A Very Historically Blind Christmas Carol

The year is 1888, and the city of London is gripped by terror because of the ripper murders. This serial killer mutilated at least five women at night around certain impoverished districts of the city, though other killings were also believed by many to have been committed by the same person. Newspaper coverage of the murders turned into one of the first true media frenzies, and the result has been a lasting legacy of myths and pseudohistory surrounding the murders. The story of Jack the Ripper is one I’d certainly like to tell one day on this podcast, but this Christmas season, I want to focus on another story that is said to have occurred in this time, while all of London was locking their doors, afraid of the bloody phantom killer stalking the streets. That year, during the week before Christmas a young girl named Carol Poles went missing. When the authorities failed to find young Carol, her family and others from her community banded together to find her, terrified that she might become the victim of the Ripper, if that wasn’t already her fate. However, as they went from house to house, knocking on doors and asking about their dear Carol, few would open their doors and talk to them, fearing that it was the Ripper lurking outside their door. Therefore, as a signal that they meant no harm to the occupants of each home they visited, they sang Christmas songs outside each door, and only when the residents opened up did they inquire whether little Carol Poles had been seen. Alas, they never found young Carol, but every year, they kept up the tradition in her memory, singing songs from door to door, and that is why we call Christmas songs sung from door to door Christmas Carols. Isn’t that a fascinating story. Too bad it’s utter nonsense. It’s unclear where this urban legend originated, but it’s very clear that it is hogwash. If they first called Christmas songs carols in 1888, it’s rather hard to explain why Charles Dickens called his novella A Christmas Carol in 1843. So where does the word “carol” come from? Some identify John Awdlay, a chaplain in Shropshire, as being the author of the earliest known English usage of this word when he compiled a list of 25 “caroles of Cristemas” in 1426. Certainly the Oxford English Dictionary confirms it was well in use by the 1500s. As for its origin, some, like Andrew Gant, author of one of my principal sources for this episode, The Carols of Christmas, claim that its derivation is murky and that it is said to have been borrowed from many different languages. The Oxford English dictionary tells us the English word was in use as far back as the 1300s referring to songs or dances generally, and not necessarily those associated with Christmas, and it traces the word etymologically to Old French. However, from there the origins do indeed become obscure, and there is debate over whether it may be derived from the Greek-Latin chorus or some other ancient derivation, such as the Latin corolla, or little crown, referring to the ring-dances also called “carols.” So as we begin to look closely at these famous songs of Christmas, we already see a patchwork of myths, misinformation, and historical blind spots.

We cannot begin our study of the little known history and surprising facts behind certain well-known Christmas carols without first properly delving into the true history behind the tradition of caroling from door to door, as we hear in the classic carol “Here We Come a-Wassailing.” This tradition has its roots in the older forms of Christmas that I spoke about in my first Christmas special, when it was more of a midwinter bacchanal that saw the norms of society, from gender to class, upended topsy-turvy style, which of course I also spoke further about in my second Christmas special. If you haven’t listened to those, you’ve got plenty of fun seasonal listening in store this holiday. The word “wassail” can be traced to an Old Norse toast to one’s health. “Waes hael,” was toasted, essentially meaning “Be healthy,” and the response was “Drinc hael,” whereupon the toasters drank. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in the 12th century that it entered the English language when the Anglo-Saxon chieftain’s daughter Rowena taught it to Vortigern, King of the Britons, though this is pure mythologizing. How this toasting became specifically associated with Christmas is unclear. The toast was commonly shouted at coronations, some of which occurred in Christmas time during the 11th and 12th centuries, including those of William the Conqueror and Stephen of Blois. However, it may simply be because people did a lot of drinking during the wild old Christmas festivities. Since then, though, the toast has evolved in meaning. A wassail is a drink, typically some kind of spiced ale, commonly drunk in Christmas and Twelfth Night festivities, and the verb, wassailing, refers to the nocturnal visits of the poor to houses of the affluent. These house-to-house visits were not the mannered and lovely caroling of today, however, but rather a kind of drunken form of panhandling in which wassailers asked for money or food. Often the singing was more of a threat. If the occupants did not treat them generously, they would annoy them with their intoxicated caterwauling until they got what they wanted. This, the true nature of Christmas caroling, may surprise some of you listeners, but Christmas carols are full of surprises like this. When you look into them, you find that lovely songs may not be about what you think they’re about, may not even be about Christmas at all, and may have a surprising history behind them.

A Christmas Eve 1842 issue of the Illustrated London News, depicting Father Christmas in a wassail bowl.

Ever since the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, watching it has become something of a national tradition in the U.S. In 1992, the Peanuts gang returned with an all-new Christmas special, It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown. Just as the first special had encouraged a more traditional Christian view of the holiday, the new special once again had Linus turn to the Bible for some insight, this time seeking an understanding of the classic repetitive song The Twelve Days of Christmas. “That song drives me crazy,” says Sally. “What in the world is a calming bird?” In response, Linus cracks open a Bible and says, “A calling bird is a kind of partridge. In 1 Samuel 26:20, it says: ‘For the king of Israel has come out to seek my life...just as though he were hunting the calling bird.’ There's a play on words here, you see? David was standing on a mountain, calling. And he compared himself to a partridge being hunted.” In reality, “calling birds” are not “a kind of partridge.” In fact, the original English version of this song, first published in the 18th century as a children’s rhyme, actually describes the 4th day’s gift as “colly birds,” which referred to European blackbirds. Oddly, among the many translations of this verse in 1 Samuel, none matches what Linus reads, and most translate it as a partridge, not a “calling bird.” It’s very strange then that they didn’t just have Linus talking about the first day’s gift, the iconic partridge in a peartree. But this line too sparks debate among ornithologists, since a partridge is a ground bird that would not typically be found in a tree. Some have looked to an alternate version of the song which says that on the first day of Christmas, the true love gives “a part of a juniper tree,” suggesting some corruption has turned it into a partridge in a peartree. However, most of the gifts in the song are game birds, so it would stand to reason that it is a partridge. Another explanation lies in the fact that the original English version was a translation of an older French rhyme, Les Douze Mois, The Twelve Months, not a Christmas rhyme at all. It is pointed out that the Old French word for a partridge was un perdrix, which sounds very much like a peartree. However, if the line was originally bilingual, “A partridge and un perdrix,” that would make it a gift of two birds on day one, spoiling the whole structure of the song. Regardless of what the original line was and how it was corrupted, one thing is certain. The song is absolutely not derived from that verse in 1 Samuel that Linus implies it is from.
Charles Schulz would not be the last to suggest that this classic Christmas song, which had evolved like so many others from earlier versions that were not about Christmas at all, actually has some religious meaning that it doesn’t really have. Since the 1990s, a claim has been circulating the Internet that the Twelve Days of Christmas was actually a secret coded Catholic catechism dating to the English Reformation, when Catholics could not openly practice their faith. However, this claim, often credited to 20th century Canadian hymnologist Hugh McKellar, doesn’t make much sense on a number of levels. First, the code itself is asinine. It says the twelve drummers drumming represented the twelve points of the Apostles Creed; the eleven pipers piping were actually the eleven apostles (minus the Twelfth Apostle, Judas Iscariot); the lords a-leaping clearly must represent the 10 Commandments; the ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit; the maids a-milking stood for the eight beatitudes; the swans a-swimming represented the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit; the geese a-laying were the six days of creation, the five golden rings really the five Books of Moses or Pentateuch; the four calling birds could be the four gospels; three French hens were the three gifts of faith, hope, and love; two turtle doves stood for the Old and New Testaments; and the partridge in a pear tree symbolized Jesus Christ on the cross, with God himself as the “true love” that gives all these things. The clearest refutation of this claim was given by Snopes, which pointed out that there is simply no support for this claim beyond the simple repeating of the claim itself. If we look at all these supposed symbolic connections, there is no correlation beyond the numbers of the things. There is no clear reason to associate Christ with a partridge, or leaping lords with commandments, or milkmaids with beatitudes. Also, besides the fact that there were varying levels of toleration of Catholicism in the centuries between Henry VIII and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, most of these secretly coded symbols, with the exception of the 12 points of the Apostle’s Creed, are just Christian things, not explicitly Catholic things. It’s not as though the Reformation did away with all talk about Christ, his Apostles, the Holy Spirit, and the books of the Old Testament. In fact, the time when the contents of the song might have been forbidden would have been during the English Civil War, when Puritans briefly outlawed Christmas, but in that case, it would have been the carol itself that was banned, not the mere mention of certain Christian concepts. While this Christmas carol myth is altogether ridiculous, it is perfectly representative of the way people simply don’t understand the origins of their favorite seasonal songs and sometimes choose to completely invent a fictional origin that suits their worldviews.

Statue of Saint Wenceslaus in St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague

One classic Christmas song, with an earworm melody and an uplifting message of Christian charity in the face of a harsh winter, is Good King Wenceslaus, but the history behind this popular Christmas song reveals that it is not quite what it seems. First, there is the ancient history of King Wenceslaus himself, who was actually a 10th century Duke of Bohemia, named Václav. According to the legend that that would see him later venerated as a saint and remembered as a king by Czechs, he was an honorable and virtuous ruler, devoted to Catholicism despite the pagan beliefs of much of his family, and he was known for his great charity to the lowliest of his subjects. This is the legend that would inspire the songwriter who would further immortalize him, but the reality of his life was rather more violent than the song lets on. When his father died, his grandmother became regent, but his pagan mother resented her and had her murdered, strangled with her own veil, it is said. When his mother took control, she suppressed Christianity, leading to a rebellion and coup by Christian noblemen who ended up exiling her and installing a teenage Václav as duke. His duchy was beset on all sides by enemies, from Magyars to Saxons, as well as from within, by conspirators who had gathered around his pagan twin brother, the resentful Boleslav who wanted power for himself. Duke Václav was eventually killed by his brother’s supporters, and supposedly run through by his own brother with a lance while celebrating the birth of Boleslav’s son. This has been portrayed in the many biographies and hagiographies of Václav as a trap laid by his brother, who had invited the duke to celebrate his son’s birth all the while planning to assassinate him, but this may very well be an embellishment meant to further portray the Catholic duke as a martyr of his faith, killed by pagan usurpers. In truth, the invitation may have been a genuine peace offering that only turned violent when a drunken argument broke out. It’s impossible to tell because the history of Václav comes to us principally through the aforementioned hagiographies, the purpose of which are to encourage the elevation of their subjects to sainthood, and thus are inherently unreliable.

Thus the image of Good King Wenceslas as a barefoot penitent who gave everything to the poor, the so-called “father of all the wretched,” is unlikely to have much relationship to the true character of the man. But it was just such hagiography that inspired Victorian clergyman John Mason Neale to write the famous hymn about him. Of course, the story that Neale describes in the hymn, of Wenceslas and his page trudging through the snow and risking frostbite to carry food and firewood to a poor subject living up a mountain, is pure fiction, a bit of further hagiography. Neale wrote the lyrics to the tune of an old Latin hymn, “Tempus adest floridum,” which in translation means, “Spring has unwrapped her flowers.” And he wrote it not as a Christmas song, but as a hymn for St. Stephen’s Day, observed in the liturgical calendar on December 26th. This much is clear from the first lines of the song, “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even…” So we have a hymn adapted from a song about spring to celebrate St. Stephen’s Day, all about a Bohemian duke whose pagan family made a habit of bloody coups. Where is Christmas here? Is it enough simply to talk of snow? Or is it the least mention of Christian charity? And what of the beliefs of the hymn writer, John Mason Neale? Does it spoil his song entirely that he chose as his subject a Catholic saint for song to be sung by choristers in the Church of England? Many of his contemporaries certainly thought so, accusing him of idolatry and crypto-Catholicism because of his high church sympathies, leading even to mobs threatening to stone him and burn his home to the ground. Once, at the funeral of a nun, he was physically assaulted for his encouragement of Anglo-Catholicism. So the question, very relevant to the history of other Christmas carols, becomes this: how much might the biography of a songwriter cast different light on a well-known Christmas song?

James Pierpont, the unsavory character who wrote “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” better known today as “Jingle Bells.”

The perfect example of a carol-writer’s life completely changing a Christmas carol can be found in one of the most upbeat, light-hearted, and seemingly innocent of all Christmas songs: Jingle Bells. Since learning more about its composer, I personally have not been able to listen to this previously lovely song without some distaste. There is actually some debate over where the song was written, with both Medford, Massachusetts, and Savannah, Georgia, claiming to have been its birthplace. In truth, both have some rightful claim, since its composer, James Pierpont, was surely writing about his memories of snowy Massachusetts when he wrote the lyrics, for the city in which he actually wrote it, Savannah, is not known for snow. James Pierpont came from a family of Unitarian preachers, but he wasn’t very pious himself. At fourteen, he ran away from boarding school and went to sea, where he seems to have picked up some poor character traits. Returning to his family’s hometown of Medford, Mass., seven years later, he took a wife and fathered three children, but he promptly abandoned them to seek his fortune Out West, in San Francisco. After losing everything to a fire and then losing his wife, who remained back east, to tuberculosis, he did not return home to raise his children. Instead, hearing that his brother John had started a church in Savannah, he left his children in his father’s care and went south to play the organ. There in Savannah, as his brother preached an increasingly unpopular anti-slavery doctrine to his Southern congregation, James seems to have fallen into scandal. He took a new bride, fathering a child with her years before their nuptials, according to one census, and thereafter begetting more, a second brood, seemingly without much thought for the three children he had left behind in Massachusetts. Looking at his most popular song, the Christmas song he titled “The One-Horse Open Sleigh,” we can see that it’s not really about Christmas. Once again, it’s simply the presence of snow that has made it a Christmas standard. Rather, the song is about wooing ladies, and may illustrate James Pierpont’s reputation as something of a rake. Its full lyrics are about taking a young lady out for a sleigh ride, and then being shown up and humiliated by another “young gent.” The message of the song seems to be that you get more girls with a more impressive sleigh, as summed up in its final stanza, “Go it while you’re young. Take the girls tonight.” Think of it like a more modern song that might talk about impressing one’s conquests with a flashy car.

Besides this song, Pierpont’s other lyrics further betray his low character. He wrote more than one song complaining about having to pay his debts. And his numerous minstrel songs betray his drifting away from his Unitarian roots toward a more Southern and racist mindset, especially one titled “The Colored Coquette.” Finally, when his abolitionist preacher brother returned home to Massachusetts at the outbreak of the Civil War, James showed his true colors. He remained in Savannah, and he joined the Confederate army, serving in a cavalry regiment for two years, and he wrote numerous Confederate war songs, including “Strike for the South,” the lyrics of which unironically argue that Confederates fought for liberty; “We Conquer or Die,” whose lyrics suggest that defeat (read: the end of slavery) was a fate like unto death; and “Our Battle Flag!” which told Confederate soldiers that if they died in battle, they went to a “hero’s grave.” So there you have it. Next time you hear Jingle Bells, you, like me, may have a hard time not thinking about the child-abandoning, debt-evading, womanizing, white supremacist secessionist who wrote it. And ironically, his nephew, John Pierpont Morgan, or J.P. Morgan, the famously ruthless banker of the Gilded Age, has been unfavorably compared to that iconic Christmas film villain, Henry Potter, of It’s a Wonderful Life. Now, I’m not suggesting that the art cannot be separated from the artist, that this classic Christmas carol, so simple and popular among children, should be canceled. Rather, I’m saying that, if knowing this kind of spoils the song for you, as it does me, then maybe you delete it from your Spotify Christmas playlist. And there is a contemporary alternative with which you might replace it. “Up on the Housetop,” a jaunty and genuinely Christmas-y song about Santa Claus’s visit, was also written during the Civil War, but its composer, Benjamin Hanby, was an abolitionist through and through, whose family is said to have worked the Underground Railroad. Like Pierpont, he too wrote other songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray” and “Ole Shady,” which unlike other songs about slavery in that era actually highlighted the cruelty of the institution with a focus on its separation of families.

The Illustrated London News's illustration of the Christmas Truce.

Much as Jingle Bells was never really about Christmas, so too another iconic Christmas carol, Oh Christmas Tree, was never really about Christmas trees per se. Nevertheless, it plays a central role in one of the most cherished modern Christmas stories, which itself may be somewhat embellished. Many have heard the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when during an unofficial ceasefire on the Western Front, German and British soldiers crossed the trenches, sang Christmas carols, and played football, or soccer as Americans like me would call it, all of it to the chagrin of their sternly disapproving generals. Like most stories in history, this one too has gathered a variety of myths and misconceptions on its way through the years. For example, it was not so general a truce as some might believe, with hostilities continuing in many places, and the military leadership was not so disapproving as the legend would have it. They did not angrily take action to halt the armistice or discipline those soldiers who had participated in it or censor news about it afterward, as would later be claimed. Even the soccer matches seem to have been greatly exaggerated, with most accounts of them originating from rumors or reports that games of football had been proposed but never actually played because the soldiers didn’t actually have a ball handy. The carol-singing does appear to have been accurate though, and the song they often as not sang together was one well known in both their languages: “O Christmas Tree” to the British, and “O Tannenbaum” to the Germans. But the two were not really singing about the same thing. Tannenbaum more accurately translates to fir tree; turning this song into an ode to Christmas trees was a bit of creative mistranslation.

The song and its melody both evolved from different folk traditions. When Bavarian composer Melchior Franck wrote the lyrics in the 17th century, praising the evergreen tree for its hardy survival through the harsh cold of winter—a lesson on perseverance and stoicism in the face of cruel hardship—he was taking part in a long folk tradition of poetry and song that used evergreens as metaphors. But the lyrics would not be set to its recognizable melody until arranged by another German composer, Ernst Anschütz, in 1824. The tune he used can also be traced back to an old Westphalian folk song, the lyrics of whose later iteration, popular as a drinking song among German students in the Middle Ages, spoke of Roman poet Horace, his romance of women, his drunken merrymaking, and his intention to live in the moment and enjoy life, or carpe diem, as Horace would have said. In some sense, the song’s association with Christmas seems natural: the imagery of greenery in the winter lends itself well to the seasonal festivities, which have always been about celebrating the persistence of life in the midst of the winter’s cold lifelessness, and even its melody’s now lost association with merrymaking connects perfectly with the true Saturnalian origins of the holiday. But it occurs to me that, during the Christmas Truce, while the British might have sung the song with visions of Christmas trees festooned with gaudy decorations in mind, the Germans may have been thinking more about the intended meaning of the song, about precious life surviving in a cruel world and the need to persevere like the evergreen through this ghastly, numbing time. And unknowingly, all of them were acting in accordance with the old theme associated with the song’s melody, seizing the day, plucking some few moments of joy for themselves before time marched them on, many of them to their deaths.

Publicity photo of American entertainers Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien, who played her little sister in Meet Me in St. Louis

Even the meanings of more modern Christmas songs are not always what many think they are, or what they were at first meant to be. For example, my father’s favorite Christmas song is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” because, according to him, it’s so hopeful and uplifting. Dad, I know you listen to the podcast occasionally, so first, Merry Christmas, and second, you know I’m going to explode your understanding of this song. I’ve talked to you before about how this classic Judy Garland showtune is not hopeful but bleak and not uplifting but rather devastating. Well, now let’s go even further into why this song only seems positive because it was more than once revised to alter its tone. The song was originally written for the musical Meet Me in St. Louis, a classic that I recommend everyone view this season. In the musical, a family’s patriarch has decided to move them all from St. Louis to New York, and none of his girls is happy about it. The song is sung by Garland’s character, Esther, to her little sister Tootie, who is afraid that Santa won’t be able to find her in New York. Esther is melancholy herself in the scene, looking pensively out a window at the snow and thinking about the young man she’ll have to leave behind because of their cross-country move. This is the context of the song, full of pain because of a major life change that seems to be the end of their lives in the city they love, and its lyrics’ talk of having a merry Christmas is ironic and even rueful. When the song was first written, the lyrics better reflected this tone. Esther was to sing “Have yourself a merry little Christmas; it may be your last; next year we will be living in the past.” We have Judy Garland to thank for the somewhat brighter tone of the song in the film. She had been performing USO tours and had seen firsthand how another sad and yearning song of hers, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” had taken on greater meaning to troops who saw in it a song about their eventual return home from service. She felt that a revision of the lyrics to this song could make it similarly meaningful on more than one level. That and she thought her character came off a bit mean singing the harsh original version to an already tearful child. So the lyrics were changed from “No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who were dear to us will be near to us no more” to the more familiar “Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more.” Yet still the song retained its melancholic heart, with a line at the end that “we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” The song did not see its final, joyful sanitization until 14 years after it was written, when Frank Sinatra wanted to include it in his album and came to the original songwriter, complaining that the “muddle through somehow” line still made it too sad. “'The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas,” he said “Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?” And thus was born the line “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” and the original tone of the song was finally lost to any who hear it divorced from its intended context. Only the pathos in Judy Garland’s original performance of the song hints at the utter despair that the sung was meant to evoke.

In my previous Christmas specials I have spoken at length about the problems with the biblical nativity story, as well as the numerous myths and mysteries that derive from it. These include the true date of Christ’s birth, the time of year when he was born and the likelihood of shepherds tending their flocks at night during that season, the legend of the Christmas star, and the mythos of the Three Magi. Many of these elements of Christmas mythology owe their immortality to their inclusion in more than one Christmas carol. One example of a carol portraying the nativity, whose depiction has caused some controversy and debate, is Away in a Manger. One line in this song mentions “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” and its critics have gone so far as to call the song heretical. This innocent line about a placid babe, they said, suggests that Christ did not display human qualities, like a full range of emotion, and as such the song took part in the notorious heresy called Docetism. But whatever one thinks of this terribly serious debate, the song “Away in a Manger,” formerly called “The Cradle Song,” serves as a final apt example of the mystery and misconception that surrounds so many Christmas carols. The song is popularly attributed to Martin Luther, the famed church reformer. It was said that he wrote the song as a lullaby for his children. It’s feasible enough. Luther is known to have written hymns. But in fact, it does not appear to be true at all, having only first been claimed in 1884 by a Universalist newspaper whose editors regarded Martin Luther very highly. The true author of the lyrics remains unknown, and even harder to pin down is the composer of its melody, for it has been sung to many different tunes through the years. In a 1951 article, music scholar Richard S. Hill identified no less than 41 distinct tunes that have been used for the song. As with “Away in a Manger,” it seems the history of most Christmas carols is confounded by blind spots and myths. In this way, it reflects well on the history of the holiday generally. Those who bloviate like Linus about the “true meaning” of Christmas, or demand some adherence to a perceived original tradition of the holiday, fail to understand that the original meaning is mislaid in a confusion of misconceptions and mysteries, and that today’s traditions are just a jumble of whatever stuck through the years, their original forms lost to time. Such is the case with all folk tradition.

Further Reading

"carol, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/28123.

Collins, Ace. Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas. Zondervan, 2001.

Gant, Andrew. The Carols of Christmas: The Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs. Nelson Books, 2015.

Montgomery, Bob. “Four Calling Birds.” American Ornithological Society, 25 Dec. 2017, americanornithology.org/four-calling-birds/.

A Defense of the 1619 Project

In the early 17th century, the port city of Luanda on the western shore of Africa, in what is today Angola, was a Portuguese colony established through the invasion and decades-long subjugation of the Kingdom of Ndongo. An estimated 50,000 Angolans, many of them captured as prisoners of war, were shipped to foreign ports as chattel slaves, often via the Middle Passage to the New World. One ship, the San Juan Bautista, carried 350 slaves bound for the Spanish colony of Veracruz, but along the way, two English privateers attacked the vessel and seized some of the Africans aboard. These two privateer ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, landed, carrying “twenty and odd” of these enslaved Africans at the English settlement of Jamestown in Virginia in late August of 1619. Some of these men and women are recorded as having been sold to prominent settlers in Jamestown—including the colonial governor of Virginia, George Yeardley—and they are viewed as the first African slaves in the United States. Some may quibble, though. Their being the first African slaves must be specified, as some Native Americans had previously been enslaved by settlers. And some may point to African slaves in Spanish colonies in what is today Florida to argue that the slaves brought to Virginia in 1619 were not the first Africans enslaved on land that today is part of the continental United States, and this of course is true. Nevertheless, the date 1619 has long stood as the beginning of African slavery in English colonial America, and certainly as the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade in Virginia, which can be viewed as the birth of the Southern institution of slavery. Despite my caveats, recognition of 1619 as the beginning of American slavery is not controversial. Search any academic database—JSTOR, EBSCO, Gale—and you’ll see scholarly articles and books almost universally identifying 1619 as the birth of American slavery. In fact, you’ll see more disagreement about the end date, with some choosing 1862, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, or 1865, the end of the Civil War, and some suggesting slavery did not truly end until as late as 1877, the end of Reconstruction. The point is, such milestones will always be matters of emphasis and interpretation. The only reason that the beginning date of 1619 is so quibbled over now is that 400 years later, in 2019, the New York Times Magazine published a special issue launching The 1619 Project, an initiative that sought to “reframe the country’s history” with a central focus on the lasting repercussions of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans, and it approached this simply by asking readers to consider “what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” Since then, the project earned its creator, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, both a Pulitzer Prize and enough criticism that this series of articles and the educational resources it inspired are now buried beneath a stinking pile of controversy.

Whether or not you believe that our national narrative can be reasonably said to have begun in late August 1619, the beginning of this controversy undoubtedly began in late August 2019, when the Times launched The 1619 Project with the publication of numerous articles by journalists, legal scholars, and historians, as well as pieces by literary artists. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay argues that the country’s founding principles about inalienable rights and equality were not genuine until Black Americans, to whom said equality was not extended and such rights were denied, struggled to make them real. Additional articles included sociologist Matthew Desmond’s argument that cruel labor practices representative of American capitalism had their start in the treatment of slaves on plantations, journalist Jamelle Bouie’s tracing of obstructionist partisan politics and counter-majoritarianism to the efforts of Southern politicians to preserve slavery, historian Kevin Kruse’s piece on segregation and its connection to white flight and suburban sprawl, and journalist Linda Villarosa’s discussion of some medical stereotypes and myths previously used to justify slavery that persist even today. There was significant fanfare at the time for the project’s launch, and it was viewed as an admirable undertaking by many scholars, even if they felt it wasn’t exactly breaking new ground with its claims. As Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review explained, it struck him “as laudable, if unexceptional.” Certainly the Times and the writers involved in the project must have expected some criticism and controversy, considering the provocative tone taken by Hannah-Jones and other contributors and the central conceit of the entire project, which suggests the popular view about our nation’s founders and their principles may be a myth and that something more distasteful lies rotting in our roots, poisoning the whole tree. However, building as they were on the sentiments of much modern historical scholarship and sociology, they likely expected opposition to arise from the Right, from conservative think tanks, whose talking points would filter out to politicians and Fox New talking heads. And certainly that opposition would come in time. But imagine their surprise when strong criticism arose first from the Left.

Leon Trotsky, modern followers of whom were the first to object to The 1619 Project on ideological grounds. Public Domain.

The first major criticism of The 1619 Project came from the International Committee of the Fourth International, on their website, the Word Socialist Web Site. If you are not familiar with the ICFI and their website, they are an organization of Trotskyists, that is, a movement that follows the Marxist philosophy of Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In their first attack on the project, they called it “a politically motivated falsification of history.” In their view, it was an effort to further leverage “identity politics” and forge an exclusive political alliance between voters of color and the Democratic Party. This accusation really reeks of conspiracy theory, since the Democratic Party was not an official sponsor of the project and the writers who contributed to it, while liberal and progressive, are not explicitly affiliated with the party and may indeed lean farther left than many Democrats or may even have some sympathy for certain Trotskyist views and share some of their criticisms of the Democratic Party. It’s hard to tell, since journalists and historians typically try to steer clear of working directly for any political party, since it could undermine their authority and/or credibility. Regardless, though, the accusation is pretty rich, considering the central criticism that the Trotskyists leveled at The 1619 Project was itself politically motivated. They took especial umbrage with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s characterization of racism being “in the DNA” of the United States. According to the Trotskyist criticism, The 1619 Project is too pessimistic, and it fallaciously suggests that racism is an inescapable part of the fabric of American culture. In other words, the Marxists think that the Times didn’t go far enough in advocating for a change in political or economic conditions, even though such advocacy is implicit throughout the Project. To the Trotskyists, drawing attention to the ubiquity of racism is akin to throwing up one’s arms and saying there’s nothing to be done about it, and by their reckoning, the Project is problematic because it did not seek to foment an overthrow of the entire economic order. And how did they further their argument? By publishing a series of interviews with historians who also criticized The 1619 Project, though none of them on the same ideological grounds.

