Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (19 page)

Audiences certainly did not turn away in disgust from
Freaks
because of its ghastly representations. American moviegoers could have seen more horrifying scenes whenever the carnival came to town. Instead, audience reactions can be explained by the film’s dénouement. Popular audiences had become used to freaks as exhibits of the abnormal, warnings and portents about the need to preserve racial and sexual normality.
Freaks
, in contrast, stands up for its subjects. The narrative refuses to recognize “freakishness” as an abnormal state. Rather than assuming the age-old connections folklore made between evil and physical deformation, Browning turned the tables and asserted the moral perversity of “normals” when they deal with the freaks. Although the final act, the killing of Hercules and the mutilation of Cleo, enacts a moral revenge narrative not unfamiliar to American audiences, Browning showed them social vengeance in precisely the terms American audiences did not want to see.
Freaks
features the lynching of normals, the killing of a traditional masculine leading man, and the mutilation of a statuesque blonde who seemed a copy of every leading lady in every musical and romantic comedy MGM produced in this era. Audiences of the 1930s reacted to this as if one of today’s torture porn directors took Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Aniston out of their usual rom-com contexts and subjected them to degrading mutilation and death.
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MGM tried to recoup its financial loss by selling away the film.
Freaks
survived through the ’40s and ’50s on the underground circuit, often billed along with exploitation and pornographic films of all kinds. Notably, a new coda was added during this underground period that twisted Browning’s original vision into something unrecognizable. Calling the freaks “mistakes of nature,” it praised modern science for “eliminating such blunders from the world.”

If Americans did not want to produce monsters, or even see them when they were not being exhibited for entertainment, they certainly did not want to believe their ancestors had been monsters. In the dawning controversy over human origins, racialized folklore about monsters and monstrosity played a central role. More than just a battle between scientific progress and traditional religious faith, the Scopes trial became a discussion of the nature of race and the nature of monsters.

Scopes “Monster” Trial

The original cut of
Frankenstein
(now generally available in remastered prints of the film) featured a moment right after the creature comes to life in which actor Colin Clive’s Dr. Frankenstein shouts in triumph “now I know what it feels like to be God.” In the 1931 theatrical release, sound editors purposefully dubbed over this statement with a peal of thunder. Universal Pictures executives felt that the line might antagonize religious leaders at a time when an impending divorce between science and religion had become irreconcilable and nasty.

The rise of religious fundamentalism in America began in the late nineteenth century with divisions within major Protestant denominations over how best to respond to the changing scientific worldview, a new understanding of the history of religion, and the application of textual criticism to the Christian scriptures. An emergent Protestant liberalism welcomed modernity in all its forms while a recalcitrant fundamentalism saw these innovations as attacks on “the old time religion.” By the 1920s these divisions led to open splits in many major Christian denominations in America and subsequent wars over the ownership of seminaries and publishing houses.
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The average American churchgoer, and certainly those outside the pews, likely found these debates too theologically abstract. Religious fundamentalism found a much more tangible issue in the Scopes Monkey Trial. The war between religion and science, and some of its implicit connotations about the nature of race, became a debate over monsters. For many Americans, Darwinian evolution became a monster story, a tale that broke down the social and cultural barriers they believed so
essential to society. Supporters of antievolution laws drew on racial folklore and the heritage of scientific racism to challenge the notion of a common descent of humanity from other life forms.
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Weird racial science played a significant role in the intellectual life of nineteenth-century America. Racists who claimed a scientific basis for their ideology influenced the way white Americans thought about their relationship to the natural world throughout the nineteenth century. The so-called “American School” of anthropology assumed an enormous gulf between the “Saxon” race and inferior races. Louis Agassiz, whose professorship at Harvard and founding of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology gave him enormous influence, never accepted the idea of a common descent of humanity. Until his death in 1873, Agassiz argued for the separate origin of the races and a racial hierarchy of intelligence and ability. Agassiz’ taxonomy assumed the superiority of the white race while picturing the darker races as “monstrous races.”
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Racist science linked brain size, ethnic origin, and criminality. An early scene in the film version of
Frankenstein
has Dr. Waldman (Dr. Frankenstein’s former professor and mentor) giving a lecture about “normal” brains versus “criminal” brains. Pointing to brains in glass vats on his lecture table, Waldman claims that there are physical differences between the brain of the normal and “inherently criminal.” Such ideas (that entered the
Frankenstein
film through the production’s scientific advisor) played an important role in scientific racism. The study of the human skull had become a significant part of the theory of racial hierarchies by the late nineteenth century. “Craniometry,” or the study of skull size and shape as a method of determining racial characteristics, began to dominate both scholarly and popular writing about racial differences. Works such as William Z. Ripley’s
The Races of Europe
contrasted and compared skull sizes of a variety of “racial types” and included photographs of specimens that purportedly allowed white readers to see their superiority for themselves.
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Racist science followed its own logic and assumed that differentiation in skull size matched observable differences in the capacity of the brain. In 1909 Edward Anthony Spitzka, a fellow at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, compared the brains of the “inferiorly-equipped races” to the brains of the “higher races,” a comparison he understood as similar to the way “the vacuous, stupid physiogomy of the dull witted individual differs from the bright, animated, forceful and energetic look in the face of the vigorous thinker and talented genius.”
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American anthropology sought to represent the notions of scientific racism in the most public forums possible. Certainly the strangest
and most outrageous example of this is the Bronx Zoo’s 1904 display of a human being, a member of the Central African Batwa people named Ota Benga. The young man had been brought to the United States from Central Africa by Presbyterian missionary Samuel Verner for exhibition at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Verner, financially insolvent, later left Benga with the director of the Bronx Zoo. At first allowed to wander about freely, Benga was eventually trapped by zookeepers in the zoo’s “Monkey House.”
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Rachel Adams, in her book
Sideshow America
, shows that zookeepers sought to present Benga as a “racial freak,” advertising him as a cannibal and emphasizing his sharply pointed teeth. Seeking to highlight the African as an anthropological missing link, the zoo’s director placed an orangutan named Dohong in the cage with Benga. Dohong had been trained to show “human” characteristics and could ride a bicycle and eat at a table. Zookeepers meanwhile urged Benga to charge at patrons and flash his sharp teeth. They scattered bones around the floor of the cage where the man and the ape lived. Adams puts it mildly when she writes that the Bronx Zoo used the exhibit to “suggest an evolutionary proximity between Africans and apes.”
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The
New York Tribune
commented on the similarity of the freak show and the “anthropological exhibition” in the Bronx. Noting that there was something “disagreeable” about Ota Benga being placed on display, the
Tribune
also noted that it had been common for “fat women, living skeletons and other eccentric human beings voluntarily to make ‘museum freaks’ of themselves, exhibited side by side with baby elephants and educated pigs.” Of course, the
Tribune
ignored much when it used the word “voluntarily” to describe the similarities. Nevertheless, the author does seem to have understood that the freak show and the exhibit shared some common characteristics. White middle-class notions of race found their way into both types of spectacles, as did American anxiety over preserving the privileges of class and racial status.
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Ota Benga was not the only racialized monster of science put on for public display during the Age of Frankenstein. On exhibit in New York City between 1860 and 1924 was Barnum’s “What is it?”— a creature described as “the Most Marvelous Creature Living” that was either “a lower order of man or a higher order of monkey.” In fact, “it” was a role played by several human beings from the 1840s into the twentieth century. Although the identity of the first two is unclear, the most famous was an African American man named William Johnson. Born in New Jersey, Johnson was the son of former slaves whose poverty likely induced them to turn him over to the traveling carnival in the 1860s.
Johnson also traveled with Ringling Brothers Circus, where he had been known as “Zip the Pinhead.”
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Barnum’s promotional literature portrayed Johnson as an inhuman monster. Promoters placed Johnson in heavy furs in an effort to create a “savage” appearance and insisted that he had been captured “in the jungles of Africa.” New York City patrons who had seen both Ota Benga and Johnson’s show had, in their own minds, already tied them into the scientific discourses of the day. Monsters in popular culture blended racist craniology, conceptions of racial brain size, pop Darwinism, and white anxieties about the “black beast.”

