by Jack El-Hai
For years McGlashan, an imposing figure with a nobly receding hairline and an aggressive stare, had roamed the region on horseback, stopping to chase butterflies for his collection. “Give me a mountain meadow and you can have the metropolises of the world,” he once told a friend. “I would rather chase butterflies on the Truckee meadows than compete for position and fees and fame in any city. Big frog in a little pond? That suits me.”
However, Charles McGlashan couldn’t help seeking fame and controversy. As a reporter he traveled to Utah to follow up the threads of the much-disputed Mormon Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857. Two decades later he met James F. Breen, a Donner Party survivor, and that encounter set him upon an obsessive, lifelong pursuit of the story of the tragedy, which many in the region considered better forgotten. Lewis Keseberg, the villain of Donner Party lore who had allegedly hastened the deaths of other members of the group, especially intrigued him. Was this man as evil as many people believed? McGlashan tracked down Keseberg in Sacramento, interviewed him, and became convinced of his innocence.
McGlashan took responsibility for locating the rotted cabins of the Donner Party families. At age thirty-one he wrote History of the Donner Party, an authoritative work based on scores of interviews with the survivors, which remains in print to this day. In the decades that followed, he took charge of an enormous and ultimately successful effort to build a large monument to the Donner victims at the site of one of the cabins. Others may have seen the Donner tragedy as a horror story that leant no distinction to the Sierra region, but to McGlashan it was something more personally important. To him, restoring the sad events of the migrants to contemporary memory brought distinction to himself and his family, and he took ownership of that calamitous winter. He came to view his research on the events of the Donner Party not just as a groundbreaking interpretation of a human disaster, but as proof of his own worth and achievement. And McGlashan’s descendants accepted this view. Their family’s distinction was wrapped up in the grisly facts of the human catastrophe that had happened so close to their land. The McGlashans ensured that the Donner Party would never be forgotten. In turn, the Donner Party became a foundational element of the McGlashan family identity. It was a powerful, strange, mutual dependence.
This all-consuming project took a toll on McGlashan’s family. His wife, Nona, disliked his frequent absences and his attachment to his work, which made him distant and tense even when he was home. He hiked out to the Donner cabins on the slightest pretext, content to sit among the ruined foundations and tree stumps while imagining that horrific winter decades before. He collected splinters of wood from Donner Party cabin logs, which he later encased in vials and sold for a dollar each to fund his Donner monument. When McGlashan was absent from the meals that Nona prepared for their family, “his empty plate enlarged before her eyes until it filled the whole table,” one of their daughters wrote. “If you want to know the truth,” Nona said late in life, “I was the chief sufferer of the Donner Party.”
McGlashan’s polymath interests led him in many directions, including politics (he was elected a California assemblyman in 1884 and chairman of the notorious Anti-Chinese League soon after, as well as being nominated for the state’s governorship by the Labor Party) and biology (with Kelley’s mother, June, he discovered a butterfly species that became known as Melataea macglashani). To others unfamiliar with his workaholism, McGlashan seemed attentive, polite, sharply intelligent, and sensitive. He had a hypnotic gaze, white hair, and a mustache that gave him authority, and complete ease before an audience. If California could boast of imperial families in the years before Hollywood showbizdom, Charles McGlashan headed one of them.
His daughter June followed him into law and was one of the first women admitted to the California bar. They practiced together for several years, and courtroom observers noticed that June had inherited her father’s fire as a speaker and persuader. McGlashan taught June, a fellow introvert, that it was pointless to try to make others understand one’s own motivations. He told her to simply do what she thought was best without bothering to explain why and see if others would follow. It was a haughty approach that belied the value of differing opinions and the importance of forming connections with other people.
Charles McGlashan had won many plaudits for his work in law, government, history, and science—he was a great man in the minds of most people around him—and he fed on public praise. When publicly challenged, such as when the committee controlling the erection of the Donner Party monument changed his wording of the stone inscription, he would quickly withdraw his support and become bitter. June shared her father’s dark and brooding qualities, which lay hidden behind the public sparkle. She bottled up her anger and tried to contain her tension. Before arguing a case in court, she often clenched her fists so tightly she drew blood. And like her father, June would hole up to restore her energy when she felt drained.
In 1909 June married George “Doc” Kelley, a Truckee dentist who practiced law part time, and she left her father’s office. Doc was famously affable, a man of simple enthusiasms who immersed himself in the civic life of the town, and who had originally courted June’s sister. For a few years June continued working, as the county deputy district attorney, a job that sometimes pitted her against her defense attorney father in court. “The ring of steel and clash of swords brought juries and witnesses to the edge of their seats,” a McGlashan family member recalled. “They insulted each other in sophisticated, polished displays of a high intense disdain that drew on the dramatic instincts of both to the fullest.”
