The Revenants - Part Two: VAMPIRES in Fantasy

In 1897, the quintessential treatment of the vampire legend was published: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an epistolary novel that owed much to John Polidori’s and Lord Byron’s first vampire tale, in that again, the vampire is depicted as an aristocrat, living in a castle, who once more preys upon women with a dark charm and sensual allure. However, Stoker’s vampire is an entirely new creation, a bringing forth of the modern legend in its entirety, fully formed, while at the same time acknowledging much of the folklore from which it sprang. Four years after the publication of the novel, an Icelandic translation of the book appeared, entitled Makt Myrkranna, or Powers of Darkness. This edition was adapted from a Swedish version that had been anonymously translated, and whose publisher remains unknown. Interestingly, Powers of Darkness appears to have been translated from some early draft of the novel, with significant differences from the book as the rest of the world has come to know it. Nor was it unauthorized, as Stoker himself wrote a preface, in which, surprisingly, he appears to state that the story is true, or based on true events. He indicates that the characters are real people, stating that he “let the people involved relate their experiences in their own way,” but changed their names. According to Stoker, “I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight.” More recently, the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, Dacre Stoker, revealed that, according to his research, Bram Stoker had always intended his book to be read as a work of non-fiction, as a warning of a very real supernatural evil that he had discovered. He describes how his publisher refused to print the book as it was, saying that such claims of a blood-letting monster on the loose in London would only cause a panic of the kind they were still recovering from following the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper. He forced Stoker to excise the first hundred pages and reframe the book as a work of fiction. This is a truly intriguing story, which even a hundred years later has led some to believe that maybe, just maybe, there really is such a thing as vampires. However, the fact of the matter is that all of these claims appear to have been made to sell novels. Dacre Stoker has made a name for himself off of his great-granduncle’s work, writing a sequel called Dracula: The Undead, and later a prequel, Dracul. These claims were made by Dacre and his co-author as part of that prequel, suggesting that the completely fictional story that followed, about Bram Stoker himself struggling against vampires, was a believable filling in of the missing story. However, the novel he co-wrote is far longer than the supposed missing 100 pages he claims were censored, and if the Icelandic version were adapted from a complete draft, it too omits everything that Dacre Stoker and his co-author imagined. Furthermore, the claim that a publisher would refuse to print anything on the grounds that it might enflame public fear like Jack the Ripper, whose murders occurred a decade earlier, is somewhat preposterous. An entire cottage industry had sprung up for publishing books about Jack the Ripper, including The Whitechapel Murders Or, The Mysteries of the East End and The History of the Whitechapel Murders, both in 1888, then The Whitechapel Murders, Or, An American Detective in London and The Whitechapel Mystery, both in 1889, not to mention a bevy of journal articles in the intervening years. To suggest that writing about Jack the Ripper was not done, especially a decade later, is patently false. As for the Powers of Darkness, there is suspicion among scholars that, though it may have been adapted from an early draft of the novel, its translator took great liberties with the story that Stoker may not have even known about. And Bram Stoker’s own preface can easily be explained as another publicity stunt, an attempt to drum up interest among a new audience by falsely claiming that the story had some basis in reality, when in fact, it was entirely fictional. It must be remembered, after all, that Bram Stoker, who had long worked in the theater, as an actor’s assistant and as a critic, was nothing if not a showman.

As we discuss the possible basis for the foundational vampire novel, Dracula, many may object and say that of course Bram Stoker based his monster on a true story, at least to some degree, in that it is common knowledge that he based his Count Dracula on Vlad Drăculea, or Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler, the Voivode, or leader, of Wallachia, the famously ruthless son of Vlad Dracul, the Dragon. Vlad the Impaler is said to have been so bloodthirsty that during his campaign to cement his control of Wallachia, when he captured dissident Transylvanian Saxons, he had them impaled, thus earning his name. However, besides Vlad Țepeș not being a Count or a Transylvanian, there is quite a bit wrong with this notion. First, rather than being a hermit in a castle feared by all the peasants for his evil or cruelty, he was widely celebrated as a just ruler and is remembered in Romania as something of a national hero who established peace. His reputation for cruelty was real, however, from his impalement of enemies to the burning of his own subjects for being lazy and poor, so the surviving view of him as some sort of just tyrant is dubious, at best. However, none of this is really relevant to vampirism. There was never any historical connection between Vlad Țepeș and blood-drinking or revenant folklore. The connection only exists in Bram Stoker’s novel, because he took the name Dracula. In the 1970s, it was argued by two researchers, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, that Stoker based his character on that historical figure, but since then, scholars have argued convincingly that he seems not to have known much about Vlad the Impaler at all. He appears to have found the name Dracula in a book on Wallachian and Moldavian history and decided that it sounded appropriately scary. Among all of his papers, no mention of or evidence of research into the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler has ever been discovered. The working name of the character before he changed it to Dracula had been Count Wampyr. But Vlad the Impaler is not the only real life figure that scholars have argued inspired the novel’s creature. Some suggest he may have been more inspired by Attila the Hun than by Vlad Țepeș, as in the novel, the character claims descent from him. Others suggest that Bram Stoker was inspired by the real-life vampire story of Mercy Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island, which I spoke about in substantial detail in a recent patron exclusive. In fact, an 1896 newspaper clipping about the destruction of Mercy Brown’s corpse for fear she had turned revenant was found in Bram Stoker’s papers. He had been touring America with a theater company that year, and certainly seems to have heard of the story. Add to that the fact that Stoker makes mention of an English town called Exeter, from where his character Jonathan Harker leaves for Transylvania, and it makes for a convincing argument. However, whether it helped shape the novel at all, the story of Mercy Brown could not have inspired it, for by the time he acquired the clipping, he was already far along in composing it. In fact, the next year it would be published. More recently, one historian, Louis S. Warren, has even argued, rather convincingly, that Bram Stoker based the character of Count Dracula on Buffalo Bill Cody, whose Wild West show had toured London in 1887, at which time Bram Stoker actually spent time with the American showman. Warren believes that, to Stoker, Dracula’s transformation and decay was a direct result of his living on the frontier among other races, and that the novel stands as a reflection on the American frontier and how the colonizer is changed and eventually was colonized himself by the racial other. Read this way, the novel has decidedly white supremacist themes, and the vampiric plague visited upon England in it comes to represent the fear of racial degeneracy. Is this what Stoker was writing about? Is this what he viewed as the true story behind his novel? God, I hope not. In the end, maybe it’s better that we only read the book as a terrifying yarn rather than as commentary on some real threat.

Vlad Țepeș, the Impaler, the usual suspect for the model of Dracula, though Bram Stoker appears to have studied him little during the composition of his novel.

If we are to compare the vampire of novels and films to reality at all, it must be to the original vision of vampires from European folklore, which I described in nauseous detail in part one of this series. So let us look at the vampire, meaning its appearance. How do the revenants of Central and Southeastern Europe, the vampir of Serbia, the Nachzehrer of Germany, the vrykolakas of Greece, compare with the bloodsuckers of modern horror fiction. As I joked about at the end of Part One, by simple appearance, they are very unlike one another. The modern vampire is thin, and pale, but according to folklore, “real” vampires are bloated, supposedly with the blood of their victims but actually with putrefying gasses, and rather than pale, it was a darkening of the skin, or more accurately, a reddening of the skin that typically indicated to real vampire hunters when a corpse had become undead. It is clear enough how this change came about. Pallor is closely associated with death; when one imagines a dead man, one thinks of the color leaving their cheeks, so that was obvious enough. As for the trim physique, from the very moment the folklore entered the realm of fiction, in John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the creature had been reimagined as an attractive figure who might walk among us unnoticed. Stoker’s Count was simply walking in the footsteps of Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, himself a caricature of Byron. The vampire never really had a chance to be its true, shambling, distended self, though I think that might have been even more horrifying. The image of the vampire evolved further from the dashing debonair in the 1920s, with the silent film Nosferatu, in which the vampire was depicted more ratlike, or perhaps batlike, and some scholars have suggested this representation was an anti-Semitic trope, presenting the vampire as the feared foreign-born Jew who was seen as an invader of white society, leeching off of and tainting its populace. So the racist meaning behind vampire fiction can again be clearly seen. By the time of Nosferatu, the teeth of the vampire had become a prominent feature, but where did they come from? It is possible that the notion of fangs derived from the receding of gums from the teeth in corpses, just as the receding of skin made it appear that hair and nails were growing, but there is not clear mention of fangs in any folkloric accounts. Indeed, when blood drinking is mentioned at all in the folklore, the vampire is said to have drunk from the trunk of his victim or some other place on the body, not the neck. Polidori’s story makes early mention of teeth marks left by the vampire on the neck, but not of fangs. It seems that this little detail was invented by Bram Stoker, and it certainly sunk in, if you will. There is some evidence, however, which I will expand on momentarily, that Stoker was greatly influenced by the folklore writing of Sabine Baring-Gould, a priest from Exeter, curiously enough, whose description of werewolf folklore was well known at the time, and which I made heavy use of myself in my own series on werewolves. So it would seem that the fangs of the vampire were borrowed from the werewolf.

