Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (6 page)

Speculation abounded in New England about both the nature and the intent of the sea serpent. One report described how the creature had been the cause of a “variety of conjectures” among both “politicians and philosophers.” Some claimed, or rather worried, that the beast that had come into their harbor, had been a female of its species, and had come to spawn. An 1819 semi-satirical account of the sightings by “Neptune” mockingly noted that the major concern of New Englanders seemed to be over the fate of commerce should their shores become a “serpent fishery.” If the beast spawned its young in Gloucester harbor, then soon, they worried, “the whole ocean within the American coast would be desolated.”
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The discussions that surrounded the appearance of the sea serpent show the complex messages and omens that American monsters conveyed. Taken together, these accounts give us a much broader sense of the meaning of the monster in American social and cultural history than scholars of the horrific have noted. While the sea serpent became a repository of fear and anxiety, it also elicited fiercer emotions. The monster awakened a desire to destroy, while also eliciting a sense of
wonder. On a more pedestrian level, it served the purposes of political discourse, both in printed material and in daily conversation. As with all of America’s monsters, part of the monster’s monstrousness grew from its many meanings, its profusion of meaning. The Gloucester sea serpent was a highly public experience, impossible to reduce into a psychological symbol.

Numerous New Englanders claimed to have seen it, and everyone tried to invest it with meaning. The Gloucester serpent quickly, in fact almost immediately, made its way into political discussion. The anxious maritime entrepreneurs of Gloucester gave their sea monster the nickname “Embargo,” a reference to the controversial Embargo of 1807. This playful moniker reflected the very real uncertainties of the fishing industry, anxieties dating back to New England’s opposition to Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Acts, which had threatened their continued commercial expansion. The
Salem Gazette
, in commenting on the popular nickname sailors had given to the serpent, thought a monstrous invasion preferable to a new round of commercial embargoes. “Let our coast then be surrounded,” its editor opined, “by multitudes of these sea snakes rather than Jefferson’s embargoes.”
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The fascination with the serpent, fascination that included both a sense of anxiety and wonder, cannot be explained simply in terms of psychological projection and response. As with many of America’s monsters, the Gloucester sea serpent can only be described as a social experience of the monster, with numerous printed accounts and a very public conversation about its meaning. This was not a monster living inside of individual nightmares. If it was in some sense a “return of the repressed,” it had a very public return rather than a secret eruption into individual psyches.

The monster of Gloucester harbor, like most American monsters, rose out of the boiling abyss of American violence. Richard Slotkin, the cultural historian of American violence, argues that while the United States may not be more violent than other “settler societies” in world history, the country is unique in “the mythic significance we have assigned to the kinds of violence we have actually experienced.” The narrative we tell about ourselves and about our heroes is a narrative of what Slotkin calls “regeneration through violence.” In this typical American myth, the hero experiences the depths of frontier savagery (through both knowledge of the wild environment and its wild inhabitants) and becomes a mediator “who can teach civilized men how to defeat savagery on its native grounds.” American heroes know the wilderness and can tame it, though only and always through violence.
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The whalers whose response to the sea monster was to kill it, performed this mythic narrative, a narrative that in the previous century had centered on Daniel Boone killing bears and Native Americans and would soon center on Andrew Jackson and his Native American-killing prowess. The same impulse would reappear in the twentieth century when even American foreign policy would be imagined in terms of slaying monsters, first by Theodore Roosevelt and later by the post-World War II architects of the national security state. American heroes are monster slayers, and the monsters are the enemies of America.

The 1817 Boston broadside certainly makes it clear that destroying the monster in Gloucester harbor was the community’s first priority. On the first day of the sighting, “a number of our sharp-shooters” were in pursuit, firing muskets at the serpent. There seems to have been no public discussion of this effort. It was assumed that killing the monster was the only possible course. The men of the New England coast killed giant sea creatures for a living, and this particular wonder would receive the same treatment. The monster in American history is not simply that which destroys. It is a being that must be destroyed. As Slotkin’s work suggests, there can be no simple border wars in America’s conflicts. Every battle is a mythic battle, a struggle against savagery, whether it be a Native American war, the search for a sea monster, or a war on terror.

It would be too simplistic to view monster tales as simply narratives in service of American violence. The monster is a many-headed creature, and narratives about it in American history are highly complex. Richard Kearney describes the appearance of a monster, in a narrative, in a dream, or in sensory experience, “as a signal of borderline experiences and unobtainable excess.” Rather than simply representing personal trauma, he argues, they raise questions about our “neat divisions and borders.” The monsters of American history challenge all simple narratives and raise specters of ambiguity. They raise questions about the narratives we trust, even about what we mean by the phrase “American history.” Monster tales have at times provided inspiration for massacres and at other times served as haunting reminders of the ghosts of massacres past, the very stuff of American history that is repressed in the American historical consciousness. They are a “return of the repressed” but not simply the return of the repressed personal id. Like the serpent of Gloucester harbor, they rise out of the abyss to create wonder, consternation, and violence. They are meaning machines that embody the historical structures and trajectory of the American nation.
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Metaphors of a Monstrous History: When Symbols Attack

The American past reads like something of a horror movie, maybe even a low-budget slasher. American history comes at us dripping with gore, victims lying scattered on the ground, eldritch moonlight revealing creeping horrors you never learned from your eighth grade history textbook. The history of the United States offers a chamber of horrors, with clergy transforming the Native American other into demonic beings, mad scientists turning state-funded laboratories into torture chambers, and the photographic revolution of the Victorian era turning toward a morbid fascination with the bodies of the dead and the creation of the category of “gore.” History is horror.

A recent debate in Texas over history textbook standards explains why it is important to open up the American chamber of horrors for all to see. In 2009, during several highly contentious sessions, a committee called by the Texas State Board of Education argued over revisions to the public schools’ history standards for the 4.7 million students in the Texas system. In May of 2010 these changes passed and became part of the state’s history standards. These modifications in social studies standards will not only affect how teachers plan their daily lessons but also the kind of information included in textbooks. The controversy will likely reverberate through the American educational system, as Texas is the second largest purchaser of high school history texts.
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Conservative members of the Texas Board, backed by powerful state legislators, proposed some shocking changes to the way central events in American history would be remembered. In the new proposed standards, the legacy of the civil rights movement would include the creation of “unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes.” Joseph McCarthy would be described, not as the progenitor of a twentieth-century witch hunt, but as an American hero. Students would not learn about Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey because, as one Republican board member noted, “he was from Jamaica and was deported.”
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At the heart of the conservative effort on the Texas Board is the requirement that textbooks, and of course the teachers who use them, teach students the concept of “American exceptionalism.” This notion, that the United States has a special place and role in the world, itself has a history. It has often appeared clothed in religious garb, borrowing biblical concepts of the biblical covenant. At other times, it has taken on slightly more secular shading and emphasized America’s unique role in world history, the last best hope of earth and an instrument for the betterment of humanity. This vision of America’s role in the world, the very concept of exceptionalism itself, trades on the idea of American
innocence, that the United States, unlike the rest of the world, is in some sense free from the terrors of history. In this view, the United States is Forrest Gump, wandering innocently through a world of conflict and, more or less by accident, making it a better place.
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Such a deeply flawed conceptualization of the American past ignores how fevered dreams of “special destiny” led directly to a genocide of massive proportions against native peoples. It fails to acknowledge how deeply three hundred years of American slavery and the century of Jim Crow that followed compromised the American democratic experience from its inception. This is a vision of an America without monsters.

Failing to acknowledge monsters is part of the act of creating them. The claim that America has always been the Puritans’ (and Ronald Reagan’s) “city on a hill” is like Dr. Frankenstein’s claim that the creature he would create would “pour a torrent of light into our dark world.” Refusing to acknowledge the terrors of American history does not make them go away. Instead they wait, emerging nightmare-like into the images of popular culture and into folktales, in fictional narratives and in narratives told around campfires. The monster lives at the heart of American identity, giving the lie to notions of American innocence and exceptionalism.
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Monstrous narratives not only shape identities, they provide a place to hold conversations about our public anxieties. Our monsters register our national traumas. Eli Roth, the director of the violent film
Hostel
, oversimplifies somewhat when he makes the claim that horror films, especially of an extreme variety, are most popular during times of national turmoil. However, numerous moments in American social and cultural history suggest that the monster itself, as omen and portent full of cultural meaning, does exist in the middle of a matrix of history and reflection on the meaning of history. The fascination with fossils and the fantastic creatures they may have belonged to peaked during the final years of the American Revolution and the throes of state building that followed. Popular interest and scientific discourses related to the “freak” arose in the midst of discussion about race and its meaning in post-Emancipation society. Slasher films appeared at a moment when American society seemed to be committing suicide in a maelstrom of political violence and social unrest. The so-called torture porn genre, produced by Eli Roth and others, has become popular as the United States has debated its willingness to use torture against terrorist monsters.
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These examples are not meant to suggest, as Roth seems to be suggesting that horror narratives primarily exist to offer American society catharsis or that monstrous fascination essentially acts as kind of
national group therapy. This book argues instead that monsters in America are more than reference points for cultural obsessions. Monsters are “real” in the sense that they not only symbolize, but also help to configure, worldviews and play a role in those worldviews. They live outside of our psyches.

If the history of the American monster could be reduced to the story of psychic wounds opened by national traumas, then this would be strangely comforting. But the monsters walk among us, leaving a trail of gore and ichor in their wake. We wish we could be F. Scott Fitzgerald, having our uncomfortable encounters and then vomiting up our response to them. It is not that simple. There are victims of our monsters. Not victims screaming on the screen or within the pages of paperback horror fiction but historical victims, sacrificed to the nation-state and its sometimes bloodthirsty folk culture.

The American past, this book contends, is a haunted house. Ghosts rattle their chains throughout its corridors, under its furniture, and in its small attic places. The historian must resurrect monsters in order to pull history’s victims out of what Alice Walker calls “the mud of oblivion.” The historian’s task is necromancy, and it gives us nightmares. Or at least it should.
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The link between the metaphor and the reality of horror, the moments when monstrous fascinations become monstrous acts, appears far too often in American historical experience. Not long before Cotton Mather wrote to the Royal Society describing the appearance of giant fossils, he described the destruction of the Pequot Native Americans of New England in the 1630s. Mather noted one episode in particular in which settlers attacked a native village on the Mystic River near Long Island Sound, killing, literally, everything that moved and then burning the village to the ground. William Bradford in his
History of Plymouth Plantation
described the aftermath of the same incident as “a fearful sight” with the helpless Pequot “frying in the fyre and the streams of blood quenching the same.” Bradford may have thought the sight fearful but also approved of what he saw, describing how “the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice and they gave the praise thereof to God.” Mather also expressed pleasure at this brutal massacre, crowing that “no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”
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