African American leaders certainly realized that visitors to the Bronx Zoo linked Ota Benga to American racist iconography and responded to his captivity with outrage. Reverend Gordon, an African American minister who headed a New York orphanage, complained in a letter to the zoo, “You people are on top. We have got to rise. Why not let us and not impede us? Why shut up a boy in a cage with chimpanzees to show Negroes akin to apes?” African American leaders, especially the clergy, continued to express this sense of outrage, though the Bronx Zoo and its director William Hornaday remained recalcitrant.
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After almost two years of public outcry, Benga was released and taken into the care of some of the clergy who had protested his treatment. Benga committed suicide in 1916 when World War I prevented his planned return to the Congo. Editorials that followed his death tended to warn about the dangers of science when it investigates “backward races” rather than question the racist assumptions that had led to the tragedy.

Benga died almost ten years before the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 became the first public skirmish in the struggle over the theory of evolution. This very public debate took place soon after a wave of antievolution statutes swept American states in the early 1920s. In Dayton, Tennessee, a small town in the mountainous eastern portion of the state, a biology teacher named John Scopes agreed to teach evolution in his classroom to provide the American Civil Liberties Union an opportunity to challenge antievolutionary laws in court.

The trial that followed, famously represented in the Hollywood film
Inherit the Wind
as a struggle between modern rationalism and religious obscurantism, exposed deep divisions in America over a number of cultural and ideological issues. Historians have read the trial, and the spectacle it became, as everything from an emerging religious divide to a struggle for local autonomy.
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The concept of racial monstrosity played a significant and generally ignored role in how Americans responded to Scopes and to evolution
more generally. The trial firmly cemented the conception of a link between apes and human beings in the American public consciousness. In a country where African American men had frequently been connected to savage apes, it was impossible that audiences would fail to connect the dots to form a crudely racist image. The ghost of Ota Benga haunted the proceedings.

Although religious objections to evolution remained paramount, antievolutionists understood, according to historian of the Scopes trial Jeffrey P. Moran, that believing in humanity’s common ancestry promised to destroy the basis of white supremacy. The
Atlanta Constitution
, for example, editorialized that “racial miscegenation” was the only possible outcome of accepting evolutionary theory. Given the white supremacist desire to maintain boundaries between racial types, Darwin’s theory threatened to break down those boundaries. The logic of evolution seemingly brought about the dreaded amalgamation so feared by many white Americans in the twenties.
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Antievolution forces, however, had no monopoly on the use of monster imagery in the fight. Conceptions of racial monstrosity inspired spokespeople on both sides of the debate. The controversial textbook used by John Scopes contained a taxonomy of “racial types” so beloved by scientific racism. William Hornaday, the influential director of the Bronx Zoo that had imprisoned Ota Benga, wrote during this period that “some sensitive minds shrink from the idea that man has “descended” from the apes. I never for a moment shared that feeling. I would rather descend from a clean, capable and bright minded genus of apes than from any unclean, ignorant and repulsive race.”
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