Also like the werewolf, and likely borrowed from Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves, are the vampire’s shapeshifting abilities in the novel Dracula, as the Count is depicted as transforming himself not only into a bat, as is commonly thought of when one thinks of vampiric transformations, but also into a large dog and a wolf. In fact, though this is pretty accurate to the folklore of revenants as well. “Real” vampires, or revenants, which were not always actually believed to physically leave their graves, appeared on their nightly perambulations as their old self but also were said to appear as dogs and as wolves, but also as cats, goats, horses, donkeys, frogs, chickens, owls, mice, and even butterflies. Strangely, bats are one of the rare animals not named as a form taken by the vampire. This wide variety of forms should cause one pause. If in many cases the dead person who was rumored to have returned from the grave to trouble the living was said to take so many different forms, then it casts even more doubt on eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen revenants. If one believed that a disease was being caused by a revenant, and one was on the lookout for a revenant, especially one that others in town had been claiming they had seen, one might see that revenant in every innocent creature that crossed their path. Or, they might not have seen anything at all, for it was even said that revenants might be invisible. Perhaps this is the folkloric origin of Dracula’s ability to travel by moonbeam or appear as a mist. In reality, though, we must consider that this means any tragedy or hardship or annoyance might have been blamed on a revenant, whether accusers really believed they had seen them or not. If an animal was within view, that was the tricky vampire, and if no animal was around to blame it on, one could just say that the revenant must have been invisible. According to the folklore, only twins who were born on a Saturday and had reversed their clothing could see an invisible revenant, so obviously that would make it hard to spot them. In this way, the vampire was quite similar not only to the werewolf, but also to the witch, who it was thought could appear as an animal and could even make herself invisible through her use of the Devil’s salve. And the similarities do not end there. As we know, witches were women, often outsiders, accused of dealing with the Devil, and so too were werewolves believed to have made deals with Satan. Well, as it turns out, vampires also were often said to have been reanimated through a diabolical power. Indeed, sharing the same pool of potential suspects with witches and werewolves, it was often outsiders or criminals or people believed to be practitioners of sorcery who were expected to turn into revenants after death.

Sabine Baring-Gould, the priest whose folklore writings about werewolves appear to have greatly inspired the novel Dracula.

In fiction, there is some disagreement about how one becomes a vampire. According to Stoker, one only has to be the victim of a vampire to become one, and this reflects some folkloric traditions well, when it was feared that any who died of the disease being blamed on a revenant would themselves become revenants. However, the strange customs behind the vampire myth do not always agree. In later fiction, it is said that a vampire must make a victim must drink the vampire’s blood to become a vampire, but in the original folklore, the vampire’s blood was something of a cure for vampirism. Just as we saw in the story of Mercy Brown with the ashes of the supposed revenant, the blood from the alleged vampire, as well as soil from its grave were often used to cure a victim or to ward off further attacks. And in many cultures and traditions, one did not need to be attacked at all to become a vampire. As previously stated, just as it was common for anyone considered an outsider or who was not well-liked to be accused of witchcraft, the same might easily be claimed to have been reanimated by the devil after their death. Take, for example, the vrykolakas of Mykonos discussed in Part One. De Tournefort specifically mentioned that he was unliked. Another category of person thought likely to turn revenant upon their passing was a person thought to have committed suicide, such as the shoemaker of Breslau. This supposed predisposition toward vampirism meant that there was probably always a handy scapegoat when a disease began to trouble a village, for any person who had killed themselves or who was suspected of sorcery or even who was not well-liked could be the culprit. Consider this list of the types of people most likely to be accused of becoming revenants, compiled by Dagmar Burkhart, expert on Slavic folklore: “the godless…evildoers, suicides, in addition sorcerors, witches, and werewolves; …robbers, highwaymen, arsonists, prostitutes, deceitful and treacherous barmaids and other dishonorable people.” Indeed, it appears that alcoholics were often prime candidates, and they, like suicides, were sometimes exhumed and dealt with as revenants before anyone had reported their supposed return from the grave. The act of suicide itself was not always believed to have opened the deceased to the influence of the Devil, though. Rather, it was the fact that they had died before their time. We see this also among those taken suddenly by some disease or in some other way suffering an untimely demise. In Psalm 90, it is stated, “Our days may come to seventy years,/ or eighty, if our strength endures,” and this line of scripture led some to interpret that God had appointed at least that number of years to all of us. Therefore, if one is taken early, by accident, or disease, or by their own hand, or even by the hand of another, they may rise from the grave a revenant. Murder victims and those who meet untimely ends in the wilderness especially are at risk of vampirism because if their remains are left undiscovered, they do not have the benefit of a proper burial. But none of this may matter, according to some traditions. One may be well-liked, and god-fearing, and live out all their appointed days on earth, but if they were born a certain way, they may be damned from the start to become a vampire. Babies born with teeth, it was said would become a revenant, or those born with a red caul, or with a split lip, or a supernumerary nipple or vestigial tail or red birthmark. Again, the folklore of the vampire is reminiscent of that of the witch, who was said to have been marked by the Devil with some of the very same bodily signs.

One prominent feature of the fictional vampire is its sexual magnetism. From Lord Ruthven to Count Dracula to Anne Rice’s Lestat, vampires are depicted as darkly alluring or even rapacious. They enter the bed chambers of their victims and take them in an intimate embrace, pressing a their red mouths to their victim’s necks, and exchanging fluids. Whether one sees this as a metaphor for sex, or in a more horrifying sense, as a representation of violation, the subtext is there. Surprisingly, this too can be viewed as deriving from some aspects of vampire folklore. For example, the revenant was thought to be a sexual creature. This may be the result of the so-called “wild signs” observed in corpses exhumed on suspicion of being vampires, which is believed to be a euphemism for an erection. Such anatomical reactions are an apparent common thing in decomposing bodies, as a result of the bloating that I spoke about in great uncomfortable detail in Part One. These signs of what must have seemed to be arousal likely then led to further claims about the sexual activity of revenants. It has been claimed, for example, that the revenant was apt to visit his widow and wear her out with his lovemaking. Beyond these reports, though, many were the claims that the revenant entered the bedchambers of his victims and lay down on top of them. This was not necessarily said to be a sexual act, however, or a rape, but rather a physical assault in the sense that the revenant was trying to smother them. But, if we really think about these incidents, we come away with an entirely different explanation. If a person today were to describe seeing a shadowy figure enter their room, and said they were unable to do anything as this figure got on top of them and pressed down, smothering them, we might more likely attribute this to not only a nightmare but the terrifyingly real phenomenon of sleep paralysis with hypnopompic hallucination. Those who suffer from this well-known sleep disorder feel that they cannot move while in a state between sleeping and waking, and the hallucinations that accompany this sensation are often terrifying, involving shadowy figures and creatures entering their room, sitting on their thorax, creating the feeling of pressure there, and sometimes carrying out some sexual act on them. This has been called “the incubus phenomenon,” relating to folkloric demons like the incubus and succubus that were said to seduce and have intercourse with sleeping men and women. Statistical analysis has shown that this incubus phenomenon may be experienced by as much as 11% of the general population, and up to 41% of those who experience sleep paralysis. Rather than a demonic figure, this creature that sits atop a sleeping person is viewed as an old hag in many traditions, also called the Night Hag, and is more of a witch-like figure. In fact, this hallucinated entity is actually where we get our word for nightmare. A mare in Scandinavian folklore was a damned woman who visits villagers in their sleep to sit on their chests and bring them terrifying dreams. Clearly this known sleep disorder serves as a sound rational explanation for many reports of nightmarish revenant visitations.

The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781), a classic depiction of sleep paralysis and the incubus phenomenon.

All that remains to consider when it comes to the vampire myth are the odds and ends, things like the origin of driving a wooden stake through their hearts, their lack of reflection in a mirror, their aversion to silver and garlic, and their reaction to crosses and to sunlight. The staking of a vampire is clear enough; we have observed that because of the folklore of the revenant, many original vampire hunters drove stakes of wood through supposed vampires. The truth of the matter, however, is that this may have originated not as a means of destroying the vampire. For that, beheading and burning served their purposes far better. The stake, it seems, was actually a means of keeping them immobile, driving the stake through their bodies and into the earth beneath so that they could no longer rise to trouble the living. Among the Finns, for example, the staking of a vampire was only to pin it in place. Other folklore indicates that the stake may have been a kind of apotropaic, or charm to ward off the vampire, as it was believed that revenants could be driven away by the mere presence of sharp things generally, not only stakes, but even thorns and knives, which were placed under pillows to ward off vampires. This may have been the origin of the belief that silver could kill a vampire, since the knives kept under mattresses and pillows were often silver. The folklore says little about the effect of crosses on vampires, though we may presume that this Christian element of the myth was incorporated later, with the spread of Christianity, in conjunction with the notion that the Devil was responsible for raising the revenant. Indeed, early accounts indicate the opposite effect of crosses, though. My principal source, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber, describes an incident in which a sword is driven into a suspected vampire, and then it is worried that, because the cross guard of the sword made a cross shape, it would prevent the Devil from leaving the corpse. Garlic, though, it seems, was indeed a recognized apotropaic against vampires, for the sole reason that it was stinky, and it was believed that revenants would be repelled by the stink. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that it was claimed the revenant did not stink as it should have, but the fact is that garlic was not unique. Any stinky thing was thought to repel the vampire, and villagers were known to spread feces on cloth as revenant repellant. As for the absence of a vampire’s reflection, there is speculation that this relates to the notion that vampires had no soul, and mirrors were thought to show or capture the soul. In fact, according to some folklore, it was actually believed that vampires had two souls, and even two hearts, thereby allowing them to survive death. It was thought that vampires talked to themselves because of their dual souls, and I would imagine this led to numerous mentally ill persons being posthumously accused of vampirism. Others have thought that the vampire’s issue with mirrors is that most used to be backed with silver, but the truth of the matter is that the element of vampire lore having to do with mirror images never appeared until Bram Stoker invented it. Likewise, the vampire’s inflammable reaction to sunlight is nowhere to be found in the folklore or early vampire fiction and appears to have been invented in 1922 by F. W. Murnau in his Dracula ripoff, Nosferatu.

