15 Quoted in Orlando Patterson, “Feast of Blood,” in Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1998), 194, 195.
16 Patterson, “Feast of Blood,” 198.
17 Quoted in Melvin E. Matthews Jr., Fear Itself: Horror on Screen and in Reality During the Great Depression and World War II (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2009), 254.
18 A complete discussion of Birth of a Nation appears in John Hope Franklin, “Birth of a Nation—Propaganda as History,” in Hollywood’s America: United States History through Its Films, ed. Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts (St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 2001), 42–52.
19 Jonathan Lake Crane, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1994), 26.
20 Readers should be aware that while the term “freak” carries derogatory connotations, it is the preferred term for both disabled people who work in sideshows and those who theatrically create abnormal differences in themselves for display and profit. See Robert Bogdan, Freak Show (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xi. I discovered in my research that entering the term “freak” into search engines and library catalogs results in the message that “this library does not use the term freak. Search under monster.” (!)
21 See P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum Written by Himself (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 225. An excellent examination of Barnum and his world can be found in James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). See esp. 1–6 on his career and 80–118 on the Feejee Mermaid.
22 Barnum, Life of P.T. Barnum, 234–45. See also Joe Nickell, Secrets of the Sideshow (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 10–15, and Stephen Asma, On Monsters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 136.
23 Robert H. Brisendine Papers, box 9, file folder 28, Emory University Special Collections.
24 Brisendine Papers, box 9, file folder 28..
25 Brisendine Papers, box 10, file folder 16 and box 11, file folder 22. For ethnographic shows more generally, see Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 212–19.
26 Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 29–31.
27 See Dean Jensen’s The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 2006), 151–54, 193, 312–14; Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 73–74; Nickells, Secrets of the Sideshow, 125–26; Bogdan, Freak Show, 166–73.
28 Daniel P. Mannix, Freaks: We Who Are Not as Others (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2000), 70–71.
29 Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana University Press, 1980), 141–45. See also Lynn Dumenil, Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 35–45.
30 Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 31.
31 See Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, ed. Lois A. Cuddy and Claire M. Roche (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2003).
32 The full story of eugenics is explored in Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 256–77.
33 For more on audience reactions to the film Freaks, see Matthews, Fear Itself, 54–58. Rachel Adams writes that “Freaks is less concerned with establishing the normality of its disabled characters than with subverting the notion of normative standards altogether.” Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 72.
34 See George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
35 See Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 212–21, for a detailed discussion of the Scopes Trial and its antecedents.
36 See Nell Irvin Painter on the “American School” and Agassiz in particular in History of White People, 190–200.
37 Nell Painter, History of White People, 112–13, 212–13.
38 Edward Spitzka, M.D., “The Development of Man’s Great Brain,” Connecticut Magazine 9 (1909): 327.
39 See Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, Ota Benga (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992).
40 Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 32. This comports with Linda Frost’s contention in Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages and Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) that whites came to see blackness as a kind of spectacle. See esp. 57–62.
41 “Negro Ministers Act to Free the Pygmy,” New York Times, Sept. 11, 1906; “Bushman’s Champions Angry,” New York Tribune, September 12, 1906; “Still Stirred About Benga,” New York Times, September 23, 1906.
42 Cook, Arts of Deception, 128.
43 Quoted in Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 40.
44 Edward J. Larson, The Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 239–46.
45 “Reading Race into the Scopes Monkey Trial: African American Elites, Science and Fundamentalism,” Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (2003): 891–911. See esp. 902–3.
46 Quoted in Adams, Sideshow U.S.A, 39–40.
47 Philip A. Shreffler, The H. P. Lovecraft Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press), xi.
48 “Call of Cthulhu,” in More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Dell Trade Paperback, 1999), 172–216.
49 T. E. D. Klein, “A Dreamer’s Tale,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham House Publishers, 1965), xxiv, xxv.
50 Susan Bordo discusses a similar image that appeared in a Guess jeans ad in the midst of the O. J. Simpson trial. A blonde Nicole Brown look-alike is shown being grasped from behind by a large African American man, himself an O. J. look-alike. The caption reads, “If you can’t be good, be careful” (Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 102–5).
51 Joshua David Bellin examines the racial imagery of King Kong thoroughly in Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 1–2, 9–10, 21–47. Elizabeth Young writes that King Kong’s “distance from realism enables the explicitness of its rape imagery.” See Young, Black Frankenstein, 182–83.
52 Harvey Roy Greenberg explores this from another angle, pointing out how Denham himself kills the beast by summoning the Air Force, suggesting that the destruction of the monster makes the final line of the film an example of “preadolescent fascism.” See Greenberg, “King Kong: The Beast in the Boudoir—or, ‘You Can’t Marry That Girl, You’re a Gorilla,’” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 350.
53 Karen Grigsby Bates, “Race and King Kong,” NPR, December 22, 2005, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5066156. Noel Carroll explores the relationship between King Kong and the evolution controversy thoroughly in “King Kong: Ape and Essence,” in Christopher Sharrett, Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 212–39.
54 Aesthetic documents such as Birth of a Nation make their intention clear; this is not a matter of “reading too much into” a cultural production.
55 Young, Black Frankenstein, 183.
56 Young, Black Frankenstein, 184.
57 Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 22–23.
58 Donovan, White Slave Crusades, 26, 27.
59 The classic study is John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Athenaeum, 1963).
60 Quotes in Donovan, White Slave Crusades, 29–30.
61 See David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (New York: Faber & Faber, 2004), 172–74, 176–79.
62 Quoted in D
avid J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1992), 125. For more on reviewer reaction, see Skal, Hollywood Gothic, 199–200.
63 Matthews, Fear Itself, 25.
64 William Patrick Day, Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), 5, 6.
65 Bloom, Gothic Histories, 69.
66 Glen Scott Allen contends that American culture has moved back and forth between seeing the scientist as a “master mechanic” or a “wicked wizard.” See his Master Mechanics and Wicked Wizards: Images of the American Scientist as Hero and Villain from Colonial Times to the Present (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). See esp. chap. 4 for his discussion of the image of the scientist in the 1930s.
67 See John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science, the War and the Devil’s Pact (New York: Penguin, 2004).
68 The complete history of the crimes at Tuskegee can be found in James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: Free Press, 1993).
69 Along with Washington’s work, readers should consult Michael Sappol’s A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). See esp. his discussion of race and dissection, 253–59, and his description of the “body trade” on 122–35.
70 A complete history appears in Allen M. Hornblum, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison (New York: Routledge, 1999).
71 Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 250.
72 Washington, Medical Apartheid, 250–51. This was part of the CIA MK-ULTRA program, a long-term research project that hoped to use mind-altering drugs as a covert weapon. Washington further shows that experiments on prisoners was not uncommon, with African Americans making up the majority. In 1952, for example, researcher Chester M. Southam from Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center injected almost four hundred inmates in the Ohio correctional system with cancerous cells. See 252–54.
73 See Paul Fussell, “The War in Black and White,” in The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 230–24.
74 Matthews, Fear Itself, 167–68.
Chapter 4
1 J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” Foreign Affairs (July 1953): 529.
2 A good introduction to the cold war era appears in the editor’s introduction to Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 1–15.
3 A detailed description of popular tastes and their cultural meanings during the cold war appears in William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, The 1950s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004).
4 Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 220.
5 For a very different view of 1950s notions of the monster, see Mark Jancovich’s Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996). Jancovich argues that too much focus on “invasion narratives” and an unwillingness to look more closely at films that offer dissenting visions has led to a misunderstanding of 1950s horror narratives. See esp. 3, 4, 72–79.
6 Quoted in Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 211.
7 On the medicalization of freaks, see Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 62–68, 277–78; Invaders from Mars, directed by William Cameron Menzies. Special edition DVD with illustrated collector’s booklet by Wade Williams (2000).
8 A number of scholars have used the “containment” concept as a general metaphor for 1950s America. See Martin Haliwell, American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 8–10.
9 See Paul M. Boyer, Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998).
10 Boxoffice, February 25, 1956.
11 Boyer, Fallout, 73.
12 William Tsutsui in Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) describes how the original Godzilla film dealt with “the most profound, contentious and chilling issues of the day” (19), addressing itself to the scars of Hiroshima as well as to American environmental irresponsibility in atomic testing. The American version, on the other hand, removed “all nuclear anxiety and memories of World War II” (20).
13 Margot A. Henrikson, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 45.
14 Scott Allen, “Radiation Tests Used Retarded Children at Wrentham Hospital,” Boston Globe, February 9, 1994.
15 See James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). See esp. 241–46, in which parents of retarded children came to be seen as the true victims because they had to house “low grade defectives.”
16 David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1992), 289–90.
17 “Mrs. Finkbine Undergoes Abortion in Sweden,” The New York Times, August 19, 1962.
18 A complete history and analysis can be found in Elizabeth D. Blum, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class and Gender in Environmental Activism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008).
19 Eckardt C. Beck, “The Love Canal Tragedy,” EPA Journal (January 1979).
20 A full history of the first generation of Marvel comics appears in Ronin Ro, Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American Comic Book Revolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).
21 “Synopsis: The Fantastic Four July ’61 Schedule,” in Marvel Vault (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007).
22 Marvel Vault, 76–77.
23 Stan Lee interview, in Stan Lee’s Mutants, Monsters and Marvels (Sony Pictures, 2002), DVD.
24 Complete script available in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ed. Al Lavelley (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989).
25 See David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joseph McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983).
26 J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 186–87.
27 Sara Hamilton, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Los Angeles Examiner, March 1, 1956; Jack Moffit, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 16, 1956.
28 Henrikson, Dr. Strangelove’s America, 91.
29 Examples can be found in the film Atomic Café, directed by Jane Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Jane Rafferty (1982). DVD release by New Video Group (2002).
30 Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists, 114.
31 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, Md.: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 59.
32 See Jancovich’s discussion in Rational Fears, 34–41. Jancovich emphasizes how the film deals with conceptions of both language and gender. He is right to show how it is nuanced and yet, in terms of production and distribution, the majority of American horror films in the 1950s were rather simple invasion narratives.
33 Almost every sensational work by UFO hunters contains a detailed description of the tale. See Jerome Clark, Unexplained!: Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences and Puzzling Physical Phenomena (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1993).
34 Obituary of Kenneth Arnold, Idaho Statesmen, January 22, 1984.
35 Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies!: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1994), 247, 249, 280. Peebles shows that belief in UFO conspiracy comported well with the increasingly “nihilistic mood” of the United States. See 275–80.
36 Peter Knight, ed., Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in PostWar America (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 7.
> 37 Athan G. Theoharis, ed., Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People’s Right to Know (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 2, 3. See Ted Gup, A Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
38 Arthur Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 201.
39 Peebles, Watch the Skies! 99–101.
40 Nigel Watson, Fortean Times, March 23, 1999.
41 See Vern L. Bullough’s “Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report,” in The Sexual Revolution, ed. Mary E. Williams (San Diego: Green Haven Press, 2002).
42 Nancy K. Young and William H. Young, The 1950s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), 24–25.
43 Quoted in Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 86.
44 “Hearing in Student’s Case Continued,” Ann Arbor News, January 25, 1947.
45 Albert Ellis, Sex and the Single Man (New York: Lyle Stuart Press, 1963), 83. Beth L. Bailey shows that, elsewhere, Ellis made the case that rape was “neither dangerous nor health destroying.” See Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, 166n.
46 See a full discussion of body panic and alien abduction in Bridget Brown’s “‘My body is not my own’: Alien Abduction and the Struggle for Self-Control” in Knight, Conspiracy Nation, 107–32.
47 A good discussion of the postwar religion boom appears in George R. Marsden’s Religion and American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), 213–18.
48 Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 89.
49 Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 81.
50 Peebles, Watch the Skies! 93–99.
51 Fry’s account appears in Daniel W. Fry, The White Sands Incident (Louisville, Ky.: Best Books, 1966). See also Orfeo Angelucci, The Secret of the Saucers (Amherst, Wisc.: Amherst Press, 1955).
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