Among the larger group of historians interviewed on the World Socialist Web Site, only four of them, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, Gordon Wood, and James Oakes, signed a letter penned by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz that demanded corrections be made to the articles thus far published. The letter insisted that it was only a matter of keeping the Times accountable and seeing factual inaccuracies retracted and corrected. Their complaints mostly focused on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, and their biggest sticking point, the inaccuracy they have spent the most time rebutting is Hannah-Jones’s assertion that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” These historians, and many others, refute this notion, arguing that anti-slavery activism was not prominent enough in Britain at the time for it to seem like a threat to slave holders in America, and anti-slavery principles were actually very prominent in New England, where the Revolution began, and were even proclaimed by certain revolutionaries, like Thomas Paine and John Adams. However, others have pointed out the way that the Constitution made definite concessions to slave-holders in the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Slave Insurrection Clause, and the Fugitive Slave Clause, and actually ensured the continuation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in America for another 20 years with the Importation Clause. This can be viewed two ways: as proof that the country was already moving swiftly toward the banning of slavery and thus is not racist at its roots, or as evidence that the slaveholders here saw the world swiftly moving toward abolition and by their participation in the founding of this new country, sought to negotiate the preservation of slavery. Certainly it had that effect, and the existence of slavery was ensured in America for a half a century longer than it would exist in Britain. So the argument of Wilentz and his co-signatories that this assertion was simply not true has been vigorously challenged as well, with concessions that while Nikole Hannah-Jones may have overstated anti-slavery sentiment in Britain at the time as well as pro-slavery sentiment in colonial America, it is otherwise a matter of interpretation and could be simply corrected by removing the word “primary” from the phrase “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain.” Likewise, the letter signers took issue with Hannah-Jones’s argument that Black Americans struggled for their freedom “largely alone,” suggesting that this erases the historical contributions of white abolitionist allies, but here Hannah-Jones’s modifier exonerates, for she did not claim that they struggled entirely alone, only “largely,” and certainly this too must be conceded as a matter of perspective and interpretation, since throughout the centuries of slavery and segregation, it certainly was a lonely struggle for most who endured it. A further objection the letter signers raise is Hannah-Jones’s focus on Abraham Lincoln’s support of colonization, or the removal of freed African Americans from the country, and that while he opposed slavery he also opposed black equality. But this is not so much a matter of factual inaccuracy as it is an argument that Hannah-Jones is making, and which she supports convincingly. Indeed, it is an argument that, as Alex Lichtenstein says in his American Historical Review editorial, “many historians will find…persuasive,” and one shared by Lincoln’s esteemed contemporary, Frederick Douglass, who asserted that Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro.” So in the end, while these leading scholars claimed to be correcting factual errors, they were instead disagreeing with her interpretations and, at most, quibbling over some misstatements.

16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, claims about whose persistent prejudices, made in The 1619 Project, some historians have argued against. Public Domain.

While Wilentz and his co-signatories are certainly well-respected historians, the fact is that Wilentz approached far more than four other historians to join his crusade against The 1619 Project, but everyone else refused to be a part of such an attack, and some have gone on record to explain that, while they may have had similar objections to specific claims made in the Project, they declined to sign Wilentz’s letter because its tone, seeming more like an attempt to discredit the entire undertaking rather than a good faith correction of facts, was unwarranted and its approach unprofessional. Nikole Hannah-Jones agrees that the letter was not a good-faith suggestion for corrections. She has herself conceded that the revision of some overstatements could improve her essay and address genuine concerns, but she points out that neither she nor the Times were approached about these concerns by the historians before or during their efforts to find other historians to sign on to the letter, which makes it seem like these critics were not interested in having a real conversation about corrections but rather were engaged in a campaign to discredit the project. And this is certainly strange, since if we take these historians at their word, they actually admire the purpose behind the project. According to Sean Wilentz, speaking to The Atlantic, “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism to American history is a wonderful idea.” If that is the case, and as Wilentz also said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it,” then why has it been almost universally regarded as discrediting? Probably because of its tone, identified as problematic by Thavolia Glymph, one of several black historians that Sean Wilentz failed to convince to sign his letter, among others. And why is its tone so dismissive? It has been suggested that these historians are gatekeeping, protesting the mere idea of journalists spearheading a reframing of American history. Is has been further suggested that their criticisms all boil down to the central complaint that they would have written the articles differently, the perpetual grievance of the toxic nerd. As Lichtenstein points out, Gordon Wood, in his criticism of the project, “seems affronted mostly by the failure of the 1619 Project to solicit his advice.” And according to the aforementioned Thavolia Glymph, “They think they're trying to fix the project, the way that only they know how.” Furthermore, Nell Irvin Painter, another Black historian who refused to sign the letter, has stated that “For Sean and his colleagues, true history is how they would write it.” These historian critics cannot really object that no true historians were consulted in the making of the project, though, as numerous respected historians contributed to it, including Mary Elliott, the curator of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture; Tiya Miles, a History professor at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School; and New York Times bestselling historian Kevin Kruse. And perhaps the prominence of Kruse and his Twitter celebrity can explain the intensity of principal opponent Sean Wilentz’s criticism, for Wilentz and Kruse both teach in the same department at Princeton. Could jealousy that the Times asked Kruse to contribute and not Wilentz lay at the heart of this debacle?

Ironically, Wilentz has expressed fear that not correcting these few errors could provide fodder to conservative critics. “One of the things I’m worried about,” Wilentz said, “is…people on the other side, politically, I suppose, who are going to use this as an event to show how corrupt the left is. Unfortunately, you’re giving them the sword to kill you with.” As true as this might have been, Wilentz’s letter did worse than handing a sword to the project’s opponents; it gave them a cannon. As would always have happened, conservative commentators and politicians criticized The 1619 Project, but with the added ammunition of well-respected historians calling the Project a distortion, they turned it into a major Republican strategy, which dovetailed with the misplaced outrage over Critical Race Theory and has further evolved into the reactionary movement to censor discussion of racial inequity in the classroom. So let’s address some of the less intellectual arguments originating from rather more expected precincts. One of the most vociferous critics actually sounds rather academic, the National Association of Scholars. If you look further into this organization, though, they are an explicitly conservative advocacy group bent on combating what it sees as a liberal bias in academia, with especial focus on opposing affirmative action and multiculturalism. Not really surprising that this group would dislike The 1619 Project, especially after Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on it and the Pulitzer Center rolled out its 1619 Project Curriculum. In its eagerness to counter the project and find their own alternative anniversary to suggest was the true birth of the nation, they started the 1620 Project, memorializing the signing of the Mayflower Compact as a more appropriate true beginning of the country. What’s ironic is that, far from discrediting The 1619 Project, this impulse to find an alternative early 17th century origin of the country only legitimizes what the Times was doing, showing that it’s all simply a matter of interpretation and argument. I, for example, would argue that while it’s useful to point to the Mayflower Compact as an indication of the growing tendency toward democratic self-government, holding up the radical Puritans that we have come to call the Pilgrims and the document they drew up, permeated as it is by Christian imagery and language, does not really stand as a good representation of the birth of America for any who are not Christian. Moreover, to view the Puritans of Plymouth Colony as the true exemplars of America, rather than the settlers in Jamestown, is rather selective. Plymouth was a decidedly unusual colony among early settlements. If you view extreme piety as an American ideal, they’re you’re go-to, but their religious devotion was unusual compared to most early settlers. And of course, they did not murder women accused of witchcraft like some other Puritan settlements, but whether that makes them more representative of America and its entire history really depends on how pessimistic or optimistic your view of the country is. And more to the point of The 1619 Project, the fact that the Puritans of Plymouth colony did not keep slaves certainly stands as a counterpoint to the settlers in Virginia, but the sad fact is that, in 1614, 6 years prior to the arrival of the Puritans there, an Englishman abducted dozens of Native Americans from the area, including the man who would later serve as the Pilgrims’ own interpreter, Tisquantum, or Squanto, and sold them into slavery in Spain. So, search as we might for some sunnier and less squalid idea of our nation’s beginnings, perhaps, as The 1619 Project asserts, slavery is always there, rearing its ugly head.

The signing of the Mayflower Compact, 1620, proposed as an alternative foundational event for American history by critics of the 1619 Project. Public domain.

Predictably, amid the continuing George Floyd protests, the 45th President decided not to seek any redress for the demonstrators’ very real grievances, and instead promoted further division, latching onto The 1619 Project as an issue to run on in his reelection campaign. On September 17th, he convened the first so-called White House History Conference at the National Archives, and he laid the responsibility for recent unrest not on police violence or systemic injustice but rather on progressive indoctrination in schools, explicitly blaming the 1619 Project, which by that time, a year after its publication, had seen some use in classrooms. His solution was to establish by executive order a 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education.” The irony abounds with this commission. Trump and the GOP attack the 1619 Project for being a distortion of history and liberal propaganda, yet to correct the historical record, he established a commission whose membership is completely devoid of actual historians and instead is filled rank and file with conservative activists and politicians and even some of Trump’s own policy advisers. Of course, Trump then went on to lose the election and rushed the release of the report only a month after assembling the commission, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, making one of his final acts in office the release of a report on history scholarship that lacks any scholarly source documentation and doesn’t even properly credit any of its own authors. Without any apparent struggle with the cognitive dissonance, this report decries progressive propaganda while simultaneously propagandizing by likening progressivism to fascism and listing it alongside slavery as one of the “challenges to America’s principles.” It warns of the dangers of progressive indoctrination in schools while recommending a kind of government-sponsored indoctrination program to ensure traditional hero worship of the country’s founders, seeking to regress history education back to the myth-making curriculum of the 19th century. While Sean Wilentz could only find 4 other respectable historians to put their names on his letter censuring The 1619 Project, the American Historical Association’s condemnation of the 1776 Commission’s report has been endorsed by 47 highly credible historical and scholarly organizations. On his first day in office, just a couple days after the report’s release, President Biden saw fit to disband the commission and take down its report’s official webpage.

As with Critical Race Theory, the central objection to The 1619 Project has been that it is being taught to our youth. Unlike CRT, though, which isn’t really being taught outside of academia, The 1619 Project actually has inspired a high school curriculum presented by the Pulitzer Center. However, as the editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein, has observed, “[T]here is a misunderstanding that this curriculum is meant to replace all of U.S. history.” In fact, Silverstein points out, “It's being used as supplementary material for teaching American history." And as Alex Lichtenstein, the previously cited editor of the American Historical Review, has noted, “[N]o specific, detailed analysis of the proposed K-12 curriculum accompanying the 1619 Project has yet been offered by teachers or scholars of history-teaching,” calling this blind spot “puzzling and ultimately inadequate to the vigor of the objections.” What seems to be a universal assessment among scholars and teachers of American history is that The 1619 Project’s purpose is worthy because history education about slavery and its lasting effects is sorely lacking. The Southern Poverty Law Center found in its 2018 report “Teaching Hard History” that “[s]chools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery, educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it, textbooks do not have enough material about it, and – as a result – students lack a basic knowledge of the important role it played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America.” More specifically, they discovered that “few American high-school students know that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, that the Constitution protected slavery without explicitly mentioning it, or that ending slavery required a constitutional amendment.” Hofstra University’s director of social studies education Alan Singer, a historian of slavery in New York, has detailed how, in New York State, high school social studies curriculum “minimizes the role of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the sale of people, and the sale of slave-produced commodities in global and United States history.” Meanwhile, among the teachers who are actually choosing to use the Project in their classes, it is clear that the project’s chief merit is that it has started a sorely needed discussion, despite or even because of all the controversy surrounding it. As explained by John Duffy, faculty fellow of the University of Notre Dame’s Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights, when he teaches The 1619 Project in his English classes, he uses the controversy to encourage critical thinking: “While I encourage students to draw their own conclusions about the controversies, we do not attempt to decide collectively which perspectives are more accurate. Instead, we discuss reasons historians disagree, how such disagreements are argued and what this suggests about historical truths. We consider who gets to tell the story of a people and what is at stake in the telling.” And this is how the project should be used, and how I imagine any teacher worth anything would use it. So what does this tell us about Republican laws to cripple the discussion of race in the classroom, some of which mention The 1619 Project by name? Either that the legislators lack a fundamental understanding of modern pedagogy, or that they are simply afraid such frank and critical discussions will lead to students developing viewpoints opposed to theirs.

Further Reading

“The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.

“The 1619 Project Curriculum.” Pulitzer Center, pulitzercenter.org/lesson-plan-grouping/1619-project-curriculum.

“AHA Condemns Report of Advisory 1776 Commission (January 2021).” American Historical Association, 20 January 2021, www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-statement-condemning-report-of-advisory-1776-commission-(january-2021).

Anderson, James. “U. professors send letter requesting corrections to 1619 Project.” The Princetonian, 6 Feb. 2020, www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/u-professors-send-letter-requesting-corrections-to-1619-project.  

Autry, Robin. “Trump's '1776 Commission' tried to rewrite U.S. history. Biden had other ideas.” NBC News, NBC Universal, 21 Jan. 2021, www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-1776-commission-tried-rewrite-u-s-history-biden-ncna1255086.

Crowley, Michael, and Jennifer Schuessler. “Trump’s 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided by Historians.” The New York Times, 18 Jan. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/trump-1776-commission-report.html.

Kazin, Michael. “The 1776 Follies.” The New York Times, 1 Feb. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/opinion/trump-1776-commission-report.html.

Lichtenstein, Alex C. “From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That.” American Historical Review, vol. 125, no. 1, Feb. 2020, pp. xv–xxi. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/ahr/rhaa041.

Serwer, Adam. “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts.” The Atlantic, 23 Dec. 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/.

Shuster, Kate. “Teaching Hard History.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 31 Jan. 2018, www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history.

Silverstein, Jake. “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project.” The New York Times, 20 Dec. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html.

Singer, Alan J. “Defending the 1619 Project in the Context of History Education Today.” History News Network, The George Washington University, 20 Dec. 2020, historynewsnetwork.org/article/178586.

Strauss, Valerie. “Professor: Why I teach the much-debated 1619 Project — despite its flaws.” The Washington Post, 14 June 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/14/professor-why-i-teach-controversial-1619-project/.

Waxman, Olivia B. “The First Africans in Virginia Landed in 1619. It Was a Turning Point for Slavery in American History—But Not the Beginning.” TIME, 20 Aug. 2019, time.com/5653369/august-1619-jamestown-history/.  

Wulf, Karin. “Why the Myths of Plymouth Dominate the American Imagination.” Smithsonian Magazine, 24 Nov. 2020, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-myths-plymouth-dominate-american-imagination-180976396/.

Curriculum Controversies in America

Over the last year, a conservative talking point has emerged that a new and dangerous kind of “woke racism,” originating from an arcane and supposedly nefarious ideological academic discipline called Critical Race Theory, is being taught to children in schools, amounting to a kind of un-American indoctrination. If you’ve paid attention, this view has garnered a lot of traction and become a favorite grievance on the right, resulting in many local school board meetings devolving into a venue for the breathless protests of ill-informed parents. The result has been recent legislation in states like Oklahoma, Tennessee, Iowa, and Idaho, with Republican-controlled legislatures, banning the discussion of Critical Race Theory, or CRT for short, in schools, a dreadful development indeed for free speech and academic freedom. As many have pointed out, though, CRT is not actually taught in public elementary or secondary schools. It’s an approach to legal scholarship that emerged in academia in the ‘70s and ‘80s, in which the inherent discrimination of public policies is analyzed with a view toward improving equity under the law. This scholarly subject has become the chief bogeyman to conservatives, who conflate it with all efforts to address systemic racism and cultivate anti-racist views and approaches in various fields, in both the public and private sector. In the wake of the George Floyd protests last year, many organizations began, admirably, to acknowledge the fact that the long history of racism in America may be present in their own administrations and bureaucracies, and to hold seminars and meetings to educate themselves about systemic racism and how they might be able to effect change within their domains. Of course, some fragile attendees at these meetings, when asked to examine the possibility that they may have benefited from privileges others are denied, balked and became defensive and suggested that such frank discussions of racism amounted to another kind of racism, one targeting them. Some even recorded their Zoom sessions, thinking of themselves as heroic whistleblowers on this new woke culture invading their safe spaces, and sent the footage to journalists to blow the whole thing wide open. Of course, one conservative journalist obliged. His name is Christopher Rufo, and he wrote a series of articles supposedly “exposing” these anti-bias seminars in Seattle, even though they were not closely held secrets or anything that the organizations who held them were embarrassed about. But Rufo believed he was uncovering a vast conspiracy. In the materials leaked to him, he unsurprisingly found references to some well-known books on anti-racism by authors like Ibram Kendi and others, and then, examining those books, he found further references to the legal scholarship of Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originated Critical Race Theory. Rufo shows his lack of experience in performing academic research in that, rather than understanding the nature of academic scholarship as a conversation between texts and authors over decades and centuries, in which supportive materials are cited to strengthen arguments, just as they would be by those who assert an opposing view, Rufo saw this as some kind of insidious conspiracy, fancying himself a kind of Robert Langdon, uncovering evil power structures through his rather cursory readings of a few works, all of whose points he seems to have missed entirely.

Christopher Rufo on Fox New, starting the CRT controversy. Image may be subject to Copyright.

Rufo believes that the perennial specter of Marxism lies at the root of Critical Race Theory and all anti-racist activism, mostly because of some anti-capitalist comments made by certain of the authors frequently cited, who recognize that discriminatory public policies are deeply enmeshed in our economic system, but he entirely disregards the more obvious cultural basis of these works in the Civil Rights Era struggles of Martin Luther King Jr. and others. He proposes that this activism started in academia and is now deeply embedded in our bureaucracies—again, taking a conspiratorial view, as if these anti-bias seminars were somehow foisted on unwilling organizations rather than sought out by administrators who may actually agree there are deeply entrenched problems in our society that they don’t want to be a part of. In Rufo’s view, anti-racist activism, and by extension CRT, which he paints as the evil puppet master, is simply about overturning the system by humiliating and shaming White people. If he had actually managed to grasp the message of Ibram Kendi’s work, though, he would understand that’s not what anti-racism is about. Perhaps it would have been better if Rufo had read Kendi’s simplification of anti-racism in the form of his children’s book, Anti-Racist Baby, which spells out for still developing minds the fact that anti-racism is not “reverse racism,” a term which itself is wildly racist, in that it suggests racial discrimination and bias is meant to be directed at only non-White people. Instead, as Kendi’s children’s book states, anti-racism celebrates our differences and identifies policies rather than people as the problem. But it’s Kendi’s suggestion that we use our words to actually talk about racism that seems to be the problem for Rufo and others. The backlash against Critical Race Theory, which is actually a backlash against anti-racism activism generally, is at its heart a resistance to talking about racism at all. Think about it in terms of gun violence. In the aftermath of a mass shooting, there are calls to address the issue and talk about gun control, and there is always a resistance, suggesting, “Now is not the time,” when clearly there is no better time. After the George Floyd protests, now clearly is the time to talk about systemic racism, and the protests against teaching Critical Race Theory are a clear attempt to squelch such conversations. Rufo recognized that Critical Race Theory was the perfect term to spark conservative outrage. The word “critical” being inflammatory to defenders of the status quo, the word “race” being outrageous to those who refuse to recognize that they may have been born privileged because of the color of their skin, and the word “theory” suggesting that it is not fact and can therefore be vigorously refuted. Rufo and his views were welcomed onto Fox News Channel by Tucker Carlson, and his calls for the President to issue an executive order were answered by Trump, who signed an order coauthored by Rufo limiting speech about race in seminars delivered to federal employees. But this was just the beginning. Even though Critical Race Theory is not taught in public schools, Rufo’s activism has sparked a huge push from the right to ban it, and these laws, in effect, seem to outlaw the candid discussion of race in classrooms generally. The vague contours of some of these laws seem to suggest that classic literature that explicitly addresses racism, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird could be banned from English classrooms. Especially hard hit would be American history classes, for how can students and teachers honestly discuss colonialism, slavery, the decimation of Native American tribes, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Era, or really any aspect of American history without acknowledging and openly discussing racism? This legislation is little more than a ban on ideas, and it is not the first time that the classroom has become a theater in which to wage the culture war.

To suggest that the current furor over discussing systemic racism with students in the classroom originated with Rufo’s conspiracist view of Critical Race Theory would be to turn a blind eye to the fact that he is capitalizing on long-standing sentiments among conservatives that liberals control academia (when in fact, perhaps, progressive ideas just stand up better to scholarly scrutiny), that the history of America is being distorted and falsified by the Left (when in fact historical revision to achieve better accuracy and understanding is a central tenet of historical research, without which we may today still believe falsehoods like that the women executed in 17th-century Salem really were Satan-worshipping sorceresses), and that changes to elementary and high school curricula represent indoctrination (when it actually represents efforts to improve education and prepare students for the academic rigor of college, which will in turn help them succeed in life and become better citizens generally). It is pretty hard to indoctrinate through the teaching of critical thinking, which is what lies at the core of historical revision and recent changes in curricula, and which serves as the foundation of all efforts to recognize the systemic racism that has been ignored or denied for so long. As I try to emphasize in this podcast, critical thinking encourages every individual to analyze and evaluate received information, to sift through it for falsehoods and errors in logic and reason, and to try to achieve a more perfect understanding of the truth, as far as it can be discerned. This is something that even conspiracy theorists and denialists claim to value. For example, take Glenn Beck, currently a vocal opponent of what he calls Critical Race Theory in schools (which again, seems to just be just be any acknowledgement of racism’s existence and the systemic preservation of privileges for some and not others). He likes to encourage critical thinking too! However, when he disagrees with where critical thinking leads students, he calls it indoctrination. In fact, back in 2012, ridiculously enough, the Republican Party of Texas actually made opposition to critical thinking a plank in their platform! When this resulted in controversy, they tried to claim that they actually only opposed a specific teaching approach called Outcome-Based Education which they argued was simply relabeled as higher order thinking and critical thinking. Here again, they rely on the argument that a relabeling has occurred, just as they say anti-bias training and anti-racism activism is actually repackaged Critical Race Theory, which is really Marxism, they’ll say. But the Texas GOP platform was clear about what they found offensive in critical and higher order thinking skills: that they “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs.” So already we see the aversion to having students exposed to what they view as ideas that may challenge the status quo.

Lynn Cheney on Charlie Rose amid the History Standards controversy. Image may be subject to copyright.

The political battle over how history is taught itself has a long history. Before the uproar over anti-racist approaches to education and so-called Critical Race Theory, there was outrage over the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to place slavery and its effects at the center of our understanding of America’s founding and subsequent history. In response to this series of publications, the Trump administration even founded a commission to defend a more traditionalist view of American history, to denounce progressivism in education as indoctrination, and to promote “patriotic education,” despite the fact that it is not the federal government’s place to control instructional programs or curriculum. However, the controversy over the 1619 Project deserves an entire episode, or at least a minisode, in its own right, so suffice it to say here that Christopher Rufo was latching onto this controversy when he conjured the specter of CRT. This more recent controversy over approaches to the teaching of American history echoes the controversy over National History Standards in the mid-1990s. In the fall of 1994, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife Lynne Cheney, who served as the chair for the National Endowment of the Humanities, sparked a lengthy political controversy by writing a rebuke of the forthcoming national standards which her organization had funded, developed by the National Center for History in Schools at UCLA, which again her organization had chosen for the task. Her central complaints, which were thereafter parroted by conservative talk radio hosts, talking heads, and politicians, were that the new standards focused too much on injustices related to race and gender and not enough on the traditional hero worship of former textbooks. It was all so negative, she whined, and she even resorted to score-keeping, counting the number of times that McCarthyism and the Ku Klux Klan were mentioned and bemoaning that Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers didn’t receive equal page space. While critics derided the proposed standards as an example of political correctness run amok, historians defended them as rigorous and dismissed the backlash as a reactionary attack on modern historical scholarship, which had for some time sought to bring the marginalized and underrepresented further into focus and do away with insupportable myths about our country. In the end, though, since these were just voluntary standards, and since most of the complaints stemmed from the numerous teaching examples provided, which were confused for curriculum, and not from the actual standards themselves, whose criteria were universally praised, a few simple revisions sufficed to appease the detractors and dampen the fires of controversy.

Woman protesting textbooks in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Via West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Curriculum controversies have not been exclusive to History, either. One of the most egregious examples of political scrimmage over teaching materials centered on literature reading lists. The story of the Kanawha County Textbook War sounds extremely similar to the protests seen this year in school board meetings. In April 1974, the Board of Education assembled in this West Virginia county to discuss how they would meet a mandate to include in their curriculum “multiethnic and multiracial literature.” One board member, Alice Moore, who had campaigned for her seat by protesting sex education, a curriculum controversy that has been consistent and ubiquitous in its own right. She seems to have seen in the new lit curriculum another opportunity for outrage. She found the poetry of e. e. cummings pornographic, the writings of Sigmund Freud atheistic, the Autobiography of Malcom X un-American, and generally complained that works by Black authors like James Baldwin were too depressing in their description of life in ghettoes. “[T]extbooks should show life as it should be,” she argued, “not life as it is.” Her rhetoric enflamed the resentments of parents, who boycotted county schools. Thousands marched in protest against these “dirty books.” They circulated pamphlets that claimed the new reading material contained sexually explicit passages, but these assertions proved to be false. In fact, unsurprisingly, neither Alice Moore nor any of her followers had read the literature they were railing against, which they openly admitted, claiming that they didn’t need to subject themselves to such radical propaganda to know it was harmful. The protests quickly turned violent. Property was destroyed as protesters shot firearms at empty school buses and firebombed an empty school building. They even set off dynamite at the district offices. Beatings and shootings occurred, board meeting broke out into riots, and people were arrested, and not only the violent protestors; Alice Moore managed to get other school board members arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Even though the violence eventually subsided and the books being protested were added to the curriculum, this conservative terrorism accomplished somewhat the outcome desired: it had a definite chilling effect on academic freedom and freedom of speech in the classroom, as for some time afterward, teachers censored themselves for fear of stoking controversy, avoiding potentially divisive books like 1984 and even skipping over biology lessons about animal reproduction for fear that it came too close to sex education. At the time, Alice Moore presented herself as just a concerned parent, but since, historians have suggested that she was more of a right-wing provocateur with connections to other organizations that had been protesting progressive curriculum since the 1960s, including the Christian Crusade, which focused on removing sex education from schools, and even that far-right anti-communist group who saw socialist conspiracies everywhere, including in curriculum that they believed was little more than Marxist indoctrination, our old friends, the John Birch Society.

Protest to progressive curriculum as Communist indoctrination was, unsurprisingly, common during the Second Red Scare, in the era of McCarthyism. Indeed, the House Unamerican Activities Committee, well known for its investigation of Hollywood, which resulted in so many careers ruined because of blacklisting, also went after teachers that they suspected of indoctrinating youth. In 1959, the HUAC planned to hold one of its dreaded hearings in San Francisco, California, where it subpoenaed dozens of teachers. In response, local college professors organized San Franciscans for Academic Freedom and Education, or SAFE, and solicited a broad base of bi-partisan support even among moderate and conservative organizations on the grounds that the federal government has no place in controlling local education. This public resistance led to the HUAC canceling its hearings for the first time, but they came back the next year with a new spate of subpoenas. They were met by thousands of demonstrators, representing a wide range of San Francisco society, including students, politicians, and other activists, in a significant protest movement that prefigured the anti-war protest movement of the 1960s. The response of authorities on the second day of the protest was much the same as would be encountered in later years as well, with truncheons and fire hoses wielded against the protestors. But on the third day, some 5,000 protestors marched in downtown San Francisco, and this display helped to encourage nationwide opposition to the HUAC, whose spell of fear over the country was finally breaking.

Anti-HUAC protesters at San Francisco City Hall, with seated Anti-HUAC protesters, after being doused with fire hoses. Via Zinn Education Group.

The absurdly paranoid John Birch Society and the witch-hunting HUAC were not the only groups to fear the creeping influence of Marxist thought into classrooms. One organization was the veterans association, the American Legion, which had for decades made it their mission to criticize and reject any textbooks they found to be “un-American.” One major target of the American Legion was the work of Harold Rugg, whose social studies textbook series, Man and His Changing Society, sought to highlight both the strengths and the weaknesses of America in order to demonstrate to younger generations where social change may be beneficial. The books sold widely and were adopted in many school districts, becoming a standard for years. However, the encouragement of change was viewed suspiciously, and the depiction of America as anything less than perfect was seen as unpatriotic. In the mid-1930s, some parents complained that they were communistic, and during World War II, the controversy expanded to the point that the books were being derided as treasonous propaganda. In fact, the books simply encouraged students to think critically about social problems and come to their own conclusions. Familiarly, protestors gleefully condemned the books without having bothered to read them, saying that they didn’t need to read them because they had heard all they needed to hear about the author. After enough sustained controversy, school administrators banned the texts in many districts despite their admiration for them simply because they did not want to deal with the anti-Communist crusaders, and not content to see Rugg’s books simply removed from the schools, the protestors, Nazi-like, held numerous public book burnings. This controversy did more than just remove and destroy Rugg’s books; it set back progressive education decades, as for years afterward, other textbook authors shied away from addressing social issues and avoided any implication that America could improve in any way.

This inclination among many on the right to desire a white-washing of America and our history finds its apotheosis in the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to recast the history of the South and promulgate the Lost Cause Myth that I spoke about in my episode Jubal Early’s Lost Cause. The United Daughters of the Confederacy are perhaps best known today for their efforts to erect monuments to white supremacists, monuments regularly targeted by racial justice advocates who continue working to get them removed. To those who might protest that Confederate monuments aren’t monuments to white supremacists, first I would point out that in 1926, the United Daughters of the Confederacy actually erected a monument to the Ku Klux Klan in Concord, North Carolina. But that blatant evidence aside, any who might protest that a monument to the Confederacy or its leaders does not itself represent a monument to white supremacy has accepted the false notion of the Lost Cause Myth that the South was fighting for anything other than a social order based entirely on the patrician rule of elite white families over the poor and their exploitation of Black chattel slaves as forced labor. I have refuted the Myth of the Lost Cause before and won’t retread the same ground here, but suffice it to say that the success of the Lost Cause Myth, the reason it is still so commonly repeated today, can be attributed to the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to remove textbooks they felt portrayed the Southern Cause in a negative light and install curriculum that exalted the South and distorted the truth about the war and about slavery.

A North Carolina chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, via Encyclopedia Virginia.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, or the UDC, took up their crusade to indoctrinate Southern youth with the Myth of the Lost Cause from other organizations, namely the United Confederate Veterans and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who in the 1890s balked at the portrayal of Southern planters and the Confederacy in histories written by Northern writers, which understandably condemned their treatment of slaves and their entire economic and social system, and further blamed them for the war. Motivated by their desire to maintain the dominance of patrician families in the postbellum South, they undertook a campaign to systematically vindicate themselves through propaganda and indoctrination. They removed Northern textbooks from their schools, accusing even the Encyclopedia Britannica of malicious distortion, and then wrote, published, and installed their own history texts onto school bookshelves. Their books, and others afterward promoted by the UDC, maintained the idea that the Confederacy did not secede in order to preserve the slavery on which their economy and social hierarchy was built but rather because of dignified and honorable ideals about state sovereignty, and more than this, they perpetuated the even older lies that slave owners were “kind and lenient” to their slaves and that “[t]hey in turn loved their master.” They even went so far as to suggest that, without the guidance of an overseer, slaves would have turned to cannibalism, which they claimed was their natural tendency in Africa. Meanwhile, they glorified white Southerners, describing the idyllic mansions of the plantation system and calling it “a civilization that gave us brave and true men and pure and noble women.”

The taking up of the cause to indoctrinate Southern youth with these ideas was the natural evolution of the UDC’s efforts to memorialize the Confederacy. Rather than just inanimate statues, they sought to create “living monuments,” as historian Karen Cox puts it. And their campaign was extremely effective. Beyond expunging history textbooks they disliked and getting Confederate-friendly texts adopted, they went after teachers and administrators who resisted and drove them out of schools. They sponsored essay contests that required students to use their texts, they filled the schools with teachers from among their own ranks, and they composed lesson plans for the rest. They put up portraits of Confederate figures in the schools, hung Confederate battle flags in classrooms, and even petitioned to have schools named after Confederate “heroes.” Perhaps most disturbingly, like the formation of the Nazi youth, the UDC organized Children of the Confederacy auxiliaries, grooming the kids for later membership in the UDC and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, having the children themselves cut the cord to unveil each new monument. This is what we must fear when conservative voices protest progressive curriculum. They will cry “Indoctrination!” but true to their nature, it is just projection, for what they really object to is any challenge to the status quo. They recognize that a progressive curriculum prevents them from propagandizing in schools and brainwashing young minds.

Those who protest anti-racist approaches to education, or what they have been told is Critical Race Theory, inevitably resort to the criticism that progressive curriculum is itself biased, or even racist. However, the lessons they protest often involve just the simple acknowledgement of racism’s continued existence or any encouragement for students to openly discuss and analyze disparities in representation and the systems of privilege at work in the world. Any calls for fairness or teaching both sides may seem reasonable, but you must consider what they’re saying. Even the United Daughters of the Confederacy claimed to want “impartial” history, but how is it edifying or moral to give equal time and emphasis to a point of view that exonerates and exalts white supremacy? The entire notion of “teaching the controversy” is always only a demand that inarguable or harmful ideas be unduly recognized or accorded merit they do not possess. Take the idea of “creation science.” It was not taught in science classrooms because it is not science. There is not controversy about it among actual scientists. Christian fundamentalists only attempted to portray evolution as controversial in order to put religion in science classrooms. Likewise, today, opponents of CRT argue that equal time must be awarded to any opposing view when it comes to racism in society and history. This has led to suggestions that any lesson on the Holocaust, for example, may need to be balanced with equal time given to Holocaust denial. The simple fact is that not all controversies have two equal sides, and hate should not be presented to children as an acceptable view to take. And the entire notion that teaching about racism is biased doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Trends in progressive curriculum, which as I’ve shown are not new, actually are an effort to redress cultural bias and one-sidedness in education, acquainting students with the experiences of underrepresented and marginalized groups that have previously been excluded from textbooks. To claim this inclusion is biased or exclusionary is exactly the same as refusing to explicitly acknowledge that Black lives matter and instead insisting only on repeating that all lives do. It reveals a fundamental, racist aversion to recognizing the struggles of any group other than one’s own.

Further Reading

Appleby, Joyce. “Controversy over the National History Standards.” OAH Magazine of History, vol. 9, no. 3, [Oxford University Press, Organization of American Historians], 1995, pp. 4–4, www.jstor.org/stable/25163026.

Bailey, Fred Arthur. “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 3, Georgia Historical Society, 1991, pp. 507–33, www.jstor.org/stable/40582363.

Camera, Lauren. “Federal Lawsuit Poses First Challenge to Ban on Teaching Critical Race Theory.” U.S. News and World Report, 20 Oct. 2021, www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-10-20/federal-lawsuit-poses-first-challenge-to-ban-on-teaching-critical-race-theory.

Carbone, Peter F. “The Other Side of Harold Rugg.” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, [History of Education Society, Wiley], 1971, pp. 265–78, doi.org/10.2307/367293.

Cox, Karen L. “The Confederacy’s ‘Living Monuments.’” The New York Times, 6 Oct. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/the-confederacys-living-monuments.html.

Gershon, Livia. “How One Group of Teachers Defended Academic Freedom.” JSTOR Daily, 29 Dec. 2019, daily.jstor.org/how-one-group-of-teachers-defended-academic-freedom/.

Huffman, Greg. “The group behind Confederate monuments also built a memorial to the Klan.” Facing South, 8 June 2018. www.facingsouth.org/2018/06/group-behind-confederate-monuments-also-built-memorial-klan.

---. “TWISTED SOURCES: How Confederate propaganda ended up in the South's schoolbooks.” Facing South, 10 April 2019, www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks.

Paddison, Joshua. “Summers of Worry, Summers of Defiance: San Franciscans for Academic Freedom and Education and the Bay Area Opposition to HUAC, 1959-1960.” California History, vol. 78, no. 3, [University of California Press, California Historical Society], 1999, pp. 188–201, doi.org/10.2307/25462565.

Ravitch, Diane. “The Controversy over National History Standards.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 51, no. 3, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1998, pp. 14–28, doi.org/10.2307/3824089.

Skinner, David. “A Battle over Books.” HUMANITIES, vol. 31, no. 5, Sep./Oct. 2010, www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/septemberoctober/statement/battle-over-books.

Stanley, William B. “Harold Rugg and Social Education: Another Look.” Journal of Thought, vol. 18, no. 4, Caddo Gap Press, 1983, pp. 68–72, www.jstor.org/stable/42589033.

Kay, Trey. “The Great Textbook War.” West Virginia Public Broadcasting, 17 Oct. 2013, www.wvpublic.org/radio/2013-10-17/the-great-textbook-war.

Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory.” The New Yorker, 18 June 2021, www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory.

Waxman, Olivia B. “Trump's Threat to Pull Funding from Schools Over How They Teach Slavery Is Part of a Long History of Politicizing American History Class.” Time, 16 Sep. 2020, time.com/5889051/history-curriculum-politics/?amp=true.

Winters, Elmer A., and Harold Rugg. “Man and His Changing Society: The Textbooks of Harold Rugg.” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, [History of Education Society, Wiley], 1967, pp. 493–514, https://doi.org/10.2307/367465.

The Demoniacs: The True Spirit of Possession and Exorcism

Maricica Irina Cornici and her brother Vasile grew up in an orphanage in Romania after their poverty-stricken father hanged himself. Once they became of age to leave the orphanage, they struggled to find work, relying on meager wages that Maricica managed to earn as a nanny to a series of families. It was a time when the Eastern Orthodox Church was growing in Romania, recruiting inexperienced young men and women to serve as priests and nuns in their monasteries after a long period of the church’s suppression. An old friend from their orphanage days informed them of just such an opportunity in the rural commune of Tanacu in Western Moldavia, so Maricica and Vasile, ready to give themselves over to the church, packed their few belongings and headed into the Romanian countryside, where they met a charismatic young priest with long red hair and beard named Corogeanu. This young priest fancied himself an exorcist and had become popular in the community as a healer, casting out evil from villagers who sought his help before seeking the advice of a physician for a variety of ailments that superstition told them might be the result of a diabolical influence rather than simply an illness or disease. Not long after her arrival at Tanacu, Maricica began to exhibit odd and even unacceptable behavior.  It began with giggling during Mass, and eventually, it developed into Maricica mocking and cursing the clergy at the monastery. Her fellow nuns took to tying her up and leaving her in her room so that her behavior would not interrupt the services that villagers attended there, and eventually, the priest, Corogeanu, decided that she was possessed by a demon, or perhaps by the Devil himself. They took her from her room and chained her to a cross, stuffing a towel in her mouth to stifle her cursing and parading her about the church as Corogeanu performed his impromptu rite of exorcism. She endured this for three days, with no food or water beyond the dabbing of holy water on her lips. Unsurprisingly, she later died…after Corogeanu and the nuns gave her into the care of EMTs who took her in an ambulance to the nearest hospital. Yeah, that’s right. This did not take place in the Middle Ages. Rather shockingly, it occurred in 2005. Since these events, Corogeanu and the nuns were arrested and defrocked and the monastery at Tanacu shuttered. Blame has been cast not only on them, but also on the Eastern Orthodox Church for too quickly rushing to ordain uneducated priests in their rush to reestablish their influence following the fall of Communism in Romania. Corogeanu and others actually have had the nerve to blame the EMTs for administering too much adrenaline in their efforts to revive her in the ambulance, but the fact remains that the nuns had previously taken Maricica to the same hospital and had been informed that she displayed all the signs of being schizophrenic. Nevertheless, they rejected the opinion of modern medicine and chose to abuse her physically and psychologically by chaining her up, suffocating her, and starving her until she was unresponsive.

*

In starting this examination of cases of purported demonic possession and the practices of exorcism with a tale originating from the Eastern Orthodox Church, I may elicit objections that not only was Corogeanu practicing an illegitimate homebrewed rite of exorcism but also that the Eastern Orthodox Church generally does not have a strict and codified rite as does Roman Catholicism. People like to hold up Catholics as being a kind of gold standard when it comes to assessing demonic possession and eliminating scientific explanations and physical or psychological illness before resorting to exorcism. There’s currently a very enjoyable television drama that promotes this view called “Evil.” This notion is a result of the church’s own efforts to modernize the practice, as in 1999 Pope John Paul II updated the Church’s guidance on exorcisms to discourage the treatment of “victims of the imagination.” Rather than viewing this as a modernization of the barbaric rite, however, it should instead be considered the opposite. The Latin text in question simply affirmed the notion that some conditions cannot be treated medically or psychologically and encouraged the continued practice of exorcism. In fact, as of 2018, the Church appears to be mustering an army of new exorcists by educating a new generation of priests in the rite, in part as a bulwark, given claims from their priests in Mexico and other Latin American countries that demonic activity is on the rise. While the Catholic Church cautions against too lax a view on possession, they are still sending the message that more exorcists are needed to combat what they see as the growing diabolical influence in the world. However, not all those who answer this call to action are Catholic. There exists a subculture of Evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals and Charismatics, who believe themselves capable of casting out demons or “delivering” members of their congregation from the Devil’s power. Much of this is obvious theater during sermons in which preachers melodramatically touch the foreheads of their ecstatic followers, but behind closed doors, these would-be exorcists have no official strictures governing their historically harmful ceremonies.

Before I continue to historical cases of supposed possession and the exorcists that claimed to do battle with the demonic entities responsible, it should be said that the phenomenon is not unique to Christianity. German Psychologist Traugott Oesterreich, in his 1921 work Possession: Demoniacal and Other, Among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times, has provided the scholarly research showing the historical ubiquity of the notion, going back to Greek daimones, from which word we derive the word “demons.” The term meant something else entirely, signifying a kind of guardian or guiding deity, or even creative inner spirit, but as it was used to translate certain Hebrew terms for other kinds of spirits, it has become part of the Christian lexicon for evil spirits. Christian notions of demonology have passed to us from Assyrian and Persian religious notions, and the other modern monotheistic traditions, Judaism and Islam, all have their forms of demonic possession, whether by dybbuks or djinn, although a more detailed comparison would reveal these concepts to be very different from one another. However, monotheistic traditions do not hold a monopoly on the concept of spirit possession either. Austrian-American anthropologist Erika Bourguignon, in the 1960s through the 1980s, wrote a great deal about what she called “dissociational states” and the “possession trance,” with an emphasis on its cross-cultural nature. She surveyed 488 cultures and recognized some form of belief in spirit possession in 74% of them. Nevertheless, if we are to speak of demon possession in particular, and the practice of exorcising those demons, we are speaking principally of the monotheist traditions that dominate world religion, and among them, it is Christianity that was founded on exorcism. That may seem a strong claim, but it should be remembered that according to the gospels, Jesus Christ was an itinerant exorcist. The Gospel of John, which is so different in many ways from the others, makes no mention of Christ’s exorcisms, but it is a central aspect of Christ’s story as presented in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. And ironically, as we shall see, some of the most outrageous and telling cases of demonic possession in history supposedly affected women of the cloth, nuns who were said to have given themselves over symbolically in marriage to Christ, the first Christian exorcist.

A depiction of Christ exorcising demons. Public domain.