There is an explanation given from ancient mythology for many of the elements I just spoke about, however. They originate in the Scriptures of Delphi, the so-called “Vampire Bible.” Said to be passed down from the word of the Oracles at Delphi themselves, it tells the story of Ambrogio in ancient Greece, who was cursed by Apollo, the sun god, to have his skin burned by sunlight, and who thereafter lost his soul to Hades, god of the underworld. The goddess of the moon and the hunt, Artemis, further cursed Ambrogio to be burned at the touch of silver, and grants him immortality but only if he drinks blood to sustain himself. If such a Greek myth were real, it would indeed appear to be the origin of the vampire story. The problem is, the earliest mention of the “Scriptures of Delphi” and the story of Ambrogio that I can find is 2015, and though some vampire enthusiasts claim it was unearthed by archaeologists in Delphi, I’ve seen no evidence of this. It appears to me that this is likely a modern hoax. Thus vampire mythmaking continues today. And fiction writers are not alone in expanding the vampire mythos. Well-meaning scientists and medical professionals too have added misinformation to our understanding of the subject. In 1851, British anatomist Herbert Mayo hypothesized that revenants were merely people in a coma or suffering from catalepsy who had been buried alive and who woke up only when dug up and impaled. This doesn’t account for all the reports of revenants who had no reaction at all when cut open or staked or those who had been in the grave for months and clearly would have been dead regardless of whether they’d been alive when interred. It would also require us to believe that some villages had a habit of burying a great many people alive. Also clearly false is the more recent hypothesis that vampires were actually people suffering from porphyria. This blood disorder, which has also been tried as an explanation of werewolves because of excessive hair growth being one side effect, is raised as an explanation mainly because of the porphyria victim’s sensitivity to sunlight, an aspect of vampires that we know was invented for cinema. However, other aspects lend themselves to this explanation, such as a supposed aversion to garlic because of its sulfur content, which could worsen their condition, and the receding of gums supposedly making fangs (though as we’ve seen, fangs were also never part of vampire folklore). Proponents of this theory claim that the lack of a reflection in mirrors, which we have seen did not originate from folklore, really refers to a porphyria sufferer avoiding mirrors because of how the disorder ravages their faces. And they even go so far as to claim that since the urine of a porphyria sufferer is red, it would have been presumed that they had been drinking blood (which is rather absurd considering blood in the urine is common of many ailments and not some strange condition that would encourage such speculation). The further claim that, since blood infusions would later be used as a treatment, perhaps porphyria sufferers used to try to treat the disorder by drinking blood, is also completely unsupported conjecture. The fact is that as a theory it seems believable, but since the symptoms it attempts to account for were largely fictional, it makes no sense, and furthermore, it makes no effort to account for the fact that those who were accused of vampirism were already dead and buried, and there is not always mention of them having been diseased in life or drinking blood when they supposedly rose from the grave. SO at the end of our examination of vampires, what it boils down to is a superstition, borne from a lack of understanding of disease and death, which has since been embellished by fiction writers and earnest men of science into a wide-ranging legend of an abominable and fiendish monster…who wants to suck your blood!!

Until next time, remember, if there is anything that my Halloween series have shown--from “The Specter of Devil Worship,” to the “Shadow of the Werewolf,” to “A Rediscovery of Witches,” to “The Demoniacs” and “The Revenants”—it’s that monsters, as such, may not be real, but those who claim to hunt, cast out, prosecute, and destroy them certainly have proven themselves monstrous. 

Further Reading

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. Yale University Press, 1988. 

Molendijk, Marc L et al. “Prevalence Rates of the Incubus Phenomenon: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Frontiers in psychiatry vol. 8 253. 24 Nov. 2017, doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2017.00253

Stoker, Dacre, and J.D. Barker. “Bram Stoker Claimed That Parts of Dracula Were Real. Here's What We Know About the Story Behind the Novel.” TIME, 3 Oct. 2018, time.com/5411826/bram-stoker-dracula-history/.

The Revenants - Part One: VAMPIRES in Reality

It was a dark and stormy night when in late spring of 1816 the travelers arrived in Geneva, but more than that, it was a dark and stormy season all around, for that was the “Year Without a Summer,” when the volcanic ash clouds spewed out by Indonesian volcano Mount Tamboro resulted in darkness and unseasonable rainfall. The poet Percy Shelley, his lover and the mother of his son, Mary Godwin, their boy William, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont were in the midst of a tour of France and Switzerland that May, having just traveled through an unseasonably bleak and wintry country to reach Lake Geneva, where they stayed in a small chalet. During a particularly dark and stormy time of their stay, they abandoned their lodgings to stay in the far more lavish Villa Diodati that had been leased by Percy’s poet friend, the famous playboy, Lord Byron. Sexual tension abounded in the Villa during their stay, as Claire Clairmont, whom Lord Byron had previously taken as a lover, sought once again to draw the poet’s attentions, and Byron’s personal physician and companion, John Polidori, tried to draw the eye of Mary Godwin, but she remained devoted to the father of her child, whom she soon would wed, becoming Mary Shelley, though she already referred to herself as Mrs. Shelley. With some among them frustrated in their romantic interests, and all of them frustrated in their recreations, unable to go sailing on the lake because of the foul weather, they stayed indoors, read German ghost stories, and with thunder rumbling and lightning flashing outside, they spoke about the life-giving power of electricity, the then-popular notion of galvanism. This spooky atmosphere eventually led to a friendly contest among the writers, to compose the most frightening story. Lord Byron struggled, starting a story about a man who promised to return from the grave to visit his friend, but in the end abandoning it and working instead on his poem, The Darkness, which reads, in part, “I had a dream, which was not all a dream. / The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.” Meanwhile, Mary Shelley too was troubled by a dark dream or nightmare, inspired by all their talk of galvanism. The result was her masterpiece, Frankenstein, the story of a monster raised from the dead. Her tale easily won the day, and today remains a classic of gothic horror literature. But it is Byron’s fragment of a story, which would later be taken up by his physician, John Polidori, and completed as a story called The Vampyre, which would eventually inspire an entire genre of horror storytelling and reinvent an ancient legend as a modern nightmare. Both were stories of things that came back from the dead, but Byron’s fragment was more clearly a representation of the old European notion of a revenant, a person that becomes resurrected and calls on people he knew in life. Polidori used the old Slavic word for a revenant, vampir, but the similarity ends there. In his story, the vampire is a nocturnal aristocrat named Lord Ruthven who preys on women. Clearly, Polidori rewrote the story as a parody of his friend, Lord Byron, but in the process, he single-handedly invented the vampire archetype, a well-dressed and mysterious gentleman with a dark, sexual charisma. In ensuing years, after his story was adapted into plays and an opera, his version of the vampire stood as the model for many imitators, and it reached an even wider audience later that century when a penny dreadful rip-off called Varney the Vampire serialized a similar tale on the cheap for a far broader readership. But today we easily forget that the basis of this fictional trope is a creature from European folklore that many cultures believed was utterly real.

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I often try to create some throughline in episode topics. For example, I had a solid run this summer, from my episode about the Tartaria urban myth to my series on giants, and my examination of the Book of Enoch, and my study of the Flood myth and Noah’s Ark. Often there is no clear transition between my topics, though, like from JFK’s assassination to Tartaria, or from Noah’s Ark to gun violence, or gun violence to MK-Ultra, or Montauk to demagogues. However, if I were to attempt some tenuous connection here, I suppose that demagogues could be seen as a kind of vampire on a democratic society. Vampires are commonly used as metaphors or symbols, signifying greed and misuse. In fact, Merriam-Webster lists these metaphorical uses of the term as valid definitions, including “one who lives by preying on others” as one meaning, and even the disarmingly misogynist definition that a vampire might refer to “a woman who exploits and ruins her lover.” To suggest that the vampire is only present today in fiction or metaphor, however, disregards the continued belief among some that vampires are real. Such modern belief can be traced back to Christian apologism, or more specifically, the work of Montague Summers, the colorful clergyman and popular writer who styled himself as a kind of modern witch-hunter and demonologist in the early 20th century. I have spoken at some length about Montague Summers in my 2-part series Shadow of the Werewolf, as well as in my 2-part series A Rediscovery of Witches, both of which, if you haven’t listened, would make for a great podcast binge this Halloween season. Suffice to say that Montague Summer, who was undeniably erudite and whose work cannot be faulted for lack of scholarship, differentiated himself from any contemporary academic writers on the occult with his apparent absolute belief in his subject matter. He argued that witches really had made pacts with the devil, and that werewolves were real, having also made pacts with the devil. He made similar arguments that vampirism was and remained a real phenomenon. His claim can be clearly discerned in his second volume on the subject, The Vampire in Europe, when he writes of “the fundamental truth, which, however exaggerated in expression and communication, essentially informs the vampire-tradition.” Likewise, he states in no uncertain terms, “That a large number of cases of vampirism must be accounted certain only the most prejudiced will deny. Even in many other relations which cannot be pressed in detail it seems beyond doubt that the main facts are true.” Nor is this an obsolete view that cannot be entertained even by the bright light of modern science, as there exist today various subcultures that believe in vampirism, members of which even consume blood and believe it sustains them. So, in examining the folkloric origins of the vampire, we are not only examining the source material for a literary invention. Rather ridiculously, it seems we are obliged to refute the notion that vampires, as such, ever really existed.

Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where one dark and stormy night, much of modern horror was born.

First, we will examine some of the most widely cited reports of supposed real vampirism, looking at the primary source material to determine the real basis for the legend. One of the earliest firm accounts of such a revenant is preserved in a book of Prussian folklore. In this report, we are told of an affluent shoemaker of Breslau, in what was then Silesia, who committed suicide in 1591, cutting his own throat with a knife. The remains of people who had committed suicide were traditionally buried using alternative funerary rites and were not buried in the churchyard. It was, therefore, not uncommon for the bereaved loved ones to hide the true cause of death. Such was the case of the Silesian shoemaker, whose widow claimed he had died from a stroke and went to great lengths to hide the truth of the matter, not accepting visitors to view the corpse, and having it wrapped tightly so that its wound would not be perceived. Her efforts paid off, and the shoemaker was buried with traditional ceremony. However, rumors soon surfaced about his suicide and became such a scandalous gossip that the town council confronted the widow, who continually changed her story, saying first that he had actually fallen on a rock, then that he had fallen on his own awl and she had thrown it away to prevent others from injuring themselves. However, her neighbors continued to distrust her because they said they had begun to receive visits by the shoemaker. In the tradition of the revenant, the dead man was seen walking the city and visiting people he knew after his death. The text does not call him a revenant, or a vampire, or even a Nachzehrer, a northern German word for the same sort of creature, but rather a Gespenst, or ghost. As is common in revenant folklore, the shoemaker frightened those it visited, waking some up from slumber and in some cases entering their houses and assaulting them in their beds. People left their homes and spent the night in the company of others, keeping their lanterns burning the whole night through, but still they reported seeing the shoemaker making his nightly visit to oppress them. The troubles were so great, that the council determined to open the shoemaker’s grave and see for themselves that he truly was dead. What they found was a great swollen corpse, but they found him complete and undamaged by decay, and the fact that he was not stiff as they expected him to be caused them to believe that his was no normal corpse. Moreover, his skin had peeled away, revealing fresh skin beneath, and it was said not to stink as other corpses stank. They set a guard on the corpse and allowed the townspeople to come and view it for themselves, but regardless, the revenant continued to visit and trouble the people. Finally, the shoemaker’s widow admitted that he had killed himself and urged the council to end the troubles by killing him a second time. In order to utterly destroy the revenant, they cut off his head, hands and feet, removed his heart, and cremated the remains.

Of course we see the bare bones of a vampire story here: a creature that has risen from the dead to attack the living who is finally dealt with by attacking his heart, beheading him, and setting him on fire. As we look closely at the story, however, we see already how different the traditional stories of revenants are from the later vampire tradition. First and foremost, there is no drinking of blood. Instead there is only some noisy bothering of neighbors and perhaps some mild throttling. This is essentially a ghost story, complete with unfinished business. It is not the body itself which rises from the grave to vex his neighbors; the grave appears to have been undisturbed and the visits continued even when the body was watched. Rather, the story seems to indicate that the spirit of the shoemaker set about bothering and even physically attacking people until the truth about his death came out. As we shall see later, there is ample reason to doubt the reports of the revenant’s victims, as many may have imagined the visits, encouraged by the mass panic, or made false reports in an effort to further encourage the widow to come clean about the rumored true nature of the shoemaker’s death, or someone may even have been disguising himself as the shoemaker and going around bothering the people for any number of reasons. But the story of the shoemaker from Breslau does clearly introduce some elements of European folklore surrounding revenants: that when they are exhumed, they appear not to have properly decomposed. Indeed, it is claimed that the corpse of the shoemaker does not even smell bad, although, it should be noted that immediately after stating that there was no stench, the text concedes that “the cloths in which he was wrapped had a repulsive smell.” It seems unrealistic to believe that those who dug up the shoemaker, upon smelling a repulsive stench, then went about sniffing things more closely to determine whether it was the cloth or the corpse itself that stank. So the reliability of the report is called into question. Likewise, we read that the body was “undamaged by decay” but in the same breath it’s stated that it was “blown up like a drum,” as if those who examined it did not recognize swelling as a part of the decomposition process. Thus we must consider that they may not have been the best judges of whether or not the corpse should have been stiff at this stage in its decomposition, or whether the fresh skin they saw beneath the peeling skin was or was not an aspect of normal decay. To these strange features of the revenant in his grave we will add a few more before essaying to provide some rational explanation other than that they represent signs of the undead.

A depiction of a revenant visitation

The next historical account of a supposedly real revenant, and one who can more accurately be called a vampire since he was Serbian, and that is the Serbian word for the phenomenon, comes to us from the 18th century, when Serbia and Walachia were occupied by Austria, and it was noticed that the locals had the strange practice of digging up corpses to “kill” them. In a village called Kisilova, after a man named Peter Plogojowitz died and had been buried, nine different people took ill and died swiftly, after only a day of symptoms. These people, as they lay dying, supposedly claimed that Plogojowitz had visited them in their sleep and attacked them. The villagers knew just what this meant—they had a vampire on their hands. So they opened Plogojowitz’s grave, in which they noticed that his hair and beard and even his fingernails had continued to grow after death, that his dead skin had peeled away to show healthy looking skin beneath, that his body did not stink, and that it was entirely intact after more than three months. More than this, fresh blood could be seen on his mouth, which the villagers believed he had sucked from his victims. To destroy the fiend, they drove a sharp wooden stake through his heart, whereupon great quantities of fresh blood erupted from the wound as well as from his eyes and mouth. Afterward, they burned his remains. This report adds features of the revenant in his grave that we will address in due course: the fresh blood seen in his mouth and flowing after being staked and the growth of hair and nails. Notable is the mention of blood sucking, and the staking of the heart. Here we find the vampire tale more complete but still not fully formed. Some vampire tales make claims about a disturbance of the grave, but more often, as in this tale, there is no indication that the corpse has left the grave or even that the villagers believe he had physically done so and then somehow reburied himself. Rather, again, it appears the revenant is seen as a kind of spirit, whose nocturnal attacks seem to create some effect on the corpse lying still undisturbed back in its grave. It is interesting that the report indicates the corpse is perfectly intact and “fresh,” yet admits an exception, saying, “except for the nose, which was somewhat fallen away.” Once again the reliability of the report is questionable based on its own claims and logic. But perhaps most interesting here is the indication that the vampire is being blamed for an illness that is spreading through the village. Vampirism in folklore and fiction has since been portrayed as a kind of plague in its own right. It spreads like a disease when one vampire turns two victims into vampires, who in short order then each turn victims of their own, and so on. We don’t see vampirism spreading like an infection here, but it does appear to be a vector of some other infection in this tale, as we see his victims dying after a brief illness. But these sick villagers only essentially said that they had had nightmares about Plogojowitz. Again, if they even really made these claims, this could very well have been the result of some rumors that Plogojowitz had turned into a vampire. One wonders how many others who weren’t sick might have had similar nightmares with such rumors going around. Viewing the scenario in this more rationalist light, it becomes a case of scapegoating. We know nothing about Plogojowitz’s character in life or how he was viewed by villagers, but for whatever reason, when three months after his death a disease began spreading among the villagers, some chose to explain the mysterious illness by blaming it on the dead man, and the claim took on a life of its own, as it were. Who knows how many cases of vampires can be similarly explained as an attempt to find some comforting explanation for a frightening danger. The village of Kisilova knew of nothing they could do to defeat this communicable disease, but they knew just what to do about a vampire.

The explanation that vampirism was simply a way to cast blame for a plague when there was no one really to blame does much to explain every instance when a village chose to dig up and desecrate a corpse in this way. It was an established belief, which would of course encourage further claims of visitation by a recently deceased revenant whenever an illness was sweeping through a village. According to the account of the vampire Peter Plogojowitz, the people of Kisilova had heard of entire villages being wiped out by such a vampire. Of course, by this explanation, they were actually wiped out by diseases they did not understand, which they only explained by claiming a vampire was attacking them. As the notion that vampires cause disease transformed into the notion that vampirism spread like a disease, the act of digging up and destroying corpses itself sometimes became epidemic. According to a report published in Nuremberg in 1732, it sometimes resulted in villagers digging up entire cemeteries in the belief that they were full of vampires. In the village of Medvegia, a belief that vampires were visiting people and sucking their blood had arisen. The villagers claimed that their troubles could all be traced back to a soldier named Arnod Paole, who had died falling off a haywagon. While still alive, Paole had told people that a vampire used to attack him. He claimed to have finally rid himself of the vampire by eating soil from its grave and smearing its blood on himself. When Paole died, there were further claims that he had turned into a vampire and begun to bother villagers, and that he had even posthumously killed four people. One assumes they probably died from some illness, but regardless, the village dug him up, claimed he was not decayed, and that fresh blood flowed from him and that new skin and fingernails had grown on him. As was their custom with vampires, they staked him, whereupon he groaned and bled profusely, and thereafter they burned his remains. However, in Medvegia we see that whatever plague had been troubling them did not fade, so they needed further scapegoats and therefore claimed that all of Paole’s victims must likewise have been transformed into vampires. Thus they began digging up every corpse that had supposedly been killed by a vampire, which had probably actually expired from some disease, and each of these they decided had also not properly decomposed and showed the signs of vampirism, perhaps because they seem to have exhumed them in the winter, when cold weather slowed their decay. And when they ran out of dead people to blame for the disease and the disease continued to rage, they claimed that vampires had attacked their cattle too, and therefore anyone who had eaten of their meat must also have been transformed into a vampire upon dying. And when they dug these up—these people who hadn’t claimed to have been troubled by vampires but had likely died from the same illness nonetheless—they found that they too showed the signs of vampirism. It makes you wonder how many corpses they would have to observe before they started to suspect that the features they were so certain indicated vampirism might actually have been typical of a corpse in certain stages of decomposition.