In August 1912 June gave birth to a son, Douglas McGlashan Kelley. The family moved from Truckee to San Francisco in 1919, and Doc set up a dentistry office at Ninth and Irving, where he worked for more than fifty years. Young Douglas felt the intense love and protection of June, which contrasted with the easygoing companionship of Doc. To her, the boy was the embodiment of the McGlashan line; he was not an amiable nonentity, as June increasingly came to find her husband. As a student, Douglas immersed himself in brainy activities: helping build dioramas for local science exhibits, selling cards that described the constellations, hunting wildflowers, collecting stamps, and reading hungrily and widely. In research notes he took around this time describing the attributes of people born under his astrological sign, Leo (and surely ascribing them to himself), Douglas listed: “Super-vitality, courage, brusque, waste no time in politeness, men of action, energy, enterprise, never listless, stubborn . . . very touchy, passionate . . . perhaps genius . . . generally rise to top of whatever position they choose.”
This precocious boy—increasingly certain in his intellectual judgments and commanding in his confidence—soon came to the attention of Lewis Terman, a Stanford University psychologist who was starting a study of the lives of highly intelligent California children. Keenly aware of her son’s intellectual distinction, June took him to Terman’s numerous examinations and appraisal sessions. Douglas’s measured IQ was lofty enough, above 135, to qualify him for inclusion in the study, and he and Terman regularly corresponded for the next four decades as part of the psychologist’s drive to find out if exceptionally bright children grew into exceptionally bright adults. Terman kept close tabs on all of his subjects as they grew into adulthood, but he came to regard Kelley as one of the most intriguing and puzzling of the 1,444 children in the study.
By the time Douglas was fifteen he had amassed collections of wildflowers, fungi, and lichens; was a leader of his Boy Scout troop (and would soon become an Eagle Scout); joined his high school’s debating society and served as the president of its botany club; and earned money on a lumber crew and as a worker in the school cafeteria. The boy was ardent in his intellectual pursuits, something of a brain beast. He was driven to succeed, to amass and classify knowledge, and to dominate all his challenges.
Years later, even Douglas’s young children perceived his need to master everything he tried and make sure others recognized his mastery. Sometime in
his teens he took up the hobby of stage magic, a pastime well suited for a boy intent upon impressing others. Whether performing with cards, tricks, or other illusions, the stage magician controls where his audience looks and what it perceives. From simple tricks learned from magazines and manuals, Douglas advanced to more complicated illusions. His interest in magic intensified as a premedical student at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. The school’s newspaper published amused accounts of magic stunts he promoted and staged for as many of his fellow students as would come watch. These feats included driving a car around campus while he was blindfolded and hooded, a stunt that Berkeley’s police chief apparently approved of, but found dangerous enough to comment “on the dangers both to Kelley and passing traffic in downtown districts.” Kelley emulated Harry Houdini in public demonstrations by escaping from handcuffs while encased in a mail sack and an ironclad sea chest, performed magic at club events and dinners, and printed business cards promoting his skills at sleight of hand. Later he served as president of the San Francisco Society of Magicians. As Kelley himself noted later, working as a magician strengthens the performer’s self-confidence and gives him a feeling of superiority over his audience. He soon learned that well-educated people—those trained to accept suggestions from others, surrender their attention, and arrive at conclusions from observation—were the most astounded folks in the audience at a magic show when a trick defied their expectations. He also glimpsed the downside of the illusion: the audience enjoyed the marvel, but the magician carried the knowledge that it was no more than a trick, a clever deceit.
As Douglas matured, he drew ever closer to his mother’s commanding personality and fell out of his father’s orbit. Doc rarely asked young Douglas about his reading or the scientific experiments and Boy Scout activities that occupied his time. Intellectually, Douglas was a cross between a sponge and a rampaging bull, but Doc didn’t seem to understand his son’s passions. In addition, measured against the McGlashan clan, Doc was an underachiever, a man content to ply his trade and display his cheerful disposition, itself proof that he lacked the brooding and furious drive of a great man. Douglas observed his father’s straightforwardness and good nature and believed they made him appear weak. McGlashans never felt satisfied to drift along in life; they were driven to rise to the top, master their situations, and assert their superiority. They controlled their realms. Douglas absorbed that approach to living from June, and he never strayed from it.
Charles McGlashan died on January 6, 1931—at the very end, he longed to see June, who was herself bedridden with illness—and Nona followed him to the grave three years later. Within another few years the spectacular McGlashan house in Truckee burned down, and the Rocking Stone tower, spared by the flames, was razed. Worst of all, the stone itself had stopped rocking. Guardians of the property had filled the rocking space to prevent the tippy boulder from crushing visitors. The magic of the estate had completely gone.
Douglas Kelley went on to medical school at UC Berkeley and graduated at the age of twenty-four. Now five feet eight and a half inches tall, ruddy, and solidly built, he had wanted to be a brain surgeon, but he believed his hands were too small to conquer that specialty. So he turned instead to psychiatry, perhaps, as family legend maintained, because he knew the McGlashans were a pack of loons. He excelled in the discipline and earned a yearlong postgraduate Rockefeller Institute Fellowship at Columbia University, which led to his doctor of medical sciences degree from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1941. There he spent hours at the New York Psychiatric Hospital. His research in New York opened Kelley to much new thinking on the workings of the mind and covered a wide range of territory, and he collaborated with colleagues to discover a skin test for sensitivity to alcohol consumption, much like tests already in use to measure reactions to allergens. He also dabbled in arcane and strange studies on such topics as the effect of the full moon on the behavior of mental patients, which he reported in The Psychoanalytic Review.
More influential on his career was his exposure to the relatively new Rorschach inkblot test, which offered insights into the psychiatric state of patients by allowing trained clinicians to interpret their responses to a standardized set of ten cards showing symmetrical, abstract patterns of ink, some in shades of gray and some in color. In themselves, the inkblots showed nothing. Whatever subjects saw in them, therefore, were projections of their inner personalities.
“The average individual gives from two to five responses to each ink-blot,” noted a magazine article of the era. “Ten or more indicate ambition—a hard driving toward success, a resolve to succeed by quantity in case sheer quality isn’t enough. Fewer than two responses, especially if these are vague and ill-defined, denote the individual who was bound up in himself, lacking ideas and imagination. But when a small number of responses is clean cut, clearly seen and accurately reported, it reveals the skilled and confident individual. He knows what he wants and goes after it.” During a test period of about an hour, evaluators typically recorded exactly what a subject said about the inkblots, scrutinizing not only the content of the responses, but whether the subject focused on the whole inkblot image or only part of it, and the number of animals, humans, fantasy figures, and other images discerned in the picture. Cheating was impossible, Kelley believed; the subject’s personality came through in any response, no matter how much that person tried to disguise or distort it.
Introduced in 1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, the inkblot test had gained considerable influence in psychiatry, and later in psychology, as a tool for the investigation of individual personality. (It retains its high status in psychology to this day.) Until the 1960s, when standardized methods of interpreting Rorschach data gained traction, the value of the test depended on the skill and experience of the interpreter in drawing conclusions from the results. Kelley met and grew professionally close to Bruno Klopfer, a leader in championing the Rorschach test in the United States, and by all accounts Kelley was supremely talented as an interpreter. “The method must always be considered an aid to diagnosis and not complete in itself,” he wrote. “It is a technique, which when properly used, adds to the armamentarium of the psychiatrist by giving him an additional objective method of diagnosis.” He sometimes likened gathering Rorschach results to slicing a thin piece of pie. “And as any pie eater knows, one thin slice gives a good idea of what the whole pie is like,” he said.
Use of the Rorschach eventually spread beyond the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders to applications by the government, the military, companies, and anyone interested in determining the personality type of a prospective employee, a person seeking security clearance, or someone in search of a good career fit. But the Rorschach was only approaching wide use during the 1930s and early 1940s, when Kelley took a leading role in advancing it. In 1942 he and Klopfer published The Rorschach Technique, a detailed guide to administering and interpreting the test. Kelley’s contribution to the book focused on the use of the Rorschach in clinical settings.
Equally fascinating to Kelley was the emerging study of general semantics, a field developed in 1933 by an eccentric engineer, physicist, and former Polish count named Alfred Korzybski. Bald, possessed of a searching gaze and the hands of a wrestler, and frequently fingering a cigarette in a long holder, the imposing Korzybski proposed a method of thinking that he believed would end stupidity and promote sanity, especially in people’s relationships with one another. He placed high importance on the principle of “time-binding,” the ability of our species to pass along collective knowledge from one generation to the next. Emotional and irrational thinking makes time-binding difficult or impossible, stunting human progress. Korzybski formalized these ideas in his influential book, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, much of which he wrote in his home study with two pet monkeys sitting on his lap.
Eager to apply these ideas to psychiatry, Kelley became a devotee of Korzybs
ki and his new science. Kelley saw general semantics as the study of the communication and preservation of higher ideas. “This communication must be free and mutual, or persons and nations will lead themselves to self destruction by regression to an animal status,” he explained. “Maintenance and progress of higher ideas are the main distinction between human beings and animals.” He explored many applications of general semantics to clinical psychiatry. Unlike animals, who react to stimuli but cannot think of rational explanations for them, humans have the ability to change their behavior by understanding causes, circumstances, and solutions. A soldier may grow conditioned to battlefield danger by becoming cripplingly anxious whenever he hears loud noises, but the therapeutic use of general semantics in his case would persuade him that those sounds are perilous only in certain environments and from specific sources. Rational thinking can often overcome the harmful results of emotional reactions. Similarly, a skilled debater can persuade an opponent, not by arguing aggressively, but by listening carefully, pinpointing the opponent’s emotional thinking, and determining what compels the adversary to behave as he does. Solving differences, Kelley maintained, is much easier when one understands the signals that drive others.
Kelley’s passion for magic intensified. By the mid-1930s he had become an officer in the august Society of American Magicians and had authored several instructional articles in GENII, a magazine for conjurers. One described how to use false shuffling to make an audience member unknowingly pick four aces out of a deck of cards, and he introduced readers to such other stunts as “The Kelley Gamble-Trophy Trick” (another card trick), the “City Desk Trick” (a feat of mentalism), and “Let Him Guess” (a prop trick). “Long before the name psychology was on everybody’s tongue,” Kelley wrote, “magicians employed its principles under the term misdirection.”
