Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Booth enjoyed established company offices at 17 Battery Place, the imposing Renaissance revival building designed by Henry Hardenbergh circa 1903 still standing between Wall Street and Battery Park, with advantageous views over just one watery artery of the Booth empire. Before radio dispatching, a man high in “White Hall,” as Number 17 was called, peered through a telescope for incoming ships on the Hudson before alerting tugboats docked at the Battery with a six-foot megaphone.

  Operating in the West Indies and South America, the Booth Steamship Company was acutely aware of German competition for the trade and wartime threats to its survival. That Booth & Co. would provide merchant-shipping services to the Royal Navy probably explains why Ellis Island records show the arrival of one Richard Boyce, forty-five-year-old mechanic, who arrived on the Lusitania December 23, 1914, giving as his destination “Booth & Co., 17 Battery Place.” His passage was paid, the record shows, by the “British government.” Members of Booth & Co. were elected to the U.S. Society of Naval Architects & Marine Engineers. Where loans and matériel were concerned, Booth was the man to have on the bridge of the ship of state.

  Fig. 11.1. The Whitehall Building (center, lower building), Battery Place, seen from Battery Park

  We are not surprised then to find Spence asserting that Crowley and Booth’s arrival in New York on the same ship at the same time was “certainly no coincidence.”2 Well, it might have been. Nevertheless, on the circumstantial evidence, Spence suggests that Crowley was to have been one of Booth’s minions or cut-outs in arranging contracts, but the deal with Morgan, with Booth’s immediate and enthusiastic support, obviated the Beast’s services. Independent commercial agents were no longer wanted or needed; his “egg was addled.”3

  We’ll get on to the highly controversial Morgan Bank issue presently, but it is true that Crowley’s Confessions states: “It did not take me forty-eight hours to discover that my egg was addled.”4 He doesn’t give any details, only that he’d expected a fortnight to ensure a little splash with his “special business” before a return to Blighty. What, he says, delayed him ( for five years!) was that he had about £50 worth of U.S. currency (worth about $5,000 today) and that “in the first week I sold over one hundred pounds’ worth of first editions to a prominent collector. He [the collector whom Crowley never names, calling him “Mr. D”] then expressed a wish to possess a complete set of my works and also two or three hundred manuscripts. This should have meant at least five thousand dollars . . .” Crowley claims that he stayed initially to oversee transport of the collectibles.

  The collector was none other than John Quinn, of course, and while Crowley did not meet him until November 12, just under a fortnight after arriving, Spence takes this palette of distinct facts as sufficient, when added to subsequent attestable connections, to advocate the theory that it was already an established intelligence objective for Crowley to ingratiate himself within certain New York circles to further Britain’s war effort. That Crowley would speak of his espionage as that of “a lone hand,” Spence suspects, was because Crowley was simply abiding by a prior condition communicated by an intelligence contact that in view of who he was, and where he was (a neutral country), he would always have to remain a deniable source, an unsalaried, dispensable asset, with the most tenuous link possible to security apparatus. If Spence’s theory is correct, we shall almost certainly never be able to prove it, and the theory that Crowley was operating clandestinely from the very inception of his arrival in New York must remain just that: a theory.

  Regarding the hypothetical link of Crowley to Booth and an unenviable status of deniable asset, I observe only four things at this stage, none in any way confirmatory or conclusive. First, an understanding of an intelligence value with no obligations from official authority would undoubtedly have suited Crowley’s temperament; he was desperate to be used, preferably in intrigues, under practically any circumstances, and would have seen his having to make a living off his wits as a reasonable challenge for a magician at war; he had useful introductions to high-placed persons who might assist: courtesy, no doubt, of Harrison, Radclyffe, Feilding, and possibly Commander Guy Marston at the Admiralty. Crowley needed to feel free.

  Second, if such an understanding had occurred with an individual or individuals connected to the Secret Intelligence Service or Admiral “Blinker” Hall’s Naval Intelligence Department, Crowley would have been informed that his conduct would be closely watched, and he had better not attract to himself undesirable notice.

  Third, on December 17, Crowley says that he received and banked a further $500 from Quinn for a collection of books. That would almost surely have concluded that business; and yet, Crowley remained. By his own account, he did not find a spying opportunity until early spring 1915. Why then did he stay, especially as he was feeling lonely and downhearted, and for his own personal sake, felt he had endured enough of New York?

  Fourth, there is in fact no need to accept Spence’s macrotheory to explain Crowley’s espionage in New York, as Crowley’s own explanation—that it occurred fortuitously—is adequate to explain what occurred subsequently.

  An interesting detail that might color perception of Crowley arriving in New York in some relation to Macaulay Booth: Crowley’s diary entry for December 15, 1914—the day before his Christmas dinner date with corporate lawyer Quinn and some of Quinn’s friends—informs us that Crowley had “been generally invoking Hermes or Mercury as the obvious God of this city of New York, and proposing to make this new temple a Temple of Hermes by getting eight people to assist, and by making a circle on the floor, with the idea of building up a great Mercurial force, a mighty Caduceus to rule this city.”5 Solitary invocations of Mercury continued on an almost daily basis until March 10, 1915. I suggest that Crowley’s first material sighting of this “obvious God” of New York may still stare one in the face to this day. A stroll past 17 Battery Place, once the majestic hub of Booth’s American mercantile operation, shows in no uncertain terms, on its ground floor, two huge sculpted stone caduceuses, with wings and helmet, emblems of Hermes, god of commerce and trickery, associated with fish and silver and messages from on high, flanked by carvings of Pan, the All, repeated twice on the capitals! Crowley had always revered the horny god Pan. While visual references to Hermes as god of commerce and communication can be found in fabric details dotted about Wall Street—Mercury is also the principal statue atop Grand Central Station’s south face in the city center—it is hard to imagine those on Battery Place not registering as salient sign to a symbol-sensitive magician who, less than a year previously, had invoked Hermes with great energy by homosexual rites in Paris, and seen the god’s darting characteristics of spiritual enlightenment (he identified Hermes with Christ), rebirth, transformation, and financial trickery combined with boyish pranks visited on vain optimism. Crowley was invoking a mighty force; there is a wisp of desperation in this, for as he knew well, Hermes, like his addled deal, could be a “slippery customer.”

  Fig. 11.2. Caduceus of Hermes, 17 Battery Place, Manhattan

  Astute readers may also note the parallel of his arrival in Mexico City fourteen years earlier, when, as Chevalier O’Rourke, he busied himself establishing a temple to the “Lamp of Invisible Light,” with due invocations, as a magical radix of cosmic energy to shed its power on his and his friends’ activities. And, as then, his determination to stay will be trumpeted by a newspaper article.

  And while we consider the role of journalists and secret machinations in Crowley’s New York arrival, Crowley perhaps left a clue as to what was going on in his Simon Iff detective story “What’s in a Name?”—the first in Crowley’s Simon Iff in America series. Opening with Iff’s arrival at New York’s Cunard Pier (where Crowley disembarked), Iff—after a swift passage through customs—is greeted by “Keynes Aloysius Wimble,” described as “a native of Birmingham, England,” who discerned Iff’s “madness” was “as carefully calculated as a table of logarithms.” Without doubt, Wimble is Maitland Am
brose Trevelyan Raynes (1879–1944), Crowley’s friend and, from 1914, foreign editor of the Literary Digest.*68

  According to William Breeze, “Raynes may well have been a British intelligence agent or asset working in Washington, D.C., and New York; he possessed many of the requisite abilities and was well placed professionally.”6 Breeze’s analysis inclines us to see that Crowley may have revealed in two places, in telling and suggestive literary disguise, something of what he did in his first forty-eight hours in New York. In the Iff story Crowley offers a coded account of being picked up by Raynes and driven out to the countryside to meet a contact. Something about the contact Crowley may then have met is hinted at in a Warburg Institute (Yorke Collection) transcript. It may indicate a compulsion on Crowley’s part to imply the story by secreting its substance in disparate writings. Written around February 1915 (he says he’s been in New York three months and cites something published in February), “Under the Ferule: A Study of New York” is a study of the city from a British perspective. In part “IX” Crowley describes a tall Englishman he dined with the night after landing. From the reference to being able to look south of Central Park, it appears the following exchange occurred uptown.

  The night after I landed a very distinguished Englishman, tall, languid, aristocratic, took me after dinner for a walk. “They will tell you,” he said, “that it is impossible or dangerous to tell the truth about this country in this country. Do not believe it. You can write the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in fiery letters ten feet high if you go the right way to work.

  “Look!” he continued, “how’s that for Truth?” and he pointed to a tall building south of Central Park on whose roof was the blazing sky-sign:

  UNITED STATES TIRES

  “It won’t tire me,” said I. “I love children.”

  WHAT THE PAPERS SAID

  If on his way to his suite at the swish St. Regis Hotel at East 55th Street Crowley had happened to notice New Yorkers reading the papers, chances are that one of them would have had his or her nose in the Sun. A page 3 headline of Saturday, October 31, 1914’s issue read: BRITON FINDS MANY GERMAN AGENTS IN UNITED STATES. Taking a leaf, or article anyway, from out of London’s the Daily Chronicle, the Sun relayed poet and journalist Harold Begbie’s experiences of being in New York.

  Begbie had got on well with New Yorkers and was anxious to say that German guests Herr Doctor Dernburg and ambassador Count von Bernstorff were both affable, frank, dignified gentlemen, though the same could not be said of Herman Ridder, editor of propaganda paper Staats Zeitung, who printed things that made an Englishman’s blood boil. Ridder was a friend of German propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, whom Crowley would soon meet in New York, having met him once in London at Austin Harrison’s English Review office. Both Viereck and Ridder sat on Dr. Dernburg’s Propaganda Kabinett. Begbie recognized that propaganda was a major issue in America for Great Britain and was anxious to point out that while gentlemen appeared to front German efforts, below them lurked agents who preyed very successfully upon the minds of pro-German workers in ordinary jobs. They were easily persuaded that Russia had started the war, and Germany was fighting it to preserve the world from Russian domination. Where have we heard that before?

  “There are,” Begbie, wrote, “German emissaries all over the country paid by someone to argue with American workers and to mingle with American crowds, paid to persuade every person they could get hold of that Germany will win the war.” First they used “vehement hatred” against the English, but, “finding this unprofitable,” they had now become clever; it was all Russia’s fault. The reason was an abiding hope that American money would be forthcoming for Germany, but Begbie was convinced that this was a vain hope as Germany appeared to be losing, and, should they ever triumph, a Pan-Germanic empire would hardly accommodate an independent United States of America. Begbie urged his English readers to get serious about America and recognize its importance to the long-term war effort. In this context, of course, Crowley’s eventual activities make even more vivid sense.*69

  The Evening World (page 4) reported that Crowley’s ship, the Lusitania was Late Because of Fog and High Seas—not German cruisers—and that among its rather nervous 911 passengers safely docked were Mrs. William Vanderbilt (photographed), Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Astor, and two named correspondents from the fighting in Belgium. Crowley and George Macaulay Booth did not of course come with the obvious glamour associated with the Astors and Vanderbilts. Nor, for that matter, did the “500 Irishmen” whom the Sun (page 4) noted had arrived in New York: 500 Irishmen Dodge War. Cunard liner Franconia had, the paper reported, brought from Queenstown, Ireland, several hundred Irishmen and boys, many of whom desired to escape military service should conscription come into force. This might have given Crowley a clue at some point, depending on when it was that he chose, or had already chosen, to use his “Irish” image as a cover for apparently pro-German activity. He would also have seen clearly that being seen as a pro-German Irishman was not going to win him any glamour or popularity at all.

  Another headline on page 5 of the Sun gives a flavor of the moment: Expect More Foreign Loans: “The arrangement of the French loan of $10m, it is believed in Wall Street, will be followed by similar loans to European countries to pay for supplies purchased here.” To the right, England Still Buying Gold. A “special cable dispatch” from London revealed the Bank of England had added $860,000 worth of gold eagles and bar gold to its supply. This was possibly the kind of deal Crowley was assisting with.

  The gold theme continued in the Monday, November 2, edition of the New York Tribune, whose front page announced $25,000,000 GOLD COMING “Secrecy Helps to Guard Largest Shipment Ever Made.” Not so secret, the Tribune hadn’t caught on that the gold “left Denver last Friday . . . to be locked safely in the vaults of the Sub-Treasury in the City by ten o’clock this morning.” The American Express Company handled the shipment in three special cars over several railroad lines.

  Money was itching to move: ROCKEFELLER MILLIONS WILL FEED BELGIANS. “Relief Ship to Sail Tomorrow Bearing 4,000 tons of Supplies.” The supplies had been purchased by the Rockefeller Foundation for relieving Belgian miseries. The British Council agreed to certify that the supplies were solely for noncombatants. The “neutrality” issue was in constant flux. The British had just announced that neutral shipping that had traded with German ports could be impounded. Another headline that day showed an intensification of the conflict into global dimensions: TURKEY DECLARES WAR ON RUSSIA, ANNEXES EGYPT, DEFIES ENGLAND (New York Tribune, November 1). Even though Turkey had Germany for an ally, claims to annex Egypt were wishful thinking; the British Fleet commanded the Mediterranean.

  As regards magazines of note, Crowley almost certainly read the books section of the November issue of Albert Shaw’s American Review of Reviews, which Jeanne Robert Foster, recently back from England, will have had an uncredited role in compiling. The November section on new books relating to the war included a respectful, even generous, review of Professor Hugo Münsterberg’s latest propaganda tome. Münsterberg, who Crowley would soon take the trouble to get to know and, he would claim, influence, was Harvard’s professor of psychology. He also sat in on the first committee of Dr. Dernburg’s Propaganda Kabinett, and his pro-German booklets were strongly featured and advertised in pro-German magazine, the Fatherland, edited by sophisticated poet and essayist George Sylvester Viereck.7

  According to the review the professor “has gathered his various letters contributed to the newspapers during the past three months, together with considerable other historical material, into a lucid and authoritative book. The War and America (Appletons, $1). From the German point of view he reveals the true inside of the war, its motives and issues, and their vital meaning for America.”8 It is hard work today to read Münsterberg’s extraordinary claims on behalf of Germany’s superior civilization. His “four premises” are by today’s standards outrageous, racist, extreme stateism. The Germ
an state had the right by virtue of its preeminence to challenge the whole world if necessary for the “higher cause” it embodied. At the time Münsterberg’s premises would have been considered typical products of a German arrogance insisting only German science and civilization could save the world from barbarism. Somehow all this justified invading France, Poland, and neutral Belgium, and the shelling and shooting of civilians in the German army’s path. Crowley would write in his Confessions that he noted a distinct pro-German point of view in Albert Shaw’s Review of Reviews; this is not fully justified, but had Crowley’s first acquaintance with the magazine been this particular soft-pedaling review, one can understand it, because while the book is “reviewed,” its contents are subject only to cursory, polite criticism. Propaganda was consistently getting in under the line of “balance,” evenhandedness and fairness, as it does today. Crowley concluded quickly that German propaganda was more effective and sophisticated than what he had left behind in London where “patriot Bottomley” could fill a headline in John Bull with lines like “To Hell with Serbia!”

  Proving that financial relations between the United States and Great Britain were not all one-way, we find the Tribune reporting, a fortnight into Crowley’s sojourn (November 14), that an Anglo-American frame-work had been drawn up for a credit plan “to pay Debts to Britain.” A proposal outlined drawing against $100 million in the Bank of England to cover U.S. commercial interests’ “indebtedness to Great Britain”: “If this plan is accepted, American officials are certain that foreign exchange will be again on practically a normal basis and that trade between the U.S. and Great Britain will again flow freely through its accustomed channels and with increasing volume.” It should be noted that George Macaulay Booth was elected a director of the Bank of England in April 1915. There was a good deal of stitching going on that would not “go public” in the United States until the time of Booth’s election.