An image depicting the rising of the dead from their graves.

Perhaps the best and most revealing report on such peasant superstitions comes to us from a French botanist named Pitton de Tournefort in early 18th century Mykonos, where the Greeks called such revenants vrykolakas. De Tournefort viewed the peasant superstitions more critically, and his skeptical account offers a rarer look at what was actually going on. He described a certain man on Mykonos who was unliked because of his quarrelsome nature, who had been murdered, with the culprit never having been discovered. Afterward, he was said to have been seen walking the island at night, or even entering homes and playing pranks like snuffing out lanterns, overturning furniture, or seizing people from behind and scaring them half to death. After ten days of this, they said a mass, exhumed his corpse, and cut out his heart. De Tournefort observed the practice, remarking on how inexpertly the butcher who completed the task performed it. Rather than observing a lack of stench, de Tournefort describes how the men who examined the corpse burned incense to cover the smell, which causes one to wonder whether that might be the case in other reported instances as well, but that the practice went unrecorded. Nevertheless, de Tournefort asserted that it did not decrease the stench at all, but rather magnified it. In fact, de Tournefort states that he suspects the men would have claimed the body did not stink at all if he had not been present to contradict their claims, giving the sense that a skeptic’s presence was all that prevented them from exaggerating their claims such that they would better match those of other accounts. Instead, some of the men began to cry out that smoke was coming from the body of the supposed vampire after it had been opened, proving it was a vrykolakas, though the botanist was certain that the smoke was obviously just from the incense. Likewise, he described the crowd of people proclaiming that the corpse was not stiff and that its blood was still red and warm, although de Tournefort seemed to express skepticism on the matter. He suggested that some warmth was to be expected when “rummaging about in entrails, which were putrefying,” and he further states, “as for the pretended red blood, …this was nothing but a stinking mess.” After the people thought they had rid themselves of this supposed vampire, the pranks continued, such that townsfolk left their homes and congregated together at night, finding their houses further ransacked and rummaged through upon their return. The believers argued over the proper way to dispense with the vrykolakas, suggesting they should have said mass after cutting out the heart rather than before, etc. Meanwhile de Tournefort had a different idea, suggesting that a number of vagabonds had run wild in the town, vandalizing homes and eating and drinking their fill at night when the villagers left their houses vacant and unguarded. Here we see a further explanation, other than scapegoating for a disease. We see that the supposed vrykolakas or vampire was hated for his behavior and character, and even killed for it. So perhaps others, like Peter Plogojowitz, were likewise disliked, making them a more likely target of blame when a disease came around, or in this case, on Mykonos, a crime wave. In the dark of night, as unknown figures are seen striding outside the home, or when some brute bursts into your house and knocks over your lamp, making it impossible to properly identify him, and goes on to break your things and assault you, who can you blame? Well if the folklore of revenants is common in your culture, you may be more likely to blame the ghost, or the corpse, of that one guy who was always such a dick.

So we have some notion of why a village might decide that a certain dead person was responsible for their woes, and we understand how social contagions work, that such claims might only grow with each retelling, becoming a mass delusion. But what of the claims about the vampire’s body not rotting as is to be expected. We might presume that the claims of there being no smell are exaggerated, but what of the consistent claims that the bodies are still fresh, with new growth of skin, hair, and nails, fresh, uncoagulated blood, with no stiffness as we might expect from rigor mortis, and even that they groan, or sometimes even cry out, when pierced by a stake? First it must be pointed out that, while accounts of vampire killing often claim that there are no signs of decomposition, they almost always belie an ignorance of what decomposition looks like. The falling away of the nose is a clear sign of decomposition, or the bloating that is described in almost every report. Vampire killers often believed the revenant was bloated because it had been drinking blood, but the bloating of corpses is common, due to the release of methane during putrefaction. The lack of stiffness was also a common sign of vampirism, but the fact is that rigor mortis is a temporary phenomenon. During the course of regular decomposition, the body again becomes flexible. Likewise, what they saw as the sloughing off of old skin and the growth of new skin is also a natural phenomenon, something called skin slippage, in which the outer layers of skin peel away, revealing not fresh skin beneath, but raw layers of the epidermis. What they saw as the hair and fingernails growing was actually the flesh having retracted from them, the beginning of a process of shedding the hair and nails. Much is made of the uncoagulated blood, but this too is common. Blood may coagulate but then liquify again, depending on the conditions of the body during decomposition, and the pressure of the gasses bloating the corpse commonly force the pooling blood past the larynx, explaining the supposedly fresh blood on the vampire’s lips. This liquid blood pools in the torso and especially in the heart, further explaining the copious bleeding when the vampire-killers stake revenants, and the very act of violently piercing the trunk of a corpse that has filled with gasses explains the sounds of groaning or even crying out that were frequently reported. Why would some bodies look different from others, though, as so many of these reports claim? The answer is simple. There are many factors that might hasten or retard decomposition, including moisture, temperature, microorganisms, and the presence of air or insects. Indeed, some bodies may actually be unusually preserved through accidental mummification and other processes. Some cultures in which vampires were believed to be common actually buried their dead in lime, which they believed hastened decay but could actually preserve the corpse. Another process is saponification, when fat is transformed into adipocere, causing a pinkish red discoloration in the muscles which may be mistaken for a robust complexion. But a better question is why European peasants would presume that such seemingly unnatural preservation of the dead was a sign of evil when otherwise, as in the preservation of saints, it would be viewed as a miracle of God denoting sanctity. Simply put, the fears these people faced were not fears of a fiendish monster. It was, instead, a quite natural fear of death, something they could not fully comprehend. For this reason, because of that deep-seated dreadful terror at the heart of vampire lore, I would argue that vampires remain the most horrifying of all monsters.

In Part Two we will further explore how this lore evolved into modern myth.

Further Reading

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. Yale University Press, 1988.

Buzwell, Greg. “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati.” British Library, 15 May 2014, www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/mary-shelley-frankenstein-and-the-villa-diodati.

Summers, Montague. The Vampire in Europe. Taylor & Francis, 2013.

The Enigmatic Kingfish, Huey Long

Huey Pierce Long was a controversial figure on the national stage during the Great Depression. The former governor of Louisiana turned senator made few alliances in Washington. In fact, he had even moved to oppose the New Deal plan of the very popular president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in 1935, he announced his candidacy for U.S. president, a campaign Democrats feared could divide support for Roosevelt, for while he was not popular among his congressional colleagues, he had grown more and more popular among the public, many of whom listened to him on the radio, where he expounded like a preacher on his Share Our Wealth program as an alternative to the New Deal, promising to make “Every Man a King.” And back in his home state, where he had done much to help the common man, he was truly revered by his constituency. “I’m a small fish here in Washington,” he was fond of saying, “But I’m the Kingfish to the folks down in Louisiana.” And it was not just the voting public he held sway over in Louisiana. He still dominated the political scene there. He had handpicked his gubernatorial successor, Oscar K. Allen, and the system of patronage he had established back when he had been governor remained in place, such that, even away in Washington, he could get state legislation passed or struck down seemingly as he pleased. In fact, he was in Baton Rouge on September 8th, 1935, just a month after declaring his candidacy for president, on just such state business. On that day, there was a special session of the state legislature. The business of the day was the ouster of an avowed political enemy of Long’s, Judge Benjamin Pavy. Long had arrived, accompanied by his armed guards, to personally see to it that certain bills would be passed that would allow the legislature to gerrymander Pavy’s district and ensure his political downfall. Huey Long stood tall and proud, secure on his home turf, as he walked between the marble pillars of the Louisiana capitol. Two times that evening, a man in a white suit, Carl Weiss, Judge Pavy’s son-in-law, tried to approach Long and engage him in some sort of conversation, but Long brushed him off. At 9:20pm, Weiss came at Long one more time, eliciting some angry retort from Long that appeared to trigger Weiss into assaulting him. The result was a shootout, as Long’s security, trying to prevent Long’s assassination by Weiss, gunned the judge’s son-in-law down. However, they were too late, for it appeared Weiss had already gotten a shot off. They rushed Huey Long to the nearest hospital, and surgeons immediately went to work trying to save his life. However, they could not stop the internal bleeding from his wound. For two days, Long clung to life, but in the end, he died. His final words were reported as “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.” When his passing was announced to the public, many mourned the death of a great reformer, feeling a loss of hope comparable to what the country would feel 30 years later after the murder of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. Meanwhile, many others sighed with relief to be rid of a dangerous demagogue, an authoritarian whom many believed to be a homegrown fascist akin to Hitler.