One thing that the Catholic Church has thankfully done away with these days is witchcraft accusations and trials. The history of the Early Modern witch hunts is well known. I discussed it at length in a two-parter last Halloween. Perhaps because witchcraft accusations are today synonymous with ignorance and persecution, the Catholic Church wisely steers clear of such claims. Strange then that they are still willing to indulge, so to speak, in claims of demonic possession, which ever since a series of famous cases of mass possession at convents in 17th-century France have been closely related. It began in Marseille in 1609, when 14-year-old Madeleine de Mandols de la Palud, beginning her novitiate at the local Ursuline convent, told her superior that her confessor, Louis Gaufridy, who had spent a great deal of time with her at her father’s house over the last few years, had seduced her. It started when they had shared a peach one night, and it progressed eventually to fornication. After confiding this, she was transferred to an Ursuline convent at Aix-en-Provence, ostensibly because she had become ill, and it was there that she began to demonstrate symptoms associated with demonic possession. She suffered convulsions, she appeared to be repulsed by sacred objects, and she seemed to have knowledge that some believed could only have been acquired through clairvoyance. During the course of her possession and exorcism, she changed her story about Father Gaufridy, claiming that he had done more than seduce her. He had charmed her, she said, with that magic peach, had taken her to a witches’ sabbat and made her renounce God and sign a pact with the Devil in her own blood. It was because of Gaufridy that she had been possessed. As we have seen with other mass delusions, such as the Dancing Plague and the convulsionism during the following century in France, such experiences are contagious, either through the power of suggestion or due to a desire to receive attention and be a part of a consuming phenomenon. At Aix-en-Provence, numerous other nuns began to claim they too had been bewitched by Gaufridy and were also possessed. This resulted in a sensational mass exorcism, carried out before a huge captivated audience. The exorcist, Sébastien Michaëlis, a Dominican inquisitor who had made a name for himself as a witch hunter and demonologist, addressed the demons supposedly invading these nuns in Latin… but contrary to what was expected at the time, they did not reply in Latin. Michaëlis rationalized this by making up new rules, saying, with no apparent support for his claim, that the Devil did not typically speak in foreign languages when he inhabited the bodies of women. But of course, we can easily ascertain the truth that these women did not reply in Latin because they did not speak the language. Furthermore, it is clear that Madeleine de Mandols de la Palud could have conceived of her witchcraft claims against Gaufridy as a kind of revenge for his seduction, and that she cleverly avoided the stigma of witchcraft herself by claiming possession instead, for while witches were objects of scorn, demoniacs were objects of sympathy. The entire affair, strangely, may have simply been a way for her to rehabilitate her honor. In some ways it worked. After denying everything at first, Louis Gaufridy confessed to everything she alleged under torture and was burned alive. Madeleine de Mandols de la Palud became a penitent and for a time was viewed sympathetically, but eventually the stink of brimstone that clung to her proved too overpowering, and in 1653 she was tried as a witch herself.

The mass possessions at Aix-en-Provence were not just the first of their kind, but also they would serve as an example and precedent in the numerous copycat possessions to come. The next couple of times the Devil supposedly ran amok in a convent, it would start, rather creepily, more like a haunting. At the Bridgettine convent in Lille, in the Spanish Netherlands, nuns reported seeing specters and hearing strange noises before several of them began to display the symptoms of possession, receiving exorcisms throughout 1612, the year after the conclusion of the Aix-en-Provence affair. And 20 years later, in a single night in 1632, two nuns, including the prioress of the Ursuline convent in Loudun, Western France, claimed that they had been visited separately in their rooms by the ghost of their former confessor, who implored them for help. Two days later, one of the same nuns, along with a third, saw a black sphere which approached them and knocked them down. What followed were the classic signs of a haunting, or as some modern day exorcists might call it, a demonic infestation. Disembodied voices were heard and several nuns said they had been struck by some unseen force. Then the behavior of the nuns changed. They began to suffer uncontrolled fits of laughter and convulsions. The nuns claimed that a priest named Urbain Grandier, whom they had never actually met, was in fact a sorcerer and was the cause of their possession, much as Gaufridy had been blamed for the Aix-en-Provence possessions.  Following the playbook of that earlier affair, the Catholic church turned the exorcism of the Loudun nuns into a spectacle, with thousands gathering to watch, and Urbain Grandier, much like Gaufridy before him, was convicted and burned at the stake. However, the Protestants of the region believed the entire affair to be a charade, claiming that the nuns’ confessor, Father Mignon, had coached them in their impostures with the approval of his Church superiors. Their reasons, it was claimed, were twofold. First, Urbain Grandier was a libertine and an embarrassment. He had had numerous affairs with local women and had even written a book against clerical celibacy. The other purpose the fraud served, besides ridding the church of Grandier, was to demonstrate the power of Catholic rites to defeat the Devil, an explanation that has been put forward for many witch purges and that explains the public exorcisms in France going all the way back to 1566, when a teen girl named Nicole Obry, who was said to be possessed by 30 demonic spirits, underwent exorcism rites in which the power of the Eucharist to harm an evil spirit was supposedly demonstrated on a public stage at a cathedral in Laon every day for two months, simply as a way to refute the Huguenots, who rejected the doctrine of the Real Presence of Chist’s body within the consecrated wafers. An alternative explanation, and something of a conspiracy theory, was that the powerful Cardinal Richelieu ordered the fraud as a pretext to rid himself of the troublesome priest Urbain Grandier, who had written a satire of him. No matter what the case, whether a mass delusion, religious propaganda, or a conspiracy against an unruly priest, or some combination of these, there are too many rational explanations to take the claims of the Loudun possessions seriously today.

A portrait of exorcist Sebastian Michaelis. Public domain.

About a decade after the events at Loudun, another nun’s claims about being seduced by a priest evolved into mass possession, public exorcism, and accusations of sorcery. Madeleine Bavent was the accuser, but in this case her allegations emerged years later in a written confession that sounds in many ways like the hoax claims of the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. She wrote that she had been seduced at 18 by a philandering Franciscan monk before entering the convent at Louviers, where the chaplain, she said, used to worship God in the nude and demanded his nuns did the same. This pervy chaplain was succeeded by Father Mathurin Picard, who Bavent said would turn Eucharist wafers into love charms and thereby receive sexual favors from his nuns. In this way, she wrote, Father Picard impregnated her. Picard and his assistant conducted black masses, at which the Devil visited them in the form of a black cat, she claimed. All of this in explanation of the convulsions and other possession symptoms that she and her fellow nuns were displaying. They had been bewitched from the grave by Father Picard, who had recently died. Her fellow nuns undergoing exorcism, however, had a different story. They said it was Madeleine Bavent who had caused them to be possessed. So while the Church dug up Father Picard and excommunicated his corpse just to be sure and ended up burning Picard’s assistant chaplain at the stake, Bavent too was tried as a witch. If she had concocted the story as revenge for a real sexual assault or in order to achieve some kind of agency in her patriarchal world, as has been argued before about such accusations, it certainly backfired on her. She was imprisoned in a subterranean dungeon, left to subsist for the next few years on bread and water three times a week, and died there within a few years. A couple years after the beginning of this affair, a treatise was written in Madeleine Bavent’s birthplace of Rouen, in which the specific indications of a genuine demonic possession are listed in an effort to better discern fakers from real demoniacs. The possessed must lead a wicked life (a strange requirement when the most famous purported demoniacs of the day were nuns), must think themselves possessed (which seems to ignore the possibility of delusions), must live outside the rules of society (a criteria that is likewise associated with many who were persecuted as witches), must blaspheme and be uncontrollable and violent (because surely no one could naturally do such things?), and must be tired of living (or in other words be suicidal, which again, is a criteria one need not be demonically possessed to meet). Among the few seemingly supernatural symptoms were signing of a pact with the devil, being troubled by spirits, showing a frightening countenance, making movements like an animal, and vomiting strange objects. This is at least an early indication that some thinkers at the time sought to differentiate “true” possessions from other, more naturally explained illnesses, but all such indications can be naturally explained as being lies, performances, and illusions, and these too go a long way toward explaining anything deemed to be a sign of a genuine possession even today.

The current signs of a genuine possession are all more focused on proving the supernatural: the ability to speak in a language the possessed person does not know, the demonstration of knowledge the possessed person could not know, and the display of supernatural strength. Just think on that a moment. There are exorcists going around believing they have proved the existence of supernatural phenomena. It makes you wonder why they haven’t brought in scholars and scientists to further publicize and study these definitively proven supernatural events. Of course, it’s because any of these might still have rational explanations. Supernatural strength may be subjective, based on what one imagines a particular person normally capable of, and the existence of augmented strength caused by adrenaline could scientifically explain such feats. As for displaying hidden knowledge or speaking a language one does not know, these could be easily faked with coaching or secret studies, especially today, with the Internet. Why would someone possibly want to fake possession, you may ask. Mental illness is an obvious answer, but the historical example of famous demoniac Marthe Brossier gives us alternative explanations. In 1598, Marthe Brossier attacked an older woman named Anne Chevreau in church and declared that the woman had bewitched her into being possessed. Anne Chevreau was arrested by civil rather than ecclesiastical authorities, and not being subjected to torture, she never confessed. This meant that Marthe Brossier had to prove herself possessed. Thus began her career as a demoniac, sent from one church to the next, having exorcism after exorcism, at which she satisfied many that she displayed the supernatural indications I’ve just mentioned. Her supernatural strength was observed in her strange bodily contortions and acrobatic movements like somersaults and backbends, which of course does not seem to have been an accurate test of strength at all but rather a test of how limber she was and perhaps of how committed she was to the performance. Furthermore, she seemed to prove her uncanny knowledge by telling audience members whether their loved ones were in heaven or their enemies bound for hell, which obviously couldn’t be proven accurate one way or another. As for speaking in a language unknown to her, she answered questions in Latin, but sometimes her answers seemed to betray a lack of understanding of the language, and when called on it, she typically dismissed the priests’ objections and threatened to stop talking altogether if they doubted her. What seems to have been happening was that her family was helping her in her charade. They had given her a book about the famous demoniac Nicole Obry, whom I previously mentioned, so that she might better learn how to behave like a woman possessed, and the local curé who had been her first exorcist, a family friend, was coaching her in Latin in order to fool ecclesiastic authorities. As it turns out, she was earning the family a tidy sum in profits from supporters who charitably donated to them.

The alleged diabolical pact of Urbain Grandier. Public domain.

While the making of money must have been a definite reason for the Brossier family’s complicity in her fraud, that was not Marthe’s reason for making the claims in the first place. Marthe had lost all hope for a respectable life. At the time, there were two paths for women of her class. She must either marry or become a nun. As she was one of four daughters and her father had lost his fortune and could therefore offer no dowry, marriage seemed impossible, and even entering a convent required some exchange of money, so neither had she been able to become a nun. She had been so upset by her position that she cut her hair and ran away from home pretending to be a man, which caused her and her family great shame when she was recognized and forced to return to her village of Romorantin. After that, as an unmarried, poor woman with a history of transgressive behavior, she may have actually feared being accused of witchcraft herself. In the last few years, numerous women in her position had been accused of witchcraft and of causing others to be possessed, leading to their execution. As mentioned before, while witches were reviled and murdered, their victims, the supposedly possessed, were typically objects of sympathy. Thus, Marthe Brossier, and maybe even her family, might have believed that claiming to be possessed was the only way to safeguard herself from witchcraft accusations, and it is perhaps no coincidence that she chose Anne Chevreau to accuse, since the Brossiers blamed certain other members of the Chevreau family for the failure of a marriage arrangement undertaken by one of Marthe’s sisters. Thus, with something of a family feud between them, revenge may also have been a motive. Whatever the case, Marthe must have rather enjoyed her role as a demoniac. She went from someone with no prospects and no power to being the principal bread winner of her family, the center of attention, an object of lust to many who watched her contort her body on public stages, and a woman empowered, because of the supposed demon inhabiting her, to speak her mind and even insult the men surrounding her. As her career as a demoniac continued, she found herself before crowds in Paris, having learned that she could further please her Catholic interrogators and exorcists if she had her demon tell the crowds that Protestants were followers of the Devil. But this was her undoing. Her anti-Huguenot propaganda may have put the Church on her side, but not the Crown. King Henri IV feared that she was upsetting the peace he had achieved between Catholics and Protestants with his recent Edict of Nantes, which pronounced tolerance for Huguenots. While the Church declared her possessed, medical doctors declared there was “nothing supernatural” about her condition, instead finding that she was faking it, and perhaps a bit mentally unwell, declaring there was “a large element of fraud, a small element of disease.” The king sided with the doctors and had her arrested on charges of fraud. In the end, the Paris court settled the matter by calling her an imposter and sending her back to her village, completely chastened and humiliated.

History is chock full of such cases of alleged possessions that either demonstrate the falseness of the phenomenon or can be debunked with just a little critical thought. In fact, I probably could have produced an entire series on this subject had I not feared that it would end up being a bit repetitive. Among the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony, prior to the Salem Witch Trials, there was Elizabeth Knapp, a servant in the household of a preacher, whom the preacher claimed had become possessed, citing as evidence her convulsions and contortions, her claims to see beings who were not there, and her speaking in a strange voice without opening her mouth. Though a doctor could not explain it then, medicine today may identify epilepsy or Huntington’s chorea as a cause of her physical symptoms, both of which can lead to depression, mania, hallucination, and even schizophrenia, which may further explain her behavior. Living as she did with a fire and brimstone preacher who would later be involved in witchcraft trials, it is perhaps no surprise that she eventually confessed to having made a pact with the Devil, and there may have been some further motivation for actually feigning possession, using a kind of ventriloquism to affect a voice in the back of her throat, in that it allowed her to get out of work and verbally abuse her employer with impunity. The same medical conditions may explain many a case of supposed demonic possession, but sometimes, when an exorcism appears to cure said condition, as it did in the case of George Lukins, the Yatton Demoniac of 18th-century England, it would seem some further explanation may be needed. Lukins seemed compelled to scream, and bark, and sing backwards hymns in a voice that sounded inhuman to those who heard it. These violent fits began during a Christmas pageant, when he claims to have felt some phantom blow. He eventually told any who would listen that he was possessed by seven demons, and that they must be exorcised by seven clergymen. Perhaps Lukins was an impostor, faking possession for attention or in order to promote the wonderful works of God—for though his exorcists claimed they wanted to keep the ceremony secret, through some error, they said, many townsfolk discovered what they were doing, eavesdropping on the exorcism and, to their supposed chagrin, afterward publishing reports about the miracle they had performed. Or perhaps Lukins did genuinely suffer the fits described and only believed they were diabolical because of his religious worldview, a belief system so strong that he was cured simply by the placebo effect, demonstrating the power of suggestion, if indeed he was entirely healed at all and never again suffered any of his fits.

The exorcism of Madeleine Bavent. Public domain.

Very religious, also, was the 19th-century French demoniac Antoine Gay, a carpenter of Lyon who had once been accepted as a lay brother at an abbey but had to leave because of some nervous disorder that surely represented the early onset of whatever condition would later be mistaken for demonic possession. A priest who would later sign a certificate affirming the authenticity of Gay’s possession cited as “grounds” for his belief in Gay’s possession that he displayed a preternatural understanding of a language he did not know because he seemed to contort more violently when they spoke prayers over him in Latin, which of course proves nothing except that he could discern the appropriate time to writhe, and that he replied to questions posed in Latin, though he concedes that Gay only ever responded in French. As one who had previously sought to enter the mendicant life, it is possible he had studied the exorcism ritual enough to know the nature of the questions that would be posed to him, even if he could not speak Latin in any passable way. Later, when Gay was placed in an asylum for the mentally ill, another priest marveled at how Gay and a female patient who was also believed to be possessed would hold long arguments in an unknown language, which Antoine Gay later translated for the priest. It sounds like little more than a folie à deux, two mentally disturbed individuals feeding off each other’s delusions and shouting gibberish at each other. It’s absurd to think that the priest believed the mental patient’s subsequent explanation of the content of their exchange. Much as the seeming mastery of unknown languages convinced many of Antoine Gay’s possession, the mysterious indecipherable Devil’s Letter, purportedly written by a possessed Italian nun in 1676, captured a lot of imaginations recently when in 2017 researchers at the Ludum Science Center used a decryption algorithm to finally translate it. Legend had it that the possessed Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione woke up one morning covered in ink with a letter of jumbled characters from different archaic alphabets. The Ludum Center’s algorithm was able to decipher from it a message in Latin, Greek, Arabic and Runic letters that sounds like the Devil’s very voice, sowing doubt that God can save mortals. The problem is that, even after its algorithmic translation, the message doesn’t much sense, and some parts remain undeciphered, suggesting it may not have even been translated correctly. Additionally, it seems Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione may have been studying ancient languages during the more than 15 years she had been in the Benedictine convent, and that she may have suffered from bipolar disorder or perhaps even schizophrenia. Such a confluence of knowledge and interests and manic behavior or delusions could quite logically lead to her concocting a mishmash alphabet and writing out the words she believed the Devil was whispering to her.

