Script and Scribble

by Kitty Burns Florey

  But despite its disappointments and its failure of proof, Binet took the basics of graphology seriously, as did a Swiss psychologist named Max Pulver (1889–1952), who looked at handwriting in terms of three “zones” (the upper zone includes, for example, the letters f, l, and t, as well as i-dots; the middle: a, n, and w; and the lower: g, p, y) and compared them, respectively, to Freud’s ego, super-ego, and id—the taller your letters, the bigger your ego; the lower they dip, the more driven you are by your biology.

  Klara Roman (1881–1962), a Hungarian psychologist, devoted her professional life to handwriting research. She invented an instrument she called the Graphodyne, which measured handwriting pressure, but she was also among the first to get past Michon’s “trait-stroke” approach and look at a handwriting sample in its entirety. Roman’s Handwriting: A Key to Personality, though dated, is readable and sophisticated, with lots of interesting examples, and many graphologists consider it to be the best book ever written on the subject.

  GRAPHOLOGY IN AMERICA

  In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, graphology—no matter what its emphases—had few enthusiasts. But Edgar Allan Poe was one.

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  He had no training in graphology or even much knowledge of its existence as a movement, but he had a deep-seated interest in the vagaries of human psychology and the ways they’re manifested. When he was appointed literary editor of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine and began corresponding with writers all over America, Poe became intrigued by the way their scripts mirrored their literary accomplishments. In a series of 1841 essays on the subject (which he himself admitted were written not only to illustrate his belief that “the mental features are indicated … by the hand-writing” but also “to indulge in a little literary gossip”), Poe analyzed—after a fashion—the signatures of dozens of authors.

  It’s probably no coincidence that the writers he approved of had—in his sometimes eccentric opinion—admirable handwriting, and the ones he considered shams couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag. William Cullen Bryant,4 for instance, is cursed with “one of the most commonplace clerk’s hands which we ever encountered …, what mercantile men and professional penmen call a fair hand, but what artists would term an abominable one.”

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  Poor old Ralph Waldo Emerson,5 who “belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatever—the mystics for mysticism’s sake,” writes a “bad, sprawling, illegible and irregular” hand.

  On the other hand, in the handwriting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow6 (he has “first place among the poets of America”), Poe sees “plain indications of the force, vigor, and glowing richness of his literary style.”

  And he says of James Russell Lowell,7 “entitled, in our opinion, to at least the second or third place among the poets of America,” that “the man who writes thus … will never be guilty of metaphorical extravagance, and there will be found terseness as well as strength in all that he does.”

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  But Poe’s literary mischievousness hadn’t much to do with real graphology, which, like its distant cousin, psychiatry, was slow to migrate to America.8 Graphology has never been accepted here by the psychiatric community as it is in Europe. Why? The graphologists I talked to ascribed it to Americans’ deep-seated puritanism—and hence, close-mindedness. Additionally, American psychologists have tended to view handwriting not as an expression of the deep-seated truths of personality but as merely an aspect of muscle movement that can’t be precisely measured and is therefore not worth studying.

  In Handwriting in America, Thornton attributes its ill repute in this country to an influential experiment done in 1918 by two professors at the University of Wisconsin, Clark R. Hull and Robert B. Montgomery, who were intrigued by Binet’s involvement in graphological research. Using the handwriting samples of seventeen medical students, they compared some basic trait-stroke correlations with the students’ assessments of each other and found more discrepancy than agreement. Binet’s experiments must have been flawed. Graphology was baloney.

  Initially, when handwriting analysis made its way to these shores in the early twentieth century, it received a warm welcome. America was moving from an agricultural to an urban society: between 1880 and 1900, the total population of America’s urban areas expanded from eleven to twenty-five million. New York alone grew from a million residents to a million and a half, and Chicago’s population doubled. The cities were filling up with farm girls hoping to find respectable work, younger sons with no prospects, displaced persons, adventurers, immigrants, people on the make—the kinds of characters Theodore Dreiser in his novel The Titan called “a strange company, earnest, patient, determined …, hungry for something the significance of which, when they had it, they could not even guess.”

  It was a new world, exciting for many, a wrenching struggle for some, and the people who inhabited it were receptive to new fads, new products, and new ideas that would have aroused only suspicion back in East Beeville: ragtime, peanut butter, the tango, ping pong, canned food—and graphology. A glimpse into the thrilling individuality revealed with every stroke of the pen provided an assurance that, in a city full of strangers, every last stenographer, every line cook and cab driver and factory girl, was important.

  One of its first American zealots was Milton N. Bunker, who in 1929 founded a mail-order school grandly christened the American Institute of Grapho-Analysis.

  In his book What Handwriting Tells You About Yourself, Your Friends, and Famous People (1939), Bunker waxes lyrical about his young manhood spent tending cattle in Kansas: “long days under the open sky, keeping the shifting herds together” when, “stretched on the springy mattress of the growing grass,” he read his first book on graphology.

  Milton N. Bunker (image credits 3.7)

  Bunker’s first love, though, was penmanship, and like many a farm boy of his time he dreamed of wielding his pen in a government office. However, no matter how hard he tried (“night after night at the old kitchen table”), he had trouble making his handwriting conform to the copybook models: his lower loops were too long and his letters too widely spaced. Bunker finally remembered what he’d read about graphology and realized that handwriting was a highly individual matter—and that those individual traits were going to be important in his life.

  Bunker became a rigid adherent of the Michon school of graphology. “Every stroke carries a message,” he wrote, and claimed that, if he saw a relationship a thousand times, it was valid. He had no qualms about turning this concept into the most blatantly simplistic symbolism: for example, if your handwriting is riddled with “acquisitive hooks”—like that of the notorious bank robber Roy Gardner—you’re dishonest, eager to get your hooks into what’s not yours. (Other graphologists say that hooks can simply indicate tenaciousness. Gardner’s hooks could also be seen as fancy remnants of a Spencerian he may have learned in school.) “The crimes of the man who wrote this,” Bunker claimed, “could have been avoided if someone had analyzed his handwriting in time.”

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  Bunker worried a lot about “sex criminals,” and urged his readers to be on guard for suspicious handwriting: a blotted, smeared, “muddy” script, thick and heavy with ink, “warns of abnormal sex appetite.” He found in the script of FDR (“the man who sold himself to the American voter on four different occasions”) evidence of selfishness, “mouthiness,” vanity, and weak will. He claimed to be able to distinguish a writer with “a love of sweets and rich gravies” from one who “who prefers simple salads.” And he deduced—wrongly—from the writing on the ransom notes that Bruno Hauptmann was not, in fact, the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby.

  Bunker made a stern differentiation between his Grapho-Analysis and “outdated graphology.” Grapho-Analysis was “exact and scientific,” though he doesn’t specify what that claim might mean. “It is to be expected,” he wrote, “that som
e uninformed people are still skeptical.”

  At certain periods in his life, Bunker dubbed himself “Doctor” and liked to load various scholarly-sounding initials after his name, as well as the assertion that he was “an expert in human nature” and “master of seventeen systems of shorthand.” He claimed that if he ever published his findings, the lives of many of “the famous of the earth” could be ruined. On the other hand, he also believed that fixing up your handwriting would fix up your character flaws, and his books are full of entertaining case studies of people who were transformed from self-destructive maniacs into solid citizens when they started forming their lower-case g’s differently, and losers who became winners when they slanted their script up (optimistically) instead of down (in the dumps). And, by some accounts, he was a shameless plagiarizer of the work of others, including not only safely dead Crépieux-Jamin but his own contemporaries in the field.

  They were increasing. Thanks partly to the arrival of refugee graphologists from Europe during the rise of Nazism, the world of graphology was growing rapidly in America. In Germany, where graphology came to be closely associated with psychiatry, the practice that expanded on Michon’s simple code became known as Gestalt (“whole”) graphology. Gestalt (today also called holistic) graphologists take into account not only individual letter strokes but how they connect (or fail to), how they are placed on the page, how they seem to flow—the overall “look” of the handwriting sample. They use some of Michon’s trait-stroke correlations, but they temper them with spontaneous intuitive insights, linking up various traits revealed in the writing to form a complete and nuanced picture of an individual. A graphologist I consulted put it this way: “Nothing means anything on its own, and one trait can even contradict another. There are no easy equivalents.” A person identified as a quick thinker (fluid, rhythmic handwriting) with more than her share of imagination and creativity (tall upper loops, erratic letter joins), but who also uses very light pen pressure (showing timidity) and an extreme rightward slant (possible indicator of emotional problems) might be described, after close graphological scrutiny, as a bright, creative person who has trouble accomplishing anything.

  Unsurprisingly, the Gestalt practitioners gave scant respect to Bunker the backward-looking trait-stroke plagiarist. But he thrived nonetheless. A wildly creative marketing genius who could have sold fleas to a dog, Bunker would not have been out of place in a novel by Sinclair Lewis, and he had more than a little in common with the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn. One of his first money-making brainstorms was an attempt to sell shares in the Institute to his correspondence students. That grandiose idea didn’t pay off, but he did get them to pay dues,9 and managed to turn many of them into a quasi-cult that swore eternal fealty and took a vow not to spend their money on the writings of his competitors.

  Bunker was easily graphology’s most colorful character, and he and his flamboyant schemes managed to prosper until, in 1950, the Federal Trade Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, and he had to mend his ways. He died in 1961, leaving behind a mixed legacy: he had certainly helped to popularize the idea of handwriting analysis, but he had also, in the eyes of many, seriously set back the cause. Today there is still a struggle between the Bunkerites (who go by the trade-marked name graphoanalysts) and everyone else in the field—between strict trait-stroke analysis à la Michon, and the looser, more intuitive holistic route espoused by the majority of today’s graphological community. As one of the graphologists I interviewed put it, “What a perfect name for someone who specialized in bunk.”

  Of course, Bunker wasn’t the only grapho-opportunist. The field was crowded with practitioners who claimed that, by looking at a person’s script, they could predict heart attacks or deduce eye color or divine the sex of an expected baby. But the fact that something is untrue, unsound, and preposterous doesn’t mean it won’t appeal to vast numbers of the American public.10 The early twentieth century was the heyday of do-it-yourself graphology books, cheap pamphlets, and avidly read newspaper columns with pop graphological insights, of vaudeville performers who combined handwriting analysis with phrenology and crystal balls, of con artists who promised to increase your income by digging out the secrets of your script, and of enterprising practitioners advertising their services on the backs of cereal cartons and soap boxes.

  EXPERIMENTS IN GRAPHOLOGY

  Interestingly, two of the early graphologists in America, and among the most influential ones, were women: Louise Rice and June E. Downey.

  Louise Rice (1874–1959) was an even earlier supporter of graphology than Bunker, and she was probably the most famous practitioner, known to thousands as the author of a popular handwriting analysis column that appeared in a variety of periodicals from the New York Evening Telegram to Movieland magazine.

  An odd mix of serious adept and dogged self-promoter, Rice was a strongly feminist woman who wrote cookbooks, pulp-magazine stories, and potboilers. She also worked as a newspaper reporter, and discovered graphology while she was on assignment in Europe. She not only perfected the art of handwriting analysis herself but taught it to countless others. (Bunker, in fact, was one of her students, but the two ended up on opposite sides of the graphological fence, though Rice was one of the writers he later plagiarized.)

  Rice had the sincere idea that graphology could help people with their psychological problems. “Are you happy?” she asked in one of her ads. “If not, why not? Are your wishes well suited to your possibilities? Your handwriting tells me your individual powers of popularity and success!”

  Rice’s analysis of George Gershwin’s handwriting is in the archives of the Theater Division of the New York Public Library; it was commissioned as part of the research material for Clifford Odets’s screenplay (other writers were later brought in) for the 1945 biopic Rhapsody in Blue.11 In a letter to Odets, Rice wrote: “If [Gershwin] had not had his music he might have become really dangerous to himself and others …, what psychologists call a ‘split personality’.… I have never had such a difficult set of handwritings to analyze as this man was such a complex person.”

  Her book Character Reading from Handwriting (published in 1927 and still in print) is a period piece indeed. The bulk of the book is a detailed instruction in basic handwriting analysis—long descenders, for example, indicate the physical and moral courage of someone who “is well able to fight his way through the world”—but she doesn’t stop there. She also includes sixty-five pages on the history of handwriting, a chapter (more benign than it sounds) called “Racial and Other Indications in Handwriting,” another one on “Familiar Signs” (which begins informatively, “The so-called Roman Numerals are neither Roman nor numerals”), and an extensive section in which she classifies humanity into eight types, including the Material Type (tactless, heavy-set, prone to heart disease, but “a good wife or husband to a mate who is not too exacting”), the Nervous Type (often light-haired, often criminal, often well-dressed), and my personal favorite, the Mental Type (bad at sports but possessed of “a subtle charm”: “the women of this type have … made a very distinct advance over their brothers in the field of the novel and in the field of fiction generally”). The handwriting of the Mental Type is pretty inclusive: it can exhibit “the heavy pressure of the true Materialist” or “the light pressure and irregularity of Nervous formations”; the small g can be “like the figure 8” or “with the loop all but eliminated.” But it’s “almost invariably” very small, with wide margins.

  Compared with Louise Rice, June Etta Downey (1875–1932) was more credentialed and certainly more focused. Downey was a respected academic who dabbled in neither cooking nor celebrity handwriting. Born into a prominent Laramie pioneer family, she was the sister of a U.S. senator, the niece of a famous mountain climber, and the daughter of a territorial administrator who founded the University of Wyoming. She graduated from Wyoming (majoring in Greek and Latin), went to Chicago for her M.A. and Ph.D., and then returned home to teach at the university�
�first English and philosophy, then the relatively new discipline of psychology.

  June Etta Downey (image credits 3.9)

  Professor Downey—a greatly beloved teacher who also wrote the UW alma mater—began her researches with a strong belief in the validity of handwriting analysis—her dissertation had been titled “Control Processes in Modified Handwriting: An Experimental Study.” She was intrigued by all aspects of motor behavior and by the mind-body connection. The main focus of her graphological studies was the process of writing, i.e., muscular movement, rather than the writing itself, and her graphological researches ultimately disappointed her. She found little evidence to support most trait-stroke claims (e.g., upward slants equal optimism), and wrote that a graphologist could “compare varying details with most painful exactness and yet totally miss the graphic pattern.” She championed a less “mechanical” analytic procedure—a holistic outlook—but even then was cautious because of the absence of controlled experiments.

  However, while she was still a believer, she created a test known as the Downey Individual Will-Temperament Test, one of the first studies to evaluate character rather than intelligence. Her assertion that it was not useful to separate a single attribute, like intelligence, from the personality as a whole was a departure from the work of Binet and other psychologists of the day. The test employed not only graphological principles but an analysis—called a “muscle reading”—of the subjects’ movements in order to compile statistics about “will-temperament,” the term Downey devised for “volition.” Using the results, Downey—like Louise Rice—classified people into basic personality types, this time an economical three of them: the Hair-Trigger (Impulsive) Type, the Willful (Decisive) Type, and the Accurate (Careful) Type.