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In the previous post, when I revisited my first topic about Trump’s demagoguery, I suggested the current perils U.S. democracy faces are similar to those in the 1930s, and I specifically cited the demagoguery of Father Coughlin. But Huey Long is often mentioned in the very same breath as Father Coughlin. It would have been quite easy to lump him in among the threats to democracy of that period, but Long deserves further analysis, which in turn requires some further clear-eyed analysis of demagoguery. Some scholars reject the term altogether, suggesting it is too difficult to define and is a label too easily flung at those whom we oppose as a means of discrediting them. The word originally only meant “a leader of the people” in ancient Greece, but even so, it has always carried with it a negative connotation, indicative of manipulation or deception. Today, however, we might recognize the validity and even the importance of certain radical political agitation that may not have been condoned in the past. So where is the line between radical leader and dangerous demagogue? Perhaps the ultimate example of a dangerous demagogue is Adolph Hitler. The way Hitler cultivated his public image as a leader of the masses, his spellbinding oratory, his appeal to prejudices and his reliance on scapegoats are all perfect examples of the stereotypical demagogue. In fact, it has been argued that demagoguery is the definite first stage of a fascist movement. It is certainly important, even vital, to remember the rise of Hitler and be vigilant against the rise of another like him. However, comparisons to Hitler are not always the historical parallel we should use. First of all, you run the risk of offending Holocaust survivors with such analogies. Second, you may be too easily dismissed as alarmist or hyperbolic. Perhaps the better example to use when evaluating whether Huey Long was a demagogue would be the stereotype of the Southern demagogue. We can take as our exemplar “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, another Southern governor and senator. A leader of the Red Shirts whom I described in my episodes on the Wilmington Insurrection, Tillman engaged in wholesale race massacres during Reconstruction in his efforts to ensure continued white supremacy. Like others who fall into the Southern demagogue category, Tillman rose to power by whipping up the emotions and prejudices of voters. He exploited the hot-button issues, manipulating the discontent of a white, agrarian culture and blaming all of their woes on the black citizens that he painted as their enemies. The demagogue cultivates his image as a champion of the downtrodden, when often he has never been one himself, as was the case with Tillman, who came from a wealthy slave-owning family. The demagogue is charismatic in their speechmaking, but it is the emptiness of their rhetoric that is more important, since great oratory is not a fault. The demagogue is no resolver of social problems. Rather, he distracts from problems with his scapegoating, and more often than not, race-baiting, as the demagogue’s currency is prejudice and resentment. And finally, revealing that the demagogue cares more for his own elevation than serving those who raise him up, he is no keeper of promises, and he usually reveals himself to be corrupt, engaging in fraud, and betraying the principles of democracy to further his own empowerment. These attributes can be seen very clearly in Hitler, and quite clearly in “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and other Southern Demagogues. But the question of this episode is did the Kingfish meet these criteria?

Southern Demagogue “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman

Huey Long grew up in a district of Louisiana that thrived on populist politics, and he appears to have learned much about the whipping up of crowds from politicians in the so-called People’s Party, which appealed to farmers and rural laborers. Long always presented himself as being one of the working class, from a poor background, but in truth, he was from an affluent family, most of whom were Democrats, the party of Jim Crow segregation and black disenfranchisement until the party realignment that was underway during Long’s lifetime. Here we seem to be checking a box in favor of demagogue, as Long cultivated his image as one of the common man, when in fact members of his own family, upset by his later politics, publicly contradicted his tales of growing up poor. However, self-presentation is an artform practiced by all politicians, especially today with their teams of public relations experts and publicists and media messaging strategists. Adopting a rustic persona and reinventing oneself to appeal to the public is almost a requirement of the job. Yes, it’s disingenuous, but it’s also, maybe, a commonplace evil in a world where all politicians show up to disaster areas with their shirtsleeves rolled up as if they really intend to physically do anything beyond giving some prepared remarks. This alone we might dismiss as a matter of optics, a politician doing what politicians do. So let us search for further signs of demagoguery. He started his career as a lawyer, and even back then we can see his tendency to fight for the little guy, winning compensation for his clients from the enemy he would focus on throughout his political career: big corporations. His political career commenced with a position as Public Utilities Commissioner, in which role he again championed the less advantaged, supporting independent oil companies and taking on the behemoth Standard Oil. His critics will point out that he had a conflict of interest here, as he actually owned stock in the independent oil companies that he was helping. This assertion certainly paints Long as a corrupt and deceitful leader whose supposed principles only served his own ends. However, recent legal scholarship casts doubt on the long-held assumptions that Huey Long improperly profited from independent oil company profits. As it turns out, the stock shares in question, in the independent Win or Lose oil company, came into his possession years after he first began fighting for companies like them, even after he had left the governor’s office. And regardless, in his work for the Utilities commission, he not only fought for smaller companies, but also for the consumer, pushing for affordable rates. It may be difficult to argue that Huey Long was not corrupt, but to characterize all the genuinely beneficial reforms he pushed for as cynically self-serving is unfair.

During his governorship, Huey Long did undeniable good for the state of Louisiana. It is somewhat absurd to read his critics argue that he only exploited the poor and disadvantaged to achieve power, but then concede that he did actually keep his promises and enact reforms that benefitted them, but also claim that he only did so to hang on to his power. It’s a bit like arguing that a certain saint does not deserve to be sainted because they only did all that charity work and performed all those miracles in an effort to become a saint. It’s rather hard to discern the purity of one’s motives, since we judge by their actions. In office, Huey Long enacted so many reforms they became known as the Long Revolution, and the reforms would be considered progressive even by today’s standards. He pulled the state out of its Depression nosedive with broad infrastructure projects that vastly improved employment. Yes, some projects may have been vanity projects, like a new governor’s mansion and a new capitol, but they put laborers to work all the same, and most projects were not, including the construction of a new seawall and spillway to shield New Orleans from flooding, improvements to that city’s port and warehouses, a new airport, numerous bridges and railroads, and almost 4,000 miles of newly paved roads, a record at the time for a state in the Deep South. Beyond these projects, he built new health care facilities and fought for more sanitary and compassionate mental health facilities. In education, he allocated funding to improve school facilities and provide free textbooks, and as a result increased enrollment in public schools. He also established night schools and managed to significantly reduce adult illiteracy in Louisiana. Those who call him a demagogue argue that he only helped all these people in order to serve himself, but he actually did much to empower local government over big government, which would seemingly reduce his own power. If demagogues don’t keep their promises and are in the business of distracting from real world social issues by blaming scapegoats, Huey Long doesn’t fit the bill. He drew attention to real social ills and enacted concrete programs to alleviate them. The enemies he vilified were the extremely wealthy and large corporations, validly pointing out a concern that we must recognize has only gotten more concerning: that many of society’s ills derive from the distribution of wealth. It causes one to ponder, can it really be called scapegoating if you are accurately casting blame?

A Huey Long for Governor campaign flyer

While he won the enthusiastic support of Louisianians, especially poor and rural citizens, Long made many enemies as governor, and later, in Washington. Perhaps this accounts for the divisive nature of his legacy. The first time he ran, in 1924, he lost, but in 1928, through his innovative campaigning and captivating speeches, he succeeded with the slogan “Every Man a King but No One Wears a Crown.” Early in his tenure as governor, having made enemies of industrialists with his proposal of an oil tax, he was nearly removed from office under an impeachment resolution that listed accusations ranging from bribery through patronage and controlling the courts through his appointments, to carrying concealed weapons and suborning murder. The last was hearsay, a rumor that Long had suggested, while drunk, that someone kill a rival’s son and leave him in a ditch. The accusations resulted in an all-out brawl in the legislature, remembered as Bloody Monday. Long insisted the whole impeachment campaign was a conspiracy by Standard Oil to prevent his reforms, and in the end, after a battle of bribes and counter-bribes on both sides, Long was victorious. Afterward, he came to dominate state politics, such that one critic rewrote his slogan as “Every Man a King but Only One Wore the Crown.” His mechanism of influence was machine politics. He cultivated allies in the legislature through patronage. He would appoint legislators to positions in state agencies, providing them additional income, and then expect them to play ball when it came to passing laws for his reform programs, and as we saw on the day he was shot, he attended legislative sessions in person, ready to bowl over opponents of his agenda with his folksy and charming rhetoric, as well as his scathing personal attacks. His opponents he thereafter dealt with harshly, supporting those who ran against them in elections and even using his power to take petty revenge, like firing anyone in their family who happened to work for the state. It’s no wonder he was disliked by those who stood in his way, and absolutely his system of patronage was ethically dubious, but those who admire his reform programs, and especially those who benefitted from them, like the poor, tended to view him as playing the game the way it had to be played in order to keep his promises and make his changes. One argument is that he may have started out an idealist and only resorted to the corrupt means that his enemies employed because his ends justified them. Moving beyond his time as governor, though, after his election to the Senate, when he remained in firm control of Louisiana through his machine and the puppet governor he’d chosen to replace him, it may very well be that he succumbed to his ambitions, not wanting to give up his influence, and seeking greater power in Washington, whether because he lusted after it or because he really believed that only he would use it for the good of the country.