In the modern era, possession and exorcisms have taken on an even darker quality, and I don’t mean a diabolical darkness. I refer to the consistent occurrence of mental illness being mischaracterized or misdiagnosed as demonic possession by clergyman and lay consultants, resulting in exorcism ceremonies that cause real psychological and physical harm, and even death, as in the Tanacu exorcism. Roland Doe, the 14-year-old boy whose widely embellished story inspired the book and film The Exorcist and whose psychiatrists all agreed he was a deeply disturbed child that should not have been exposed to such a ceremony, thankfully survived, but many another victim of this outmoded belief and practice have not been so lucky. Perhaps the most famous and egregious case of death by exorcism is that of Annaliese Michel, a young German epileptic who suffered from psychosis as a result of her seizures. Tragically, as she succumbed to mental illness and depression and a belief she was possessed, her family went along with her desire to stop seeing medical professionals and instead focus on exorcism, enabling Michel’s intention to die as a kind of atonement. Her family, her exorcist, and the Church that approved the ceremonies are complicit in Annaliese Michel’s suicide by exorcism. After 67 grueling exorcism sessions, she died of dehydration and malnutrition, her knees shattered from her ceaseless kneeling. The Church may like to hide behind the fact that subjects must request an exorcism these days, as though this represents a kind of release of liability, but the fact is that the mentally ill don’t always have the presence of mind or rational judgement to know what is in their best interests, and if they are rejecting modern medicine for faith healing like this, then neither do their families. I didn’t really believe that this episode would connect clearly to my last episode about religious arguments against vaccination, but as it turns out, they are closely connected. We see religious creeds and specifically Christian beliefs encouraging their faithful to reject science and modern medicine, and as a result, people are dying. Just to emphasize how evil and ongoing this threat is, as recently as January, 2020, news reports appeared revealing that exorcists are responsible for massacres. In an indigenous community in Panama, a religious group that called themselves the New Light of God kidnapped people from their homes, brandishing machetes and beating them. They held them captive, performing an exorcism ceremony that demanded they renounce their evil ways or be killed. Before authorities stopped them, they murdered seven innocents, including a pregnant woman and her five children. Doubtless these murderers rationalized their heinous acts in much the same way as did the Romanian priest Corogeanu, who rather than accept responsibility for the death of Maricica Irina Cornici, asserted that her death was God’s Will, saying horribly, "Only God knows why he took her … I think that's how God wanted her to be saved."

Further Reading

Bourguignon, Erika. “Introduction: A Framework for the Comparative Study of Altered States of Consciousness.” Religion, altered states of consciousness, and social change, The Ohio State University Press, 1973, pp. 3-35. The Ohio State University, kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/6294.

Kington, Tom. “Nun’s letters from Lucifer decoded via the dark web.” The Times, 7 Sep. 2017, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nun-sister-maria-crocifissa-della-concezione-letters-from-lucifer-decoded-via-the-dar-web-d5jwx5mwk.

A narrative of the extraordinary case of George Lukins (of Yatton, Somersetshire) who was possessed of evil spirits, for near eighteen years: also an account of his remarkable deliverance, in the vestry-room of Temple Church, in the City of Bristol, extracted from the manuscripts of several persons who attended: to which is prefixed . a letter from the Rev. W. R. W. Thomas T. Stiles, 1805. U.S. National Library of Medicine, collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-0244605-bk.

Oesterreich, T.K. Possession: Demoniacal and Other among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner And Company, 1930. Internet Archive, archive.org/stream/possessiondemoni031669mbp/possessiondemoni031669mbp_djvu.txt

Sluhovsky, Moshe. “The Devil in the Convent.” American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 5, Dec. 2002, pp. 1379–1411. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1086/532851.

Smith, Craig S. “A Casualty on Romania's Road Back From Atheism.” The New York Times, 3 July 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/world/europe/a-casualty-on-romanias-road-back-from-atheism.html.

Stephenson, Craig E. “The Possessions at Loudun: Tracking the Discourse of Dissociation.” Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 62, no. 4, Sept. 2017, pp. 544–566. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/1468-5922.12336.

Walker, Anita M., and Edmund H. Dickerman. “A Notorious Woman: Possession, Witchcraft and Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century Provence.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, vol. 27, no. 1, Berghahn Books, 2001, pp. 1–26, www.jstor.org/stable/41299192.

---. “‘A Woman under the Influence’: A Case of Alleged Possession in Sixteenth-Century France.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 22, no. 3, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 1991, pp. 535–54, doi.org/10.2307/2541474.

Willard, Samuel. “A briefe account of a strange & unusuall Providence of God befallen to Elizabeth Knap of Groton.” Groton In The Witchcraft Times, edited by Samuel A. Green, 1883. Hanover College, history.hanover.edu/texts/Willard-Knap.html.

False Prophecy: The Mark of the Beast - 666

I previously thought that, in my blog post on Anti-Vaccinationism, written about 6 months ago, I had said all I felt compelled to say about anti-vaxxer movements. With the recent FDA approval of some COVID vaccines, I had hoped that the protests of many who remained vaccine hesitant had been addressed and we would see wider vaccination rates. Instead, we see goalposts moved and refusals doubled down on, and we find renewed opposition to vaccination mandates on the grounds of individual and religious liberty. On one hand, considering the long history of organized protest to compulsory vaccination, which I discussed in depth in my April blog post, I am not that surprised at the resistance to vaccine mandates, although in most cases organizations and governments are not even currently discussing the enforcement of compulsory vaccination and are instead offering the alternative of weekly testing to accommodate vaccine holdouts, making most of their rhetoric and bluster effectively moot. I suppose what I do find surprising is the outrage and shock at the mere idea the government might consider the coercion of safeguards to protect the public against this deadly virus and the suggestion that it amounts to some kind of unconstitutional medical tyranny. This viewpoint, which is popular right now (I have even seen it espoused by some otherwise rational and educated individuals who work in academia) demonstrates an ignorance of American history and a basic misunderstanding of the ideals of liberty on which our country was founded. The coercion of precautions against infectious disease and infringements on individual liberties for the sake of community safety can be traced all the way back to the first quarantine laws in Massachusetts colony, 1647, leading in the 18th century to the empowerment of the government to forcibly remove sick individuals from their homes in order to isolate them and mitigate the harm they did to others. Anyone who has served in our Armed Forces and received so many jabs they don’t even know what they’re all for will tell you that compulsory inoculation has long been practiced by our government, and this goes all the way back to the Continental Army and General George Washington. Indeed, Washington was at first resistant to instituting a smallpox inoculation mandate, but his own soldiers convinced him that they had more to fear from the disease than they did from their enemy’s swords. After the advent of the vaccine and the first vaccine mandate law was passed in the U.S. in 1809, opposition to compulsory smallpox vaccination entered the courts, as I have written about previously. The final word on the constitutionality of vaccine mandates came in 1905, in the Supreme Court case Jacobsen v. Massachusetts, in which a Cambridge City mandate was challenged. The Supreme Court upheld the law, finding that our individual liberty does not extend to putting others at risk. Since then, when the issue has come up again, specifically in cases regarding vaccine mandates for children in schools, courts have consistently looked back at Jacobsen v. Massachusetts and considered the matter settled. Thus, the idea that governments, or organizations, instituting a vaccine mandate is somehow illegal, or even an overreach, is simply false. For those who might protest that it’s not a matter of the letter of the law but rather the spirit, and that the Framers of the Constitution would never have countenanced such a disregard of individual freedoms, let us look to the wording of the Constitution’s preamble, in which the Framers wrote explicitly that their intention in formalizing our constitutional rights was not to make individual rights sacrosanct but rather to “provide for the common defense” and “promote the general welfare.” And American history in particular has also shown that the best way to promote general welfare during an epidemic, the best defense against an infectious disease, is robust vaccination, and that mandatory vaccination laws work. Comparing smallpox infection rates in states with and without vaccine mandates between 1919 and 1928 reveals that states without vaccine mandates saw as many as 20 times more cases. However, what I find really complicates the issue is the notion of religious dissent to vaccination mandates. If a religious doctrine truly holds that the faithful must not be vaccinated, then there is little left to argue, except the validity of that doctrine and the reasoning behind it, which is a losing game, especially when the most prevalent religious objection to vaccination relies on a creative interpretation of an ancient prophecy about the end of the world.

I am writing this post as one final attempt to use historical insight in order to refute the logic of vaccine critics. Specifically, I want to address the claims that getting the vaccine, or requiring proof of vaccination, somehow fulfills the prophecies of John the Revelator about the so-called Mark of the Beast, and the argument that this interpretation of a few verses in Revelation constitute grounds for the religious exemption of Evangelicals, who comprise about a quarter of the U.S. population. Before we can really address this notion, though, we need some foundation of understanding. In case any listener is unfamiliar, the verses of Revelation in question are in Chapter 13—already an unlucky number. In it, the author describes a vision of a beast rising out of the sea with numerous heads and horns with crowns. This beast is described like a chimera, with elements of different animals, and is described as having great power and authority, and is said to miraculously survive a deadly wound. Now don’t be mistaken. This is just the first beast in Revelation 13. The next beast described by the revelator also rises to the same heights of power, and furthermore performs wonders and forces the world to worship the first beast, executing any who refuse.  Verses 16 through 18 are of especial interest here: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” These verses mark the beginning of the legend. Understandably, the beasts of the vision are interpreted in terms of power structures. The beast with multiple heads and crowns, one of whose heads survives a killing blow, has traditionally been interpreted in broader terms as a nation or empire or religion, while the second beast who forces worship of the first and institutes the Mark, is usually seen as a specific world leader. Not all interpretations of these verses look to the future. Many have looked to the past, to world powers and figures at the time it was written. We will get to that. What’s important to understand now is that Evangelicals take a Futurist view of prophecy, believing it to be a blueprint of the end times. In their view the second beast is typically the Antichrist, and the Mark is a milestone that they are always on the lookout to identify. Anything that might be clocked as the Beast’s Mark helps them to characterize their own times as the End Times, and importantly, allows them to demonize any political leaders or cultural trends they want to resist.

A woodcut by Albrecht Dürer depicting the Beast of Revelation. Public Domain.

The current iteration of the Mark of the Beast legend—the conspiracy theory that the vaccine itself or vaccine documentation are really the forced mark that will make of any otherwise faithful Christian a damned heretic, effectively erasing their name from the Book of Life and denying them their eternal reward—actually involves the unlikely figure of Bill Gates. That’s right, a software developer whose career has taken him from working on computers in a garage to his philanthropy efforts on the world stage, Bill Gates is currently viewed by many as the Beast, or at least as the man behind the Beast’s Mark. It seems to have begun when Gates, a proponent of vaccination in the developing world, suggested that by helping children survive into adulthood, vaccines could help slow population growth because with fewer fears for their children’s survival, families may end up having fewer total children. The misunderstanding and purposeful misuse of this statement turned into the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was intentionally thinning populations using vaccines that kill. The conspiracy theory intersected with the Mark of the Beast legend when a digital identity initiative called ID2020 announced in 2019 that it was joining forces with a vaccine alliance with which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation partners in order to spearhead a digital identity program in developing nations. This was misinterpreted as an announcement that Bill Gates was putting microchips into people under the guise of vaccine injections. From there, it was only a skip and a jump to identifying Gates’s vaccine initiatives with the Mark of the Beast. Fears that vaccines might be the Mark of the Beast were, after all, not exactly new. Some early resisters of the smallpox vaccine saw the mark it left on the arms of the vaccinated and also cried Mark of the Beast.

The notion of an implanted microchip being the Mark of the Beast was also not new. It does seem, after all, the most logical and modern way to explain why this mark would be necessary for buying and selling, as in the imaginations of the public, it would be like an identification and a credit card that you’d never misplace. The makers of the VeriChip, a silicon microchip promoted in the early 2000s as a medical identification device or as a tracking solution such as we use on dogs, can certainly attest to the difficulty of convincing the public that their product was not the Mark of the Beast; it was one of the principal obstacles they struggled with in launching their product and probably the reason why it didn’t really take off. Never mind the fact that such microchips are subcutaneous, injected under the skin rather than into muscle tissue, and need a much larger gauge needle than is used in vaccinations, and require programming for each individual subject, which obviously isn’t happening before each jab of a vaccine dose. The pieces all seemed to fit, and the more conspiracy theorists looked, the more pieces they seemed to find. For example, in 2019, Microsoft applied for a patent for a system that rewards the fulfillment of tasks verified by the sensing of physical movement with cryptocurrency—a patent for something that sounds like an exercise app on a smartwatch, but which was erroneously claimed to be a patent for an injectable microchip… something that has certainly already been patented, since the VeriChip has been around for two decades. The really unfortunate thing is that the proposed patent was numbered W02020060606, taken by conspiracy theorists as the Number of the Beast, and thus confirmation of their theories. And how was this is all tied to the COVID vaccine in particular? Bill Gates did not develop COVID vaccines, despite what many a conspiracy theorist might tell you. Rather, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation took part in a pandemic simulation in 2019, called Event 201, in which a thought experiment was discussed as to what the response might look like if, for example, a novel coronavirus crossed species to infect humans. This event has been presented like it was a shadowy Illuminati meeting, when it was in fact a well-publicized and widely attended event, and not the first of its kind, since virologists have feared such a virus emerging for a long time. So rather than a vast conspiracy in plain sight, this appears to be a series of rather unfortunate coincidences that has now resulted in a massive and baseless conspiracy theory responsible for many avoidable deaths.

An implantable RFID chip. Image by Amaal Graffstra, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Before fears about injectable microchips were the fears about RFID, or radio-frequency identification technology generally. Christian apocalypticists have been raising the alarm about these so-called spychips being the Mark of the Beast since they first started being implemented in cattle tagging and, in the early 2000s, when major retailers began installing EPC, or Electronic Product Codes, on most merchandise in order to track inventory and product information online. In fact, anxieties about injectable RFID chips today seem rather pointless, since most of us already carry a credit card with an RFID chip in it. It’s kind of like worrying about corporations using smartphones to record your conversations when they don’t really need to because they mine far more actionable data just by monitoring browsing and social media habits. These fears about the RFID-enabled EPC tags echo even earlier fears about UPC or barcodes potentially being the Mark of the Beast. When UPCs were widely adopted, many Evangelicals were certain that what would come next would be barcode tattoos on the forehead or the right hand, thus fulfilling the prophecy. And credit cards also didn’t need a chip in them for Evangelical Christians to fear that they were the Mark of the Beast. Indeed, it seemed anything with a number might be considered the dreaded Mark. Bank routing numbers have 9 digits, which is 6 upside down. Your full zip code, too, is nine digits. Uh-oh. Well what is one to do, if you’re a God-fearing Christian and want no part of this forced worship of the beast? Clearly you must take your money out of the banks. And you must get yourself and your family off the grid. There were many Evangelicals in the late 1970s and 80s who did indeed feel that the only way to be a true Christian was to go full outlaw mountain man. This had been widely encouraged by the bestselling book The Late Great Planet Earth, which predicted a specific end times scenario, most likely occurring before the end of the 1980s. One such Christian American influenced by this apocalyptic culture was Randy Weaver, who believed that credit cards and the computer systems that networked them were the Mark of the Beast. In order to resist what he saw as Revelation come true, he moved his family to a cabin in remote Idaho, and began to associate with the only other well-armed group of professed Christians resisting the government and living off the grid out there, the Aryan Nations. To illustrate the danger of such apocalyptic thought, things did not turn out well for the Weaver family. When the ATF failed in their plan to use a firearm charge to coerce Weaver into informing on the white supremacists’ activities, the result was an infamous shootout and standoff at Ruby Ridge, the Weavers’ home, during which a Deputy U.S. Marshall and Randy’s son and wife were killed.

It's important to note here that a lot of these interpretations of the Mark of the Beast inherently rely on metaphor. If it’s not an actual barcode tattooed on you, than it’s not really a literal interpretation of a visible mark on the hand or head. An injected microchip, one might argue, could maybe be noticed as a bump; and others have pointed to a verse in Revelation about those with the Mark being afflicted with a sore to suggest that a subcutaneous chip might result in some kind of dermal ulceration, but this too takes liberties with the scripture, which is clearly referring to the sore and the Mark as separate things. Purchasing RFID tagged products, having credit card debt on record, opening a bank account or just living on the grid, these interpretations clearly have nothing to do with a literal mark on the right hand and head, and certainly neither does receiving a vaccine or having a vaccination record. This freedom from literal interpretation characterizes many of the explanations of this prophecy throughout history. It has long been associated with non-conformity and resistance to cultural norms as well. In fact, Pentecostal critics of World War One believed that nationalism was the Mark of the Beast, using the idea to support their political views. During the Reformation, this meant interpreting the visions of John the Revelator so as to see Roman Catholicism and the Papacy everywhere: signified in the heads and crowned horns of the first beast; represented by Babylon the Great, the corrupt city of the Antichrist; and embodied in the figure of the Whore of Babylon. In the 17th century, using some creative calculations, various biblical scholars suggested that the year in which the Antichrist would fall would be 1666, a year whose number further explained the Number of the Beast. This became a common fear, dreaded by many European Protestants during the decades preceding the so-called Year of the Beast, and for those in London, who suffered a plague and a devastating fire that year, it seemed that their interpretation of the prophecy had been confirmed. This notion of the infamous riddle that was the Number of the Beast would be echoed 333 years later, when worries about computers and Y2K led many, once again, to fear that the year 1999 would somehow fulfill the terrible prophecy of the Number of the Beast. Revelation is clear that the Mark of the Beast is one and the same as the Number of the Beast, and it is never satisfactorily explained by these interpretations how or why a calendar date might be received on the right hand or the forehead, even metaphorically.

Anonymous oil painting of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Public Domain.

Revelation further states explicitly that, rather than a date, the Mark is “the number of a man,” and more specifically “the number of his name,” which is why the bulk of the scholarly interpretations of the text treat it as a kind of cryptogram, a code that, once solved, will reveal the literal name of the beast, the identity of the Antichrist. Some of suggested, for example, that it was simply a matter of the number of characters in a name, thus it could be claimed that the number of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s name was 666 because each name contained six letters. Others have looked to Roman numerals, which of course correspond well with English letters. Typically, though, those who have tried to decrypt the Number of the Beast in earnest make their attempts using gematria, an arcane Kabbalistic method of interpreting scriptures in which each Hebrew character corresponds to a specific number. There is a real historical case to be made that the 666 cryptogram does refer to gematria. It was certainly in use in that part of the world and was known to be used for calculating the number of a name, as we see in an Assyrian inscription from the 8th century BCE that King Sargon II built a certain wall to a certain measurement “to correspond with the numerical value of his name.” Gematria is originally used with the Hebrew alphabet, but that hasn’t stopped some theorists from applying the numbers 1-26 to the English alphabet and applying that alphanumeric code to find out the identity of the Antichrist. During World War One, again, Penetecostal writers used this English version of gematria to suggest that the Kaiser was the Antichrist because his name and titles, William von Hohenzollern, King of Prussia, Emperor of all Germany, converted quite nicely to the number 666. At the advent of the World Wide Web, anxious Christians used gematria to suggest that using the Internet was taking the Mark of the Beast, for right there at the beginning of every URL was www, which corresponded to the 6th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Among ancient scholars, like Irenaeus and Andreas of Caesarea, using gematria to solve the 666 cryptogram led to the listing of random names, like Evanthas, Lateinos, and Teitan, not the names of specific figures, but names maybe to be on the lookout for, since their number was equivalent to the Number of the Beast. The problem was that there were and are far too many variations in method. First, if  you don’t like the numerical value you get using gematria, you can always massage the numbers. One method of gematria involves integral reduction: say you get the number 231 from a name. By adding its integers—two, three, and one—together, you can reduce it to the number 6. This is the suppleness of such numerology. Beyond that, there is the problem of transliteration, as each interpreter might make a different decision regarding which Hebrew letter corresponds to whatever language’s letters they are using, since gematria requires that a word or name be converted to its Hebrew equivalent before its numbers can be determined. This was a problem going all the way back to ancient scholars who wrestled with the 666 cryptogram, many of them writing in Greek. Hebrew, a Semitic language, does not lend itself to simple transliteration with European languages, since its phonemes, or distinct sounds, and its orthography, or spelling system, are so different, providing the translator with a lot of choices and making this anything but an exact science. This leads to the rational question of whether the author, John the Revelator, himself writing in Greek, actually intended his readers to perform such an esoteric decryption.

So then, who was John the Revelator, also called John the Theologian and John the Divine, author of the Book of Revelation? Christian tradition would have us believe he was one and the same as the author of the Gospel of John, but this is not exactly a precise identification since the identity of that gospel’s author is also widely disputed, which I spoke about in my episode entitled, The Beloved Disciple and the Authorship of John. What the Book of Revelation tells us is that the author wrote it while on the island of Patmos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Thus the author’s other appellation, John of Patmos. Many biblical scholars place its composition between 81 and 96 CE, during the reign of Roman Emperor Domitian, suggesting that whoever this John was, he went to Patmos seeking refuge during Domitian’s legendary persecution of Christians. However, other scholars have suggested that there is little contemporary source support to actually confirm the truth of Domitian’s supposed persecution of Christians, which were only first mentioned by Eusebius of Caesarea hundreds of years later. An alternative dating, based on the writings of Irenaeus, whose Against Heresies, written about 180 CE, is one of the earliest exegeses, or critical interpretations, of the scripture, is that it was written during the time of Nero, who reigned as Roman Emperor from 54 to 68 CE. With this dating in mind, we must consider the possibility that John of Patmos was not at all referring cryptically to some far flung future events and figures in his Revelation but was instead speaking figuratively about contemporary events. This would be to take a so-called Preterist view of Revelation. In this view, Babylon the Great is Imperial Rome, and the Beast, the number of whose name is 666, was Nero. Indeed, according to the gematria calculations of preterists who espouse this view, the name Nero, transliterated from Greek to Hebrew, yields numbers that do indeed add up to 666. But more than that, one problem that has plagued many an interpretation is the fact that some early versions of Revelation actually have a different Number of the Beast, identifying 616 as the “number of his name.” Funny enough, though, Nero Caesar, transliterated not from Greek but from Latin into Hebrew, yields the gematria result 616, thus explaining the deviation in some versions of Revelation. And more than just the fitting of his name with the Number of the Beast, Nero and Rome can be made to fit other descriptions of the beast. The first beast, with many heads and crowns, might be seen as Rome, and the mortal wounding of one of the beast’s heads may refer to the assassination of Julius Caesar, which the Beast survived in that the empire survived, and the making of the world to worship the Beast may refer to Roman deification of their Emperors, starting posthumously with the cult of divus Iulius, making a god out of Julius Caesar. Or maybe after all the Number of the Beast refers specifically to the first beast, not the second (which is not exactly clear in the scripture) and the head of the beast who survives his mortal wound and is to be worshipped is a reference to Nero, for there was a legend after Nero’s suicide called Nero redivivus that said Nero did not really die or that he would soon return.

John of Patmos, depicted by by Hieronymus Bosch, 1505. Public Domain.

The Preterist view, in my mind, best explains the strange visions described in Revelation as well as the cryptogram Number of the Beast, and I encourage listeners to look into it further, as it is far more intricate than I can do justice in outline here. Still I am left with certain questions, such as the specific meaning of the statement that the Mark of the Beast would be received on the hand or forehead. This, I think, is the perennial problem with prophetic texts like these. One might compare them to, for example, the poetry of Nostradamus. Works of prophecy are so chock full of evocative but abstract and surreal imagery that they can be twisted to apply to whatever you want. So, purely as a thought experiment, let’s say I wanted to turn the political tables on Evangelicals and started suggesting that the prophecies of Revelation clearly point to figures or movements on the Right. Obviously the head of the beast that recovers from a mortal wound might refer to Donald Trump, who came down with COVID during his reelection campaign but recovered, or perhaps it could refer to his defeat in the election and the insistence by Qanon that he will return to office. If Trump were the Beast, then what is his Mark? Perhaps the alt-right hand gesture we sometimes hear about, or perhaps his MAGA hats, which place his symbol on his followers’ foreheads. And the flexibility of gematria allows us to turn his name into the Number of the Beast. Using a simple online gematria calculator, I get the value of 159 for Donald, a name with six digits. If I apply the integral reduction method, adding 1, 5, and 9, that six-letter name’s value reduces to 15, and one and five add up to, you guessed it, another six. Likewise, Trump yields the number 726, whose digits add to 15, which can again be reduced to six. I think you get the idea. Do I believe that Trump’s political career was predicted by John of Patmos thousands of years ago. No. If anything, this is just evidence that all claims about the Mark of the Beast are preposterous, especially considering all the many times they have been wrong—which is every time so far—and furthermore, it just goes to show that interpretations of prophecy should not be taken so seriously, especially if they are cynically used as a specious argument for religious exemption from a life-saving public health initiative like vaccines.

Further Reading

Astor, Maggie. “Vaccination Mandates Are an American Tradition. So Is the Backlash.” The New York Times, 9 Sep. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/us/politics/vaccine-mandates-history.html.

Batniji, Rajaie. “Historical evidence to inform COVID-19 vaccine mandates.” Lancet, vol. 397, no. 10276, 2021, p. 791. U.S. National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7946603/.

Brady, David. “1666: The Year of the Beast.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 61, no. 2, 1979, pp. 314-36. The University of Manchester Library, www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m1813&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF.
Gumerlock, Francis x. “Nero Antichrist: Patristic Evidence for the Use of Nero’s Naming in Calculating the Number of the Beast (Rev 13:18).” Westminster Theological Journal, vol. 68, no. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 347–360. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=23498834&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Johnson, David R. “The Mark of the Beast, Reception History, and Early Pentecostal Literature.” Journal of Pentecostal Theology, vol. 25, no. 2, July 2016, pp. 184–202. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/17455251-02502003.

Joyce, Kathryn. “The Long, Strange History of Bill Gates Population Control Conspiracy Theories.” Type Investigations, 12 May 2020, www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2020/05/12/the-long-strange-history-of-bill-gates-population-control-conspiracy-theories/.

Klein, Adam, and Benjamin Wittes. “The Long History of Coercive Health Responses in American Law.” Lawfare, 13 April 2020, www.lawfareblog.com/long-history-coercive-health-responses-american-law.
McGovern, Celeste. “Invisible ‘Mark of the Beast’?” Report / Newsmagazine (Alberta Edition), vol. 29, no. 7, Apr. 2002, p. 46. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=6412102&site=eds-live&scope=site.

McNeile, A. H. “‘THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST.’” The Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 14, no. 55, Oxford University Press, 1913, pp. 443–44, www.jstor.org/stable/23947355.

Merlan, Anna. “The Desperate Search for the Mark of the Beast.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 June 2019, www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/desperate-search-mark-beast/.

“RFID: Sign of the (End) Times?” WIRED, Condé Nast, 6 June 2006, www.wired.com/2006/06/rfid-sign-of-the-end-times/.

Rojas-Flores, Gonzalo. “The Book of Revelation and the First Years of Nero’s Reign.” Biblica, vol. 85, no. 3, GBPress- Gregorian Biblical Press, 2004, pp. 375–92, www.jstor.org/stable/42614530.

Sanders, Henry A. “The Number of the Beast in Revelation.” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 37, no. 1/2, Society of Biblical Literature, 1918, pp. 95–99, doi.org/10.2307/3259148.

Stewart-Peters, Ella, and Catherine Kevin. “A short history of vaccine objection, vaccine cults and conspiracy theories.” The Conversation, 9 July 2017, theconversation.com/a-short-history-of-vaccine-objection-vaccine-cults-and-conspiracy-theories-78842.

Thomas, Elise, and Albert Zhang. ID2020, Bill Gates and the Mark of the Beast: How Covid-19 Catalyses Existing Online Conspiracy Movements. Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2020, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep25082.

Vanden Eykel, Eric M. “No, the COVID-19 vaccine is not linked to the mark of the beast – but a first-century Roman tyrant probably is.” The Conversation, 7 April 2021, theconversation.com/no-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-not-linked-to-the-mark-of-the-beast-but-a-first-century-roman-tyrant-probably-is-158288.
Walter, Jess. “Visions of the Mark of the Beast. (Cover Story).” Newsweek, vol. 126, no. 9, Aug. 1995, p. 32. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9508247700&site=ehost-live&scope=site.