Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (18 page)

Only in the most explicit contemporary underground splatter films can most contemporary Americans see anything approaching the horrifying spectacle of a public lynching. The hanging and burning of African American men generally followed a ritual pattern that included brandings, mutilations, bizarre sexual violence, and the taking of body parts as souvenirs. A description of the Georgia lynching of black farm laborer Sam Holt in 1899 notes that the crowd of over two thousand people “sent aloft yells of defiance and shouts of joy” as Holt’s body burned on a pyre. Before the flames had been lit “the Negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and other portions of his body.” After his death “the bones were crushed into small bits and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was … torn up and disposed of as souvenirs.”
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The passage of time did little to alter the savagery of these horrors. As late as 1934, a murderous mob killed Claude Neal in Florida, first cutting off his penis and testicles and forcing him to consume them. Burned over and over again with hot pokers, Neale only died after being choked repeatedly by the mob. Locals photographed their victim’s broken and mutilated body and sold the images in a downtown store for fifty cents each. A store owner told an interviewer of a local man who displayed Neal’s fingers with pride.
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This 1934 lynching occurred only three years after many of the participants would have seen Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster chased by an angry torch-bearing mob. The final frames of Whale’s
Frankenstein
show the monster burned alive in a windmill, the angry
villagers punishing him for the murder of an innocent white child. Foreign observers could not help but note the similarities between the American lynch mob and the torch-bearing peasants on screen. A British film critic commented that the film’s final scene reminded him of nothing so much as a “Georgia Lynching.”
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James Whale’s
Frankenstein
was not the first feature film to employ this imagery. D. W. Griffith’s 1915
Birth of a Nation
presented audiences with a similar, though much more celebratory, representation of mob violence that borrowed directly from the story of Frankenstein. Gus, a former slave portrayed as attempting to rape a white woman, embodied the imagery of Frankenstein’s monster, his large and ungainly figure shambling through the woods after the young girl and forcing her to leap to her death. This imagery reappeared in the 1931
Frankenstein
, the monster threatening little girls and respectable white women. His dark motivations were left to the audience’s race-soaked imaginations.
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It is not uncommon to hear today that the monsters of the Universal Studios films, and their flagship fiend Frankenstein, are not especially frightening. This is a theme that made it into
Gods and Monsters
, the 1998 biopic of director James Whale in which contemporary patrons at a bar smirk at a showing of
Bride of Frankenstein
, dismissing it as “not even scary.” A number of theorists and film critics have noted the same. Jonathan Lake Crane denies the power of the classic monsters writing that, today, “These once threatening creatures are for preadolescents who can’t get past alert ticket vendors at R-Rated films.”
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Perhaps the classic monsters do not seem especially frightening because they elicit sympathy rather than fear. We feel for Frankenstein’s misunderstood monster and Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man, both cursed in certain respects.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
seems less a monster than an intelligent fish literally out of water. But in the early part of the twentieth century, when whole communities believed they burned monsters at the stake, the monster’s “murder” of a small child and his subsequent death at the hands of angry villagers could not have been read the same way. Inhuman creatures, even if they elicited some sympathy, had to be destroyed.

The mob destroyed Frankenstein’s monster at a time when violent acts against the bodies of men perceived as monsters had itself become entertainment, producing a bit of horror, a bit of excitement, and a strange kind of pleasure. As heirs to the generation that had marveled at, worried about, and attempted to kill sea serpents, Americans in the 1930s found Frankenstein a worthy successor.

If 1870–1930 saw a massive, violent assault against African American people, it also saw a fascination with human abnormality on display in the “freak” or “monster”
show. As Americans passed through a series of social and cultural dislocations, society forced the freak to carry a weighty symbolic burden.

Freak Show

P. T. Barnum, who proudly asserted that “the titles ‘humbug’ and ‘prince of humbug’” were “first attributed to me by myself,” can be credited, or blamed, for making freak shows
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popular in the United States in the antebellum era. In 1842 Barnum had premiered “The Fijee (Feejee)Mermaid,” a taxidermy hybrid of a monkey and a large fish, advertised as having the traditional mythic body of a mermaid (including a nude female top half). Barnum admitted that he had tried to sell the public on “a questionable dead mermaid” but claimed that he had also given the American people “wonderful, instructive and amusing realities.”
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Following the public revelation that his mermaid had been a hoax, an undeterred Barnum wrote to his friend Moses Kimball about the possibility of acquiring some other “monster” with which to entertain the public. Barnum would, in fact, exhibit some of the most famous freaks of the nineteenth century, including Chang and Eng, the conjoined twins from Thailand, Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy from Russia, who had the rare disease hypertricosis or werewolf syndrome, and Tom Thumb, the famed midget.
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By the late nineteenth century, traveling circuses and carnivals regularly included a freak show. By the early twentieth century, the portrayal of human abnormalities replaced sea serpents as the most bankable public monsters. The Barnum and Bailey Circus, after P. T. Barnum’s death, continued to showcase some of the most elaborate of these shows, promising patrons the “smallest people that live” and “the biggest man and woman on earth.” A number of traveling carnivals offered customers a menagerie of monsters in which strange animals, human abnormalities, and foreign races with “strange rites and customs” appeared on display. Frequently, these categories blended together in the minds of the showmen and certainly in the minds of circus-goers. Barnum and Bailey shows at the beginning of the twentieth century promised a “giantess gorilla” along with “fierce dahomy amazons.” The same show offered viewers a complete catalog of what white American audiences would have considered exotic and monstrous, including “Cannibals, idolaters, fireworshippers, hindoos, mohammedans, pagans, Confucians, heathens, Polynesians and other strange races.”
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This list that mixed and mingled the categories of racial and religious otherness also included strange animals such as “giant oxes, dwarf
cattle and a steer with three eyes, three nostrils and three horns.” These “monster shows” thus explicitly racialized the concept of the monster, blending human abnormalities freely with deformed animals and “strange” racial identities.
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The exhibition of the racial other as a freak occurred in traveling shows other than Barnum and Bailey. Most circuses in this period featured a so-called “ethnological congress,” a gathering of races considered exotic (these were almost always African Americans and Hispanics theatrically represented as Eskimos, Polynesians, etc.). Along these lines, W. C. Coup’s United Monster Show promised patrons a “Japanese Village Scene” that included “5 Japs.” Audiences could see a “Japanese Dwarf” able to make jewelry for customers. In the same breath, Coup promoters promised a “talking dog.” Such representations of foreignness as monstrosity became so common that even the highly popular Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, though focused on the imagery of the American West, exhibited what promotional materials called “an oriental spectacle.”
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Freak shows reached the height of their popularity in the early twentieth century, offering visions of oddity that encouraged viewers to read the abnormal as the “foreign.” Sideshows frequently included “wild people,” especially “wild children” presented as coming from a non-western context. The microcephalic twins Elvira and Jenny Snow, who appeared in the film
Freaks
, were advertised to circus audiences as “Pip and Flip: Twins from the Yucatan.” The twins had actually been born in Georgia. Promoters described nearly every African American freak and some of the “feral children” as having come from “the savage jungles of Africa” or some similar formulation.
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Female conjoined twins became especially popular on the sideshow circuit, perhaps because of the questions they raised about sexuality and sexual practice in a time of rapid social change. The “new woman” of the early twentieth century became a figure of great anxiety for conservative America. Film images of women as “vamps” (often played by Greta Garbo or Theda Bara) emphasized the sexual voracity of the new woman. Many middle-class Americans who accepted Victorian sexual proprieties found in freak shows a free and open space where sexual inquiries could be explored. In this context of fantasy and alterity, the attractive conjoined twins known as “the Hilton Sisters” (who had sickened F. Scott Fitzgerald) became famous for their scandalous love affairs. They themselves circulated rumors about their sexually adventurous lives, including their ability to enjoy one another’s orgasms.
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Married freaks also proved a powerful draw, probably because of the mystery of their sexual relationships. Al Tomaini, an eight-and-a-half-foot
tall giant, became remarkably successful in the 1930s and 1940s touring with his wife, Jeanie “the half woman” (she had been born without any legs). Al and Jeanie represented themselves as “the World’s strangest married couple” and toured independently with their own show. Perceillia “the monkey girl” and Emmet “the alligator man” launched a similarly successful tour as married freaks, a monster’s romance.
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Such exhibits allowed customers to react in horror to what conservative, middle-class American culture viewed as the outcome of miscegenation and racial blending. Nativism, the idea of “America for real Americans only,” reached pathological heights in the early twentieth century, with even President Theodore Roosevelt warning darkly that white Americans needed to “keep out races that do not assimilate rapidly with our own” and urging white parents to have as many children as possible to prevent “race suicide.” By the 1920s a revivified Ku Klux Klan made Jews, Catholics, and other “foreigners” the targets of their terror tactics, as well as African Americans.
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Most pop science of the era asserted that monstrous beings, “freaks of nature,” resulted from strange mixings, the flouting of natural parameters and boundaries. Freak shows described their goals as “moral and instructive,” and in a sense, they did instruct their patrons in the alleged dangers of racial amalgamation and sexual experimentation. White supremacy became the lesson learned. Even new immigrants, making up the majority of patrons at sideshow venues like Coney Island, could see in the outrageous image of the freak a true outsider. As scholar of the American sideshow Rachel Adams puts it, “the freak’s extreme racial and geographic Otherness” provided these unwelcome new immigrants with “confirmation of their status as white Americans.”
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The popularity of sideshow freakery reached its height during a national discussion about eugenics. A widely held philosophy in turn-of-the-century America, eugenics asserted that “racial hygiene” prevented congenital birth defects as well as the general “weakening” of the race. Eugenics drew on scientific racism as well as worries about racial suicide, finding supporters across the political and ideological spectrum. Criminality, abnormality, and “the degenerate races” came to be seen as the outcome of flawed “racial hygiene,” usually imagined as a failure to keep the white race pure.
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Eugenics can be understood as an effort to prevent the production of monsters. Wide support for these ideas led to a number of state laws in America that forced sterilization on women deemed congenitally unfit to bear children. By 1924 Virginia became the first state to create an involuntary sterilization law upheld by the Supreme Court. Over the next forty-four years, law enforcement, aided by welfare officials,
sterilized sixty-five thousand Americans without their consent. It is important to note that eugenic practice, used as a powerful weapon of the state against poor whites, African Americans, and Native Americans, continued to be practiced in the United States long after its association with National Socialism in Germany.
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This context helps explain the reception of the 1933 film
Freaks
, Tod Browning’s love letter to his own days in the carnival circuit that caused F. Scott Fitzgerald to lose his lunch and audiences to react with a mixture of disgust and horror.
Freaks
takes us behind the scenes of a small carnival where the wealthy midget Hans dotes on Cleopatra, a trapeze artist of normal size. Cleo and her lover Hercules (the strong man) con Hans out of his money by having Cleo seduce, marry, and then poison him. Cleo earns the hatred of the carnival community when, at a celebration of her wedding to Hans, she responds to a freak ritual of welcome with disgust, calling her guests “filthy, slimy freaks!” When Hans falls ill and Cleo and Hercules’ plot becomes clear, the freaks take a terrible revenge. Hercules is murdered while Cleo herself is transformed, through horrible mutilation, into a half-woman, half-chicken creature and placed on display.