Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (49 page)

60
Quotes in Donovan,
White Slave Crusades
, 29–30.

61
See David J. Skal,
Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen
(New York: Faber & Faber, 2004), 172–74, 176–79.

62
Quoted in David J. Skal,
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror
(New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1992), 125. For more on reviewer reaction, see Skal,
Hollywood Gothic
, 199–200.

63
Matthews,
Fear Itself
, 25.

64
William Patrick Day,
Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), 5, 6.

65
Bloom,
Gothic Histories
, 69.

66
Glen Scott Allen contends that American culture has moved back and forth between seeing the scientist as a “master mechanic” or a “wicked wizard.” See his
Master Mechanics and Wicked Wizards: Images of the American Scientist as Hero and Villain from Colonial Times to the Present
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). See esp. chap. 4 for his discussion of the image of the scientist in the 1930s.

67
See John Cornwell,
Hitler’s Scientists: Science, the War and the Devil’s Pact
(New York: Penguin, 2004).

68
The complete history of the crimes at Tuskegee can be found in James H. Jones,
Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
(New York: Free Press, 1993).

69
Along with Washington’s work, readers should consult Michael Sappol’s A
Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). See esp. his discussion of race and dissection, 253–59, and his description of the “body trade” on 122–35.

70
A complete history appears in Allen M. Hornblum,
Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison
(New York: Routledge, 1999).

71
Harriet A. Washington,
Medical Apartheid
(New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 250.

72
Washington,
Medical Apartheid
, 250–51. This was part of the CIA MK-ULTRA program, a long-term research project that hoped to use mind-altering drugs as a covert weapon. Washington further shows that experiments on prisoners was not uncommon, with African Americans making up the majority. In 1952, for example, researcher Chester M. Southam from Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center injected almost four hundred inmates in the Ohio correctional system with cancerous cells. See 252–54.

73
See Paul Fussell, “The War in Black and White,” in
The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 230–24.

74
Matthews,
Fear Itself
, 167–68.

1
  J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,”
Foreign Affairs
(July 1953): 529.

2
  A good introduction to the cold war era appears in the editor’s introduction to Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds.,
Rethinking Cold War Culture
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 1–15.

3
  A detailed description of popular tastes and their cultural meanings during the cold war appears in William H. Young and Nancy K. Young,
The 1950s
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004).

4
  Andrew Tudor,
Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 220.

5
  For a very different view of 1950s notions of the monster, see Mark Jancovich’s
Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996). Jancovich argues that too much focus on “invasion narratives” and an unwillingness to look more closely at films that offer dissenting visions has led to a misunderstanding of 1950s horror narratives. See esp. 3, 4, 72–79.

6
  Quoted in Rachel Adams,
Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 211.

7
  On the medicalization of freaks, see Robert Bogdan,
Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 62–68, 277–78;
Invaders from Mars
, directed by William Cameron Menzies. Special edition DVD with illustrated collector’s booklet by Wade Williams (2000).

8
  A number of scholars have used the “containment” concept as a general metaphor for 1950s America. See Martin Haliwell,
American Culture in the 1950s
(Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 8–10.

9
  See Paul M. Boyer,
Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998).

10
Boxoffice
, February 25, 1956.

11
Boyer,
Fallout
, 73.

12
William Tsutsui in
Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) describes how the original
Godzilla
film dealt with “the most profound, contentious and chilling issues of the day” (19), addressing itself to the scars of Hiroshima as well as to American environmental irresponsibility in atomic testing. The American version, on the other hand, removed “all nuclear anxiety and memories of World War II” (20).

13
Margot A. Henrikson,
Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 45.

14
Scott Allen, “Radiation Tests Used Retarded Children at Wrentham Hospital,”
Boston Globe
, February 9, 1994.

15
See James W. Trent,
Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). See esp. 241–46, in which parents of retarded children came to be seen as the true victims because they had to house “low grade defectives.”

16
David J. Skal,
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror
(New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1992), 289–90.

17
“Mrs. Finkbine Undergoes Abortion in Sweden,”
The New York Times
, August 19, 1962.

18
A complete history and analysis can be found in Elizabeth D. Blum,
Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class and Gender in Environmental Activism
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008).

19
Eckardt C. Beck, “The Love Canal Tragedy,”
EPA Journal
(January 1979).

20
A full history of the first generation of Marvel comics appears in Ronin Ro,
Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American Comic Book Revolution
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).

21
“Synopsis: The Fantastic Four July ’61 Schedule,” in
Marvel Vault
(Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007).

22
Marvel Vault
, 76–77.

23
Stan Lee interview, in
Stan Lee’s Mutants, Monsters and Marvels
(Sony Pictures, 2002), DVD.

24
Complete script available in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, ed. Al Lavelley (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

25
See David M. Oshinsky,
A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joseph McCarthy
(New York: Free Press, 1983).

26
J. Edgar Hoover,
Masters of Deceit
(New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 186–87.

27
Sara Hamilton, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, March 1, 1956; Jack Moffit, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,”
The Hollywood Reporter
, February 16, 1956.

28
Henrikson,
Dr. Strangelove’s America
, 91.

29
Examples can be found in the film
Atomic Café
, directed by Jane Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Jane Rafferty (1982). DVD release by New Video Group (2002).

30
Tudor,
Monsters and Mad Scientists
, 114.

31
Stephen J. Whitfield,
The Culture of the Cold War
(Baltimore, Md.: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 59.

32
See Jancovich’s discussion in
Rational Fears
, 34–41. Jancovich emphasizes how the film deals with conceptions of both language and gender. He is right to show how it is nuanced and yet, in terms of production and distribution, the majority of American horror films in the 1950s were rather simple invasion narratives.

33
Almost every sensational work by UFO hunters contains a detailed description of the tale. See Jerome Clark,
Unexplained!: Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences and Puzzling Physical Phenomena
(Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1993).

34
Obituary of Kenneth Arnold,
Idaho Statesmen
, January 22, 1984.

35
Curtis Peebles,
Watch the Skies!: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1994), 247, 249, 280. Peebles shows that belief in UFO conspiracy comported well with the increasingly “nihilistic mood” of the United States. See 275–80.

36
Peter Knight, ed.,
Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in PostWar America
(New York: New York University Press, 2002), 7.

37
Athan G. Theoharis, ed.,
Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People’s Right to Know
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 2, 3. See Ted Gup,
A Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life
(New York: Doubleday, 2007).

38
Arthur Ruppelt,
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 201.

39
Peebles,
Watch the Skies!
99–101.

40
Nigel Watson,
Fortean Times
, March 23, 1999.

41
See Vern L. Bullough’s “Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report,” in
The Sexual Revolution
, ed. Mary E. Williams (San Diego: Green Haven Press, 2002).

42
Nancy K. Young and William H. Young,
The 1950s
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), 24–25.

43
Quoted in Beth L. Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America
(Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 86.

44
“Hearing in Student’s Case Continued,”
Ann Arbor News
, January 25, 1947.

45
Albert Ellis,
Sex and the Single Man
(New York: Lyle Stuart Press, 1963), 83. Beth L. Bailey shows that, elsewhere, Ellis made the case that rape was “neither dangerous nor health destroying.” See Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat
, 166n.

46
See a full discussion of body panic and alien abduction in Bridget Brown’s “‘My body is not my own’: Alien Abduction and the Struggle for Self-Control” in Knight,
Conspiracy Nation
, 107–32.

47
A good discussion of the postwar religion boom appears in George R. Marsden’s
Religion and American Culture
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), 213–18.

48
Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 89.

49
Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
, 81.

50
Peebles,
Watch the Skies!
93–99.

51
Fry’s account appears in Daniel W. Fry,
The White Sands Incident
(Louisville, Ky.: Best Books, 1966). See also Orfeo Angelucci,
The Secret of the Saucers
(Amherst, Wisc.: Amherst Press, 1955).

52
H. Taylor Burkner, “Flying Saucers Are for People,
” Trans-Action
(May/June 1966): 10–13.

53
A detailed discussion of and critical response to this phenomenon appear in Morris Goran,
The Modern Myth: Ancient Astronauts and UFOs
(London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1978).

54
Douglas E. Cowan,
Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television
(Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010), 180–88.

55
Jason Colovito,
The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture
(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2005).

56
Frank De Caro, ed..
An Anthology of American Folktales and Legends
(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe Press, 2009), 281; Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark,
Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 41.