At first, Huey Long allied himself with Franklin D. Roosevelt and campaigned for him, but eventually he turned on the president, opposing his New Deal programs as not doing enough to resolve the hardships of the Depression. It has been claimed by his critics that Long only moved against Roosevelt because the president had blocked his further political ambitions, but again, this is a matter of presuming Long’s motivation. It is certainly true that he had his eye on the presidency. He even wrote an imaginative account of what his presidency would be like. He anticipated dividing Roosevelt’s support, resulting in a Republican presidency, after which Long believed he would be swept into office. His critics further claim that his alternative program, the Share Our Wealth Society, was little more than a ploy to get him into office by bribing the poor for their support. And it is true that his alternative program was rather light on details and perhaps overpromised what could be accomplished at the time, but looking at it in a modern light, Huey Long was advocating for many reforms that were ahead of his time. He spoke about the richest 2% owning far too much of the wealth, and he proposed capping wealth and redistributing it to the poverty-stricken. He wanted to enact a temporary moratorium on debt during the economic crisis, a policy that was recently enacted under the Trump administration and furthered under Biden to provide relief during the pandemic. But more than that, Long pushed for universal healthcare, free college education, and a universal basic income. All of these proposals are still advocated for by progressive reformers today. So perhaps Long’s program was not the transparent ploy that some historians have claimed. Certainly Roosevelt recognized the appeal of it, as he came to view Long as “one of the two most dangerous men in America,” the other being General Douglas MacArthur. To address this threat, Roosevelt sicced his IRS on Long, putting his finances under the microscope in an effort to bring him down, and played Long’s own patronage game against him, declaring, “Anybody working for Huey Long is not working for us.” Roosevelt recognized not only Long’s threat to his presidency and to his New Deal programs. Almost certainly, Roosevelt’s assessment of Long as a danger reflected the belief common among Long’s critics that he was a fascist. Indeed, many were the comparisons of Long to Hitler. One New Dealer called him “the Hitler of one of our sovereign states,” and one journalist suggested Long could possibly “Hitlerize America.” American Communists called him “Louisiana’s Hitler,” and described him as “the personification of the fascist menace in the United States.” Domestic sympathizers of fascism said he was “the nearest approach to a national fascist leader.” Even Huey’s own brother said he was “trying to be a Hitler,” and some historians and biographers have immortalized this view of him. But was it accurate?

Long delivering a speech with his signature awkward gesticulation, which was sometimes compared to Hitler’s oratorical style.

There are indeed undeniable parallels between the Kingfish and fascist dictators like the Führer and Il Duce. They all rose to power in the wake of the Great Depression, taking advantage of the public’s dissatisfaction with an ineffective government. They were all mesmerizing orators and master propagandists. Huey Long pretty much invented the modern campaign media blitz. He was the first to outfit a truck with speakers and have it driven through the streets to encourage people to attend his rallies, and he was the first politician to use radio for national addresses, a practice that both FDR and Hitler later took up. However, in several key regards, Longism does not match up with fascism. A key element of fascism was race hate and racial scapegoating, obviously with the anti-Semitism of Nazism but also the Italian fascist racism against Slavic ethnic groups. However, Huey Long, while known to make remarks that betrayed a typically Southern view on race, was said by one who knew him to have “far less racial prejudice in him than any other Southerner in the Senate.” In his reform programs, he helped the poor black community the same as the poor white, securing jobs for black workers, improving conditions for black students, and reducing illiteracy among black Louisianians from 38% to 23%. He even insisted that black citizens too must receive an equal share in his plan to redistribute wealth. “Black and white, they all gotta have a chance,” Long said. “They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children.” As for anti-Semitism, despite working with some rabid anti-Semites, like Gerald L. K. Smith, Long himself was not anti-Semitic, having close Jewish friends and allies, one of whom, Abe Shushan, he honored by naming the new airport in New Orleans after him. Beyond these differentiations, there is the fact that Long’s politics were simply too far left to be considered fascist. You’ll hear some ill-informed people claim that fascism and Nazism were leftist movements, for the simple reason that Nazism was short for National Socialism, but Hitler was never a leftist or socialist. He used the term to gather broad support, but he explicitly said that he was redefining the word. In 1923, he said, “I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.” Very quickly his party revealed itself as a far-right movement, and that is how fascism is always and has always been characterized, despite what some who fear the far left might claim today. Nazism and Italian fascism both rose in clear opposition to Communism. Now Huey Long presented himself and his Share the Wealth proposals as an alternative to Communism, but his proposals were certainly far too socialist to be considered fascist today, especially since, when he had power, he did not forget about the people to whom he had made promises, as Hitler did, but rather delivered reforms to improve their condition. And Long himself certainly resented the comparisons, responding, “Don’t liken me to that sonofabitch.”

While Huey Long was no fascist, the further argument is that he at least had authoritarian tendencies. And of course, while fascism is undoubtedly a phenomenon of the far right, leaders on the far left of the political spectrum may indeed be autocrats heading a totalitarian state. One need look no further than Stalinism for an example of this. Examining Huey Long for evidence of authoritarianism, we find definite cause for concern. Even T. Harry Williams, one of Long’s most admiring biographers, concedes that Long, while seeking the power to overcome his opposition so that he could do good, may have ended up grasping too much after power and doing inadvertent harm. In wielding his unprecedented influence over the state legislature, he betrayed some rather anti-democratic sentiments, such as when one lawmaker reminded him that Louisiana had a constitution they were bound to follow, and Long replied, “I’m the constitution around here now.” As a senator and presidential hopeful, when he was pushing for wealth redistribution and was asked how he might respond as president if the Supreme Court blocked his program, he said he would get Congress to pass a law that extended the Supreme Court bench to include all congressmen and would have the case considered again. While I acknowledge and even distrust and denounce the counter-majoritarian nature of the Supreme Court, especially today as an openly partisan and extreme right bench rolls back civil rights, what Long was proposing, effectively merging the judicial and legislative branches of government, was not just unrealistic but extremely dangerous. While these remarks and Long’s unprecedented influence over every aspect of the government in Louisiana may be indicative of some anti-democratic tendencies, when we hold up Louisiana under his auspices to scholarly criteria for a totalitarian regime, we find that it doesn’t quite fit. A totalitarian system is characterized not only by a leader who holds extraordinary power as Long held. It is further characterized by the existence of only a single party and an official ideology, which just wasn’t the case with Longism. It is further characterized by an iron-fisted control over media and education and the economy, none of which Long ever held. Indeed, Long struggled with opposition newspapers and rival parties, and he once said to a newsman who suggested he was a dictator, “You and I both know that if the people want to throw me out they’re going to do it.” Besides the broad power Long wielded in Louisiana because of his political machine, the one other criteria he could be argued to meet was his commanding of a “secret police” capable of terrorism. Long’s use of the state police as his personal security was widely criticized, with comparisons unsurprisingly made to Hitler’s Brownshirt private army. And in 1928, he pushed the infamous Act 99 through the legislature, establishing the Bureau of Criminal Identification, a law enforcement agency independent of the police, which Long controlled by appointing its head officers, and which was capable of making arrests without a warrant. Long’s critics declared it his own Gestapo… but it didn’t engage in official campaigns of terror as predicted. In fact, today, it is just the wing of the state police in charge of fingerprinting.

Huey Long surrounded by his armed guards.

When Long first established this bureau, the BCI, it was specifically to investigate a number of armed militia groups that had formed in opposition to him and which had engaged in criminal violence and armed insurrection. These groups were, like so many others then and today, openly racist, overtly likening themselves to white supremacist movements like those that enacted reigns of terror all over the South during Reconstruction, much like those I described in my series The Coup on Cape Fear. These groups were responsible for death threats, not only to Huey Long but also to the Long-supportive administration, headed by Long’s successor as governor, Oscar K. Allen. They attempted arson on more than one occasion, and once even took a pot shot at Long’s home in New Orleans. At one point, when during a recount for a voter referendum on some constitutional amendments, Governor Allen declared martial law, necessitating that the recount occur under armed guard, many cried fraud, but the clear reason that Allen had to call in the National Guard that day was that these militia agitators had staged an armed rebellion in the district where the recount was occurring. Hundreds of armed members of the opposition militia group calling itself the Square Deal Association had stormed the East Baton Rouge Parish courthouse. And rather than some draconian crackdown, Allen’s declaration of martial law resulted in the Square Dealers dispersing without violence. These Square Dealers were the central focus of the BCI, who had infiltrated them with informants. It was because of these spies that the BCI was able to arrest many in this group the very next day, when the BCI surprised fifty armed Square Dealers at the Baton Rouge Airport. A shootout ensued, but no one was killed. Several were arrested, and the group’s leader fled across state lines. The informants that the BCI had among these opposition groups also provided information on meeting locations, at some of which Long stated they had recorded evidence of murder plots. Ever the purveyor of political spectacle, Huey Long dramatically read the minutes of these meetings on the Senate floor. Indeed, if they can be trusted, it does seem that the men at the meetings were talking about killing Long, specifically shooting him and sinking his corpse into the Gulf of Mexico weighted with chains and speculating that Roosevelt would pardon them for doing it. Whether this was idle talk or earnest plotting remains unclear, but all this seems enough to warrant Long’s security details and the establishment of the special investigative force, even if it does not excuse the unconstitutional granting of unlawful search and seizure powers. When later that year Long was killed in the Louisiana capitol, his armed guards failing to protect him, unsurprisingly, the event spawned a number of conspiracy theories, which I intend to discuss in a patron exclusive Blind Spot.

The figure of the Kingfish, Huey Long, is hotly contested by biographers and historians who variously call him a hero or a despot, a champion of the people or a demagogue. I have endeavored to judge him fairly in this episode, and to indicate where I thought he may have been unjustly criticized or unfairly characterized, but I must be clear that I don’t approve of his machine politics or his lack of regard for the separation of powers and for constitutional rights. I think that his plan for the redistribution of wealth, while admirable in many regards, was simplistic and unrealistic as outlined and likely a calculated attempt to steal the New Deal thunder and help him realize his designs on the presidency. I think Long actually showed his lack of support for the working classes in numerous ways, such as his lack of support for labor unions, his failure to push for a minimum wage law in Louisiana, and his opposition to the ratification of the Federal Child Labor Amendment. Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder what concrete beneficial reforms he might have managed to achieve as president. On the other hand, while Long may not fit many of the criteria of a demagogue or a fascist, when we apply the same criteria to Donald Trump, an unsettling conclusion must be drawn. Huey Long kept his promises to the people who supported him, whereas Trump, who made concrete promises such as investing $550 billion in infrastructure, bringing back U.S. manufacturing jobs, guaranteeing 6 weeks paid maternity leave, and generally improving the economy, healthcare, and education, did not keep the promises he campaigned on. He was carried into office largely by poor, rural whites, convincing them that he was fighting for them, but inequality only deepened when Trump was in power. Huey Long did not distract from real issues by race baiting, is common of demagogues and fascists, but Donald Trump ran on hate for immigrants, specifically Latin American migrants and Muslims, and since that time, he has made his political opponents and the media into his constant scapegoats, blaming the left and fake news whenever his corruption is revealed. Huey Long was regularly accused of corruption and graft, and after his death, those who inherited his political machine were definitively caught using it in corrupt ways to enrich themselves, but try as his critics might to posthumously link their crimes to him, Long has remained unimplicated in their crimes. Conversely, Trump ran on draining the swamp or ridding Washington of corruption while acting as corruptly as any President before him, or worse, conning donors to his campaign and his defense fund out of hundreds of millions and flagrantly enriching himself through the powers of his office. He is a compelling, if buffoonish and overdramatic speaker, as was Long and as was Hitler, and he certainly benefits from propaganda in conservative news media and through online disinformation campaigns. While Long was a progressive populist and used his control of law enforcement to combat lawless militia groups, Trump has proven himself a far-right extremist, far closer on the political spectrum to textbook fascism, and his apparent personal command of white supremacist anti-government paramilitary goon squads like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys serves as a far more apt comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts, and they have proven themselves more prepared to engage in terror campaigns. As I acknowledged at the beginning of this episode, comparisons to Hitler and fascism can often be viewed as offensive or alarmist or hyperbolic, and I do not make the comparison lightly. I’ve laid out the criteria and considered it thoughtfully, as you’ve seen. At a certain point, after comparing how something looks and how it swims and how it quacks, you’ve just got to admit when it passes the duck test.

Further Reading

Amenta, Edwin, et al. “Stolen Thunder? Huey Long’s ‘Share Our Wealth,’ Political Mediation, and the Second New Deal.” American Sociological Review, vol. 59, no. 5, 1994, pp. 678–702, https://doi.org/10.2307/2096443.

Haas, Edward F. “Huey Long and the Dictators.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 47, no. 2, 2006, pp. 133–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4234177.

Hogan, J. Michael, and L. Glen Williams. “The Rusticity and Religiosity of Huey P. Long.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, vol. 7, no. 2, 2004, pp. 149–71, https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2004.0040.

Leuchtenburg, William E. “FDR and the Kingfish.” American Heritage, vol. 36, no. 6, Oct./Nov. 1985, www.americanheritage.com/fdr-and-kingfish#1.
Jeansonne, Glen. “Challenge to the New Deal: Huey P. Long and the Redistribution of National Wealth.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 21, no. 4, 1980, pp. 331–39. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4232034.

Schafer, Elizabeth D., and Anthony Connors. "Huey Long: Was Huey Long a Progressive Reformer or a Dangerous Demagogue?" History in Dispute, edited by Robert J. Allison, vol. 3: American Social and Political Movements, 1900-1945: Pursuit of Progress, St. James Press, 2000, pp. 86-94. Gale In Context: Global Issues, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2876300019/GIC?u=sjdc_main&sid=bookmark-GIC&xid=6decfee2.

Seidemann, Ryan M., et al. “The Kingfish’s Mineral Legacy: An Analysis of the Legality of State Mineral Leases Granted to W.T. Burton and James A. Noe During the Years 1934–1936 and Their Relevance to Former United States Senator and Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long.” LSU Journal of Energy Law and Resources, vol. 5, no, 1, 2017, pp. 71-152. LSU Law Digital Commons, digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/jelr/vol5/iss1/8/.

The Perils of American Democracy

This installment is greatly focused on the historic figure of the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump. Any who may not read on because they simply don’t want to hear about him anymore, I understand. But to any who object because they resent partisanship in political discourse and historical analysis, I would argue, at this point, that criticism of Donald Trump’s actions in office and out of it is no longer partisan. If you care about American democracy, you should listen on.

It was recently reported that President Joe Biden took some time in early August to sit down for a 2-hour conference with a group of history scholars who spoke to him with some urgency regarding the historical moment in which the United States now finds itself. Specifically, this varied group of historians included Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham, Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss, expert on Human Rights Allida Black, Pulitzer -winning journalist Anne Applebaum, and Sean Wilentz, whom you may remember for his unfortunate criticism of the 1619 Project, which I spoke about in my defense of the project. These experts raised concerns not only about the rise of authoritarianism and threats to democracy around the world, but specifically to the danger that American democracy currently faces. These historians are not alone. According to a very recent NBC News poll, “threats to democracy” have replaced concerns about the economy as the most important issue to voters. Many are those who think they’re clever but only reveal their ignorance by pointing out that “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” but of course, a republic, by definition, is a democracy. Specifically, it is a form of government in which power resides in the voting populace, with their will exercised by their elected representatives. Or as Founding Father Alexander Hamilton once wrote of the Constitution, “This representative democracy as far as is consistent with its genius has all the features of good government.” The fragility of American democracy is not a new concern. Even back when our democratic system of government was still in the intermediary stage between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, we more than once almost went a different way with our experiment. In 1782, there was there a conspiracy among the leaders of the Continental Army, who had not been paid, and who threatened what would essentially have been a coup d'état, proposing to establish a constitutional monarchy with General Washington as its king. Had it not been for Washington’s famous rejection of the offer and subsequent efforts to quell the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy by arranging payment for the troops, our country might have taken a decidedly different path. Then in 1787, during the convening of the Constitutional Convention, rumors swirled about the Continental Congress scheming to offer a proposed regency over the United States to Hohenzollern Prince Henry of Prussia. Indeed, the anxieties and the protest ran so high that the conclave at the Philadelphia Convention had to print an official denial that they intended to establish another monarchy. For decades, these rumors and accusations were unsubstantiated, but in the early 20th century, corroborating evidence appears to have been found in the royal Prussian archives in Charlottenburg. A letter from Henry of Prussia, addressed to an old friend, Baron von Steuben, a Prussian-American general who had whipped the Continental Army into shape during the Revolution and was retired in New York at the time of the Philadelphia Convention, remarks pretty directly on the offer. In French, Henry writes, “I confess that I cannot believe that we can resolve to change the principles of the government which has been established in the United States of America, but if the entire nation should agree to establish others, and would choose for its model the constitution of England, according to my judgment I must admit that it is of all constitutions the one that seems the most perfect to me.” Now if either the Newburgh Conspiracy or the Prussian Scheme had succeeded in their designs, we cannot claim that America would be any less a democracy than is the UK, but both stories serve to show that now is certainly not the first time the fate of our particular brand of democracy has been threatened. This is not to say that concerns are unwarranted. Rather, it is to demonstrate that vigilance is required to preserve our way of life.

Let us begin this discussion by bringing the blog full circle back to the topic of my very first installment, which I removed from the podcast feed a while back because the sound mix wasn’t great and the subject matter caused some new listeners who started at the beginning to not give the podcast a chance. However, the transcript is still available here. Its topic was demagoguery. From the establishment of our federal government, the biggest threat to American democracy has always been the danger of a demagogue coming along and manipulating the people for his own benefit. George Washington wrote to Marquis de Lafayette during the Constitutional Convention that he feared “some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his Country so much as his own ambitious views” might exploit the opportunity to seize power. And during the convention, numerous speeches indicate that this danger was on many minds. James Madison spoke of the “Danger of Demagogues,” Elbridge Gerry asserted that “Demagogues are the great pests of our government, and have occasioned most of our distresses,” and Alexander Hamilton warned over and over against the threat of demagogues. In The Federalist Papers, he warned that they were the historical cause of the overturning of most republics—men who start out as demagogues, “paying an obsequious court to the people,” thereafter becoming tