Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  She was some Scarlet Woman!

  EIGHTEEN

  The Way West

  Early evening, Wednesday, October 6, 1915, Crowley, Jeanne Robert Foster, and her elderly husband, Matlack Foster, passed beneath the great clock above Grand Central Station’s sculpted facade, whose epic magnificence bestrode 42nd Street and Lexington. The feel around the station would have reminded Crowley of Paris, for Grand Central was built in the graceful fin de siècle, Beaux-Arts, neoclassical style familiar to the Belle Époque, and in 1915 no surrounding edifice existed to diminish its grandeur.

  Having located the designated track, the curious trio boarded a New York Central Railroad Pullman “sleeper” whose mighty steam locomotive puffed and hauled them overnight north up the Hudson Valley to Albany, then west through Buffalo on the U.S.–Canadian border and farther west, tracking Lake Erie’s north side to Detroit, Michigan, already home to the Ford Motor Company, the Dodge Brothers, Packard, Walter Chrysler, and William C. Durant—with all its industrial modernity more than 560 miles from New York City. On the way, Crowley recorded two delightful acts of sex magick with Jeanne, first at 9:00 p.m. and then at 6:00 a.m. Object: “Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gifts!” Jeanne’s husband was apparently in the dark about these rhythmic trysts.

  The Confessions gives Crowley’s reasons for the journey, plans for which probably started with talks with Jeanne about going to Alaska for a “honeymoon” to celebrate their “marriage” as spiritual sister, bride, brother, and husband. Crowley’s first stated motive was a desire to visit the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco, a city he hadn’t entered since 1900, before the earthquake; there was a German exhibition at the fair. The second reason was to assess attitudes toward the war in the West and Midwest, especially among German-Americans.

  Viereck probably provided expenses, because the following week’s Fatherland cover featured Viereck’s handwritten message, which read: “This is a Magazine for hyphenated-Americans.” Research on German-American opinion was necessary, Crowley argued, to gauge the relative effects of American news coverage generally in relation to persuasive German propaganda: Whose message was getting through to people of German descent? Clearly, by this ruse, there promised excellent opportunities for discerning useful intelligence, as Crowley says he had significant introductions. Spence raises the possibility that he may also have already established contact with American Bureau of Investigation personnel, because the unabridged edition of Confessions mentions that the American intelligence officers “had brains, and they used them,” contrasted with what Crowley considered lax attention to his potential shown by some figures in British intelligence. The comment, however, more likely applies to later contacts, in or after 1916; evidence is sketchy.

  The day the party left New York, the Fatherland made its weekly appearance. That day’s issue included Crowley’s first article about the devastating effects of German submarine warfare: the U-boats (Unterseeboot). Crowley was gaining steam for an unadorned advocacy of “unrestricted” submarine warfare, an issue that eventually tipped the political scales and brought the United States into the war, as was Crowley’s intention. His article “The Future of the Submarine” opened with horrible verses, to be read in a cod-German accent. It was syndicated to the Eau Claire Leader, Wisconsin on October 5.

  Old England had a nafy;

  Dey had de fifteen-inch,

  So many und so long dey vas

  Dey tink dey hav a cinch.

  De pootiest shells in all de vurld, Dey vayed ’pout two tausend pound; Und efery time dat Vinston shpeak

  He make der vurld resound.

  Old England had a nafy;

  I dells you it cost her dear;

  Dey plewed in more ash dvendy-vife Off millions efery year;

  Und vhenefer dey launch anofer ship Ed English gifes a cheer,

  I dinks dot so vine a nafy

  Nefer sailed dis erdlich sphere.

  Old England had a nafy;

  Dey haf vun “Vistory,”

  Vun ‘Driumph,’ vun “Invincible,”

  Dot sailed upon der sea.

  Dey haf two hoondred “Dreadnought.” Und super-Dreadnoghts ash vell;

  But de bride of all der navy

  Vos der prave “Unsinkable.”

  Old England had a nafy;

  Like fans der men vos rooty,

  Ven out of Luxhafen der com

  Vun klein’ Unterseeboote.

  Und ven der nafy see him come

  Dey dink of der Chudgment Day.

  And ash qvick as dey can vot vos left of dem Vos sguttling out of der vay.

  Old England had a nafy,

  Vhere ish dot navy now?

  Vhere ish de lofely brazen cloud Dot vos on Vinston’s prow?

  Vhere ish de Mishtress of de seas Dot kept dem bottled tight?

  All goned away mit de torpedo—Avay in de evigkeit [eternity]!

  HANS BREITMAN IN 1915

  The twisted propaganda Crowley fashioned made no bones about the destruction of British power (something none of the U.S. providers of money and credits to Britain could possibly relish). “When England blusteringly swore to starve Germany out, the reply was simple—the proclamation of a Reign of Terror. . . . It is easy to foresee that England will be crushed, if only that advantage be pressed home. . . . I see a submarine with a cruising radius of 5,000 miles, and enough torpedoes to blow every ship in the British navy out of the water . . . the day of island empires is over. . . . Let her [England] restore the old worship; let her resume the pastoral and agricultural life; let her patriarchs execute justice and mercy; well and good. But no more industrialism-slavery; no more swindling oligarchy; no more smile-and-dagger diplomacy; no more gentleman-burglar world-power. The Unterseeboot has changed all that.”1 Crowley was pleased, but astonished, that the Germans would publish such nonsense, though he also intended the piece as a warning to Britain’s war planners: prepare for the worst. He was convinced the reasonable American would see it as unhinged, even as he insisted to his German colleagues that a stiffened-up approach would keep the Americans in suspense about German determination. He wondered to himself why Viereck & co did not recognize that a British defeat would now be catastrophic for U.S. capital and would be resisted. But then, the Germans strove for victory, regardless of whom it might upset in the end. Crowley tried to add folly to the logic of their ambition.

  The cover of that week’s issue may have precipitated an important question that Jeanne put to Crowley after one of their “unspeakable” rhythmic interludes. The Fatherland ’s cover indicated a new propaganda battlefront: munitions supply.

  Charles M. Schwab (1862–1939), president of the Bethlehem Steel and Shipbuilding Company, had, as we saw earlier, visited Great Britain to facilitate supply of munitions. Frustrated by Secretary of State Bryan, Schwab managed to get around neutrality restrictions through exporting via Canada and became a major supplier of shells to British forces. During the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, German intelligence reported that well over 50 percent of 20 to 30 cm shells failed to explode, leading, with other German intelligence coups, to a military disaster that opened with a nightmare 57,000 British killed or injured on the battle’s first day. It was Germany’s plan to frustrate and degrade weapons production in America. Schwab, for example, refused to have trades unions in his Pennsylvania factories, causing industrial unrest that the Germans secretly fomented. Sabotage of manufacture and supply was a major objective of German intelligence.

  The Fatherland cover showed a drawing of an American ammunition factory with workers entering its walls. The headline read, AN AMERICAN FACTORY AND AMERICAN NEUTRALITY, and quoted British war minister David Lloyd George that munitions workers were fighting as hard for Britain as was every man in the trenches. This clearly implied that an American munitions worker could contribute to German victory as much as a German soldier in the trenches. Now hear Crowley’s important reminiscence from the sleeping berth of the New York to Detroit train o
f October 6, 1915.

  In the Autumn of 1915 I travelled to Detroit with Hilarion (Jeanne Foster). We slept in the same berth. In a brief interval for discussion she—an American of French extraction, asked me if I had to go into the trenches would I try to go into the French or the German trenches. I confidently replied “Into the German trenches.” I would not trust her, she being on the private staff of Albert Shaw, on the Review of Reviews, who had been distinctly anti-English.2

  What is even more interesting is a dream Crowley would have at their next stop, Chicago, to be related shortly. It shows Crowley already in contact with persons concerned with German subversion of U.S. trades unions. The question remaining is whether Crowley was still a “lone hand” in his intelligence gathering, or whether he was in secret contact with either, or both, British and American secret agencies.

  Alighting from the sleeper at Michigan Central Station, Detroit, on October 7, Crowley found himself dwarfed by an American architectural wonder: the tallest train station in the world. Only two years old, Detroit’s main station—designed by architects of New York Grand Central, Reed & Stem, and Warren & Whetmore—was a staggeringly bold feature of Corktown, just under a mile southwest of downtown Detroit. A low classical facade with high arched windows like a grand Roman bathhouse, the lower building housed the marble concourse and track access. Looming ominously high behind it soared an awesomely modern (for its time) geo-metrically proportioned skyscraper of the kind we now associate with Stalin’s monumental office structures in Moscow, but only because Stalin tried to emulate American architectural superconfidence; Stalin went over the top, but the Americans got it right.

  Similar confidence, though of a decidedly more utilitarian character, marked the impressive, mostly six-story redbrick Parke Davis Pharmaceutical factory and research laboratory at River Place, Detroit, bounded by the international riverfront, McDougall and Wight Streets.*107 Crowley relates almost matter-of-factly his surprising visit there.3 He remarks on the consideration shown to him as he was guided about the ultramodern automated, bulk-producing plant. His admiration for all he saw shows that the anti-industrial rhetoric of his Fatherland article was just that.

  Crowley even had some tips for the masters of packaged dope. “They were kind enough to interest themselves in my researches in Anhalonium lewinii [peyote] and made me some special preparations on the lines indicated by my experience which proved greatly superior to previous preparations.”4 One senses perhaps that had Crowley been able to pursue this line, the “psychedelic revolution” might have taken place considerably earlier than history records! The idea of ingesting peyote as a pill gave Spence the idea that Crowley’s real purpose at Parke-Davis was to furnish U.S. intelligence operatives with a means to drug suspects, either for purposes of deliberate disorientation or for interrogation.5 Accounts from intelligence records of disorientated suspects prevented from subverting U.S. factories and committing sabotage illustrate Spence’s interesting, yet unproven, speculation.

  The question is how did Crowley gain privileged access to the plant, and, in such a short time, how might he have gotten staff authorized to create effectively a new product? It is not like Parke-Davis had no “form” in this area, of course. They had pioneered a range of products using cocaine to perk up worker performance and provide alternatives to food! Before unlicensed cocaine use was criminalized in December 1914, such activities were normal for pharmaceutical suppliers of pharmacies, and even drug stores. Nevertheless, the commercial advantages of a peyote tab-let would require some justification in 1915! Crowley must have obtained a blue-chip introduction from someone, unless he used his journalistic experience alone to access the plant. Crowley offers no further illumination on the subject, and the mystery of Crowley’s activities on this much interrupted journey to the West Coast leaves questions that, so far, only Spence’s extensive speculative narratives have tried to fill, themselves begging more questions than answers.

  Around October 9, Crowley caught the New York Central Railroad train 250 miles west to Chicago. While the Windy City still stands on Lake Michigan, Illinois, what no longer stands is the Norman castellated glory of brick, granite, and brownstone that was Chicago Grand Central Station, which, replete with slender clock tower, used to occupy West Harrison Street before thoughtful demolition in 1971 denied posterity the pleasure of it.

  Emerging from interior marble beneath one of the three great arches that used to span its lower facade, the party doubtless hailed a cab to remove them to their hotel. Chicago’s streets in 1915 still had a fair amount of horse-drawn traffic, clip-clopping in from out of town and weaving among the cabs, electric streetcars, and roadsters that filled the city’s dense, vertical streets. Industry was expanding rapidly, and there was intensive migration from the south of African Americans fleeing poverty and prejudice, looking for work and a new life. Crowley did not like the feel of the place. “It gives the impression of being a pure machine. Its artistic and cultural side shares the deadness of the rest. It compares with New York rather as Manchester with London.”6 Had Crowley come just a few years later, he could have witnessed the “Chicago Black Renaissance,” which would surely have interested him as a creative symptom of the New Aeon, which he would soon be heralding in earnest.

  In the event, Paul Carus escorted Crowley about the city. Resident pro-German publisher and aficionado of ancient religion, Carus had published Crowley’s “The New Parsifal” and was, according to Crowley, “a big-hearted, simple-minded creature, with a certain childlike vision, by the light of which he judged the external world, a little like the White Knight in Alice!”7

  As Spence has indicated, Carus had friends in German subversion—friends like Berlin’s local consul von Reiswitz, recently apprised of Russian secret service Okhrana’s uncovering a plot to mobilize anarchists against the tsar’s military representatives and impede Allied munitions delivery. Chicago and San Francisco were recruiting centers for anarchist subversion. Among suspected anarchists were “Red Emma” Goldman and lover and comrade Alexander Berkman, both associates of the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) socialist-anarchist organization (see here).

  The Chicago Daily News archive has a photograph of Carus’s friend Gustav Konstantin von Alvensleben with a note of December 6, 1915, reading: “Reputed to be head of espionage” in Chicago. Seeing Chicago as a money-laundering base for a secret war planned in the spring with agents Rintelen von Kleist and West Coast saboteur Kurt Jahnke, “Alvo” had recently crossed from Vancouver to meet von Papen in Seattle. Forced to leave valuables near Vancouver, Spence speculates that Crowley, who was heading there, retrieved it across the border for Alvo as a “favor.”8

  Crowley gives very few details of his political activities in Confessions, hinting at them, often in a characteristically, sometimes annoyingly blasé manner. He confines his comments to cultural observations, usually critical. “I called [in Chicago] on Narnet Munroe, described in the charge sheet as a poetess. She edits a periodical called Poetry. . . . Chicago is the forlorn outpost of civilized man. Every mile beyond marks a lower rung on the ladder of evolution.”9

  Meanwhile, poor Matlack Foster’s presence pressed urgency into Jeanne’s desire, as she expressed it to Crowley, to come into “the sunlight.” Crowley had a crusading will to free women from unwanted marriages traceable since teenage days in Eastbourne; that general will was intensified by peronal feelings. On a warm afternoon (October 11), possibly in a Chicago hotel, Crowley experienced incomparable bliss with Jeanne—“a quite new experience”—“pure pleasure brought to its uttermost softness and sweet-ness.” The Object: “To be always with this woman without obstacle”—Matlack Foster being the salient obstacle.

  At 1:05 a.m. the following morning, Crowley came out of a dream. Its contents he wrote up into a commonplace book, addressed to Jeanne. She kept it to the end of her days; it is now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Texas. It happened to be the small hours of Crowley’s fortieth birthday, the
day he felt that he assumed the Grade of Magus 9° = 2▫.

  You have awakened my virility, Hilarion, to the full; a wonderful and serious event.

  I am just come out of a dream. I was supposed to be in the country somewhere proving an alibi, and had stolen up to town for an evening. There were Harré, Raynes, somebody I’ve forgotten who lived with Harré, and one or two others. There was you also, but your name was Miss Lelang or Lalaing, and you were a student artist. I think you had gone home early. Anyhow, I too went, not very late, after certain manoeuvres. (? There was some girl there with whom I wanted to be alone, but I can’t remember who, how, or why?)

  In any case, I found myself on a grassy hill, which was the west side of the Butte Montmartre, and also a University, and I had to walk round to the south side to get to 56th St. where you lived. For I wished to make a last effort to see you. But I only decided this because I went to sleep “for a moment” on the grass and waking found it was 9:30 a.m. (I wondered why it was so light. The girls were going to market and students to the University and so on.) I had on by this time my blue and gold magic robe, and my C[ambridge] U[niversity] academicals, which I put on over the robe to hide it.