frankenstein has Dr. Waldman (Dr. Frankenstein’s former professor and mentor) giving a lecture about “normal” brains versus “criminal” brains. Pointing to brains in glass vats on his lecture table, Waldman claims that there are physical differences between the brain of the normal and “inherently criminal.” Such ideas (that entered the Frankenstein film through the production’s scientific advisor) played an important role in scientific racism. The study of the human skull had become a significant part of the theory of racial hierarchies by the late nineteenth century. “Craniometry,” or the study of skull size and shape as a method of determining racial characteristics, began to dominate both scholarly and popular writing about racial differences. Works such as William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe contrasted and compared skull sizes of a variety of “racial types” and included photographs of specimens that purportedly allowed white readers to see their superiority for themselves.37

  Racist science followed its own logic and assumed that differentiation in skull size matched observable differences in the capacity of the brain. In 1909 Edward Anthony Spitzka, a fellow at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, compared the brains of the “inferiorly-equipped races” to the brains of the “higher races,” a comparison he understood as similar to the way “the vacuous, stupid physiogomy of the dull witted individual differs from the bright, animated, forceful and energetic look in the face of the vigorous thinker and talented genius.”38

  American anthropology sought to represent the notions of scientific racism in the most public forums possible. Certainly the strangest and most outrageous example of this is the Bronx Zoo’s 1904 display of a human being, a member of the Central African Batwa people named Ota Benga. The young man had been brought to the United States from Central Africa by Presbyterian missionary Samuel Verner for exhibition at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Verner, financially insolvent, later left Benga with the director of the Bronx Zoo. At first allowed to wander about freely, Benga was eventually trapped by zookeepers in the zoo’s “Monkey House.”39

  Rachel Adams, in her book Sideshow America, shows that zookeepers sought to present Benga as a “racial freak,” advertising him as a cannibal and emphasizing his sharply pointed teeth. Seeking to highlight the African as an anthropological missing link, the zoo’s director placed an orangutan named Dohong in the cage with Benga. Dohong had been trained to show “human” characteristics and could ride a bicycle and eat at a table. Zookeepers meanwhile urged Benga to charge at patrons and flash his sharp teeth. They scattered bones around the floor of the cage where the man and the ape lived. Adams puts it mildly when she writes that the Bronx Zoo used the exhibit to “suggest an evolutionary proximity between Africans and apes.”40

  The New York Tribune commented on the similarity of the freak show and the “anthropological exhibition” in the Bronx. Noting that there was something “disagreeable” about Ota Benga being placed on display, the Tribune also noted that it had been common for “fat women, living skeletons and other eccentric human beings voluntarily to make ‘museum freaks’ of themselves, exhibited side by side with baby elephants and educated pigs.” Of course, the Tribune ignored much when it used the word “voluntarily” to describe the similarities. Nevertheless, the author does seem to have understood that the freak show and the exhibit shared some common characteristics. White middle-class notions of race found their way into both types of spectacles, as did American anxiety over preserving the privileges of class and racial status.41

  Ota Benga was not the only racialized monster of science put on for public display during the Age of Frankenstein. On exhibit in New York City between 1860 and 1924 was Barnum’s “What is it?”— a creature described as “the Most Marvelous Creature Living” that was either “a lower order of man or a higher order of monkey.” In fact, “it” was a role played by several human beings from the 1840s into the twentieth century. Although the identity of the first two is unclear, the most famous was an African American man named William Johnson. Born in New Jersey, Johnson was the son of former slaves whose poverty likely induced them to turn him over to the traveling carnival in the 1860s. Johnson also traveled with Ringling Brothers Circus, where he had been known as “Zip the Pinhead.”42

  Barnum’s promotional literature portrayed Johnson as an inhuman monster. Promoters placed Johnson in heavy furs in an effort to create a “savage” appearance and insisted that he had been captured “in the jungles of Africa.” New York City patrons who had seen both Ota Benga and Johnson’s show had, in their own minds, already tied them into the scientific discourses of the day. Monsters in popular culture blended racist craniology, conceptions of racial brain size, pop Darwinism, and white anxieties about the “black beast.”

  African American leaders certainly realized that visitors to the Bronx Zoo linked Ota Benga to American racist iconography and responded to his captivity with outrage. Reverend Gordon, an African American minister who headed a New York orphanage, complained in a letter to the zoo, “You people are on top. We have got to rise. Why not let us and not impede us? Why shut up a boy in a cage with chimpanzees to show Negroes akin to apes?” African American leaders, especially the clergy, continued to express this sense of outrage, though the Bronx Zoo and its director William Hornaday remained recalcitrant.43

  After almost two years of public outcry, Benga was released and taken into the care of some of the clergy who had protested his treatment. Benga committed suicide in 1916 when World War I prevented his planned return to the Congo. Editorials that followed his death tended to warn about the dangers of science when it investigates “backward races” rather than question the racist assumptions that had led to the tragedy.

  Benga died almost ten years before the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 became the first public skirmish in the struggle over the theory of evolution. This very public debate took place soon after a wave of antievolution statutes swept American states in the early 1920s. In Dayton, Tennessee, a small town in the mountainous eastern portion of the state, a biology teacher named John Scopes agreed to teach evolution in his classroom to provide the American Civil Liberties Union an opportunity to challenge antievolutionary laws in court.

  The trial that followed, famously represented in the Hollywood film Inherit the Wind as a struggle between modern rationalism and religious obscurantism, exposed deep divisions in America over a number of cultural and ideological issues. Historians have read the trial, and the spectacle it became, as everything from an emerging religious divide to a struggle for local autonomy.44

  The concept of racial monstrosity played a significant and generally ignored role in how Americans responded to Scopes and to evolution more generally. The trial firmly cemented the conception of a link between apes and human beings in the American public consciousness. In a country where African American men had frequently been connected to savage apes, it was impossible that audiences would fail to connect the dots to form a crudely racist image. The ghost of Ota Benga haunted the proceedings.

  Although religious objections to evolution remained paramount, antievolutionists understood, according to historian of the Scopes trial Jeffrey P. Moran, that believing in humanity’s common ancestry promised to destroy the basis of white supremacy. The Atlanta Constitution, for example, editorialized that “racial miscegenation” was the only possible outcome of accepting evolutionary theory. Given the white supremacist desire to maintain boundaries between racial types, Darwin’s theory threatened to break down those boundaries. The logic of evolution seemingly brought about the dreaded amalgamation so feared by many white Americans in the twenties.45

  Antievolution forces, however, had no monopoly on the use of monster imagery in the fight. Conceptions of racial monstrosity inspired spokespeople on both sides of the debate. The controversial textbook used by John Scopes contained a taxonomy of “racial types” so beloved by scientific raci
sm. William Hornaday, the influential director of the Bronx Zoo that had imprisoned Ota Benga, wrote during this period that “some sensitive minds shrink from the idea that man has “descended” from the apes. I never for a moment shared that feeling. I would rather descend from a clean, capable and bright minded genus of apes than from any unclean, ignorant and repulsive race.”46

  During the same period that the evolution controversy became a permanent part of American cultural life, a fear of “primitive races” and the horrors of racial amalgamation came to represent a significant theme in the work of H. P. Lovecraft, one of the most influential authors of horror fiction in American history. Lovecraft’s tales of horror, written between the early 1920s and his death in 1937, became, as Phillip Schreffler puts it, “virtually synonymous with the weird tale.” They also reflected deeply racist sentiments born of the paranoia that Anglo-Saxon civilization faced threat from “primitive civilizations.”47

  Lovecraft published some of the most influential stories of horror in American literature, primarily though the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Some of these are stand-alone narratives, written quickly to please his audience and receive a royalty check (including his 1922 “Herbert West—Reanimator” the basis for Stuart Gordon’s “Re-Animator” films of the 1980s). Many of Lovecraft’s other tales are more sophisticated and have been referred to by later admirers as “the Cthulhu mythos,” Lovecraft’s mythology that tied together a number of his stories. In this horrifying cycle of tales, Lovecraft imagined a cadre of powerful alien beings, known as “the Old Ones,” who had once inhabited the earth. Human beings had been ruled by these old ones until the beings lapsed into a long sleep.

  Lovecraft’s horrors often center on human beings in the present who seek to use horrid rituals found in the occult grimoires, like The Necronomicon, to raise transdimensional monsters from their cosmic sleep. Lovecraft usually pictured these rituals being performed by what he called “the dark peoples of the earth” and taking place either in foreign locations or American seaport cities with a population heavy with the immigrants the author himself personally detested. His heroes, on the other hand, tend to be bookish, bespectacled Anglo-Saxons of Puritan descent, New England Van Helsings who seek to destroy the foreign Draculas.

  Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” provides an example of this tendency. A New England scholar of good Puritan stock begins to fear that the ancient being Cthulhu has been awakened when black “swamp-cult worshippers” near New Orleans and “degenerate Esquimax” in Greenland are found to be engaged in strange and exotic rituals. Those who take part in the dark occult rites are described as “half-castes and pariah” or “hybrid spawn.” Human beings, at least of a “degenerate type,” are some of Lovecraft’s greatest monsters.48

  Outside of his writing, Lovecraft frequently made clear his own conceptions of racial difference. During a brief residence in Brooklyn in the late twenties, Lovecraft spewed a torrent of racist venom at his correspondents. A visit to New York’s Lower East Side led him to describe the immigrants he found there as “slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets.” He called New York itself “a scrofulous bastard city” and the immigrant communities there a “degenerate gelatinous fermentation.”49

  Given the melodramatic nature of these rants, it is difficult to know how seriously to take Lovecraft’s comments on immigrants. Lovecraft had a strangely divided mind over such matters given that he lived in Brooklyn for a time because of his marriage to a Jewish woman (a marriage that went badly, undoubtedly fanning the flames of his prejudice). However we understand the undeniably great writer’s personal prejudices, the idea of racial monstrosity certainly played a key role in his literary output, mirroring the connection between race and monstrosity in the broader American culture. Lovecraft himself claimed that his “The Horror at Red Hook” had been inspired by the “evil looking foreigners” he had seen in Brooklyn. White America largely shared Lovecraft’s view of allegedly evil-looking foreigners. This was especially true in the wake of the post-World War I “Red Scare,” a national hysteria that painted every Italian laborer or Jewish tailor as a bomb-throwing anarchist. The revivified Ku Klux Klan became an open and respectable organization in the 1920s, using their tactics of intimidation against immigrant communities as frequently as against African Americans. Lovecraft’s fiction described horrors that many white Americans believed in firmly, the horror of “degenerate” foreigners.

  The Scopes Monkey Trial suggested that two cultures had emerged in America but also that belief in monsters could be found on either side of the divide. Antievolutionists worried that Darwin’s theory amalgamated them with monstrous races, while the more scientifically inclined assumed that the racially pure Anglo-Saxon had risen above the world of the monstrous. The terrors of both mind-sets are put in sharp relief in Lovecraft’s tales of horrors from the earth, horrors evoked by the “hybrid spawn” of the degenerate. In the first half of the twentieth century, American monster stories became tales of forbidden interminglings, of sex, and of terror. Miscegenated monsters threatened the neat divisions on which middle-class American life depended, and anxiety over racial chaos grew out of interrelated anxieties over sexuality.

  White Girls in Danger

  The April 2008 issue of Vogue magazine featured only the third African American celebrity to appear on its cover since its founding in 1914. It was an appearance not without controversy. The photograph represented basketball star LeBron James unloosing a savage and ferocious cry, while in his arms he grasps the white model Gisele, who pantomimes screaming terror (though with a smile). Obviously making use of the imagery of King Kong and Fay Wray, the picture set off a firestorm of controversy that reminded observers of the secret history of racial imagery in America and its tendency to transform African American men into monsters with white female victims.50

  King Kong (1933) readily made use of white supremacist imagery, tapping into centuries of white folklore about Africans and apes and the alleged hypersexuality of black men. Certain aspects of the narrative remind us how often America’s monstrous metaphors are uncomfortably close to historical reality. The captured Kong who dies in captivity shows a certain similarity to Ota Benga’s story. Its use of the symbolisms of African American men, sexual desire for white women, and folklore about monster apes tapped into racist roots going centuries deep in the American experience.51

  LeBron James and Gisele. Cover of Vogue (April 2008).

  King Kong Movie Poster with Fay Wray.

  The 1933 King Kong tells the story of a director, Carl Denhem, who wants to shoot an adventure film on Skull Island off the coast of Africa. He takes with him Anne Darrow, a willowy white waif played by Fay Wray. On the island, Denhem and his film crew meet a vicious and possibly cannibalistic tribe that conforms to every colonialist stereotype of African people. Like Lovecraft’s cultists, Skull islanders worship a giant, monstrous being, an ape that Denham and his crew capture and take to New York in chains as an ethnographic spectacle. Kong escapes and whisks away Darrow, whose screams provide the soundtrack for much of the rest of the film. The great black beast rampages through New York until brought down in the unforgettable scene at the Empire State Building. In the final frame, Denham delivers the famous line “’Twas beauty killed the beast.” The uncontrollable, and twisted, desire of the creature for a white woman became his downfall.52

  At a time when the American public had the racialized images of the Scopes Monkey Trial freshly in their minds, the story of King Kong carried a clear racial subtext. Fay Wray reincarnated D. W. Griffith’s unlucky Flora, an endangered white woman not only chased but this time seized by the monster. Screen audiences throughout much of the country would have been used to hearing their politicians and preachers refer to African American male criminals as “black beasts” and “black fiends” and insulted as “ape-like” and “monkeyish.” At the end of the day, as contemporary film critic Jim Pinkerton points out, King Kong is the story of a “flat-nosed black bei
ng brought from Africa in chains” who attacks a white girl. Notably, the 2005 Peter Jackson remake placed Skull Island in an undetermined Pacific location and not in Africa in a clear attempt to tamp down the story’s glaring racial symbolisms.53

  King Kong was not the only monster film that reflected white America’s tragic obsessions. Both of the classic Frankenstein films employ imagery in which the monster endangers white womanhood. In the original film, the monster comes upon a frail young girl throwing lilies into a pond. In his desire to play with her, the monster flings her into the water, killing her. The distraught father carries her in his arms to the town mayor in a scene reminiscent of Flora’s father carrying her after the death at the hands of the “black monster” Gus in Birth of a Nation.54

  Frankenstein does not simply rely on carefully coded messages. When the monster enters Elizabeth’s bedroom and corners her, all we hear are her screams as the camera cuts away. When rescuers rush into her room, the monster has gone and she lies on the bed, moaning incoherently, her flimsy nightgown looking torn and disheveled. As historian Elizabeth Young notes, this scene is “framed precisely according to the imagery of interracial rape.”55

  In Bride of Frankenstein, the monster bends over yet another defenseless young girl to try to save her from drowning, an action perceived as a sexual violation by an angry lynch mob. Elizabeth Young points out that, in the film’s famous final scene, even the monster’s offer of affection to “the Bride” can be read as an encoded anxiety about sexual threat to a white woman. Young notes that “the Bride” is filmed glaringly white over against the discolored, almost muddy, image of the monster. She is, in fact, wearing the same gauzy robes as Elizabeth in the first film. Her fate (she willingly dies by fire rather than give herself to the monster) again evokes Flora’s in Birth of a Nation, suggesting that death is preferable to sexual violation by “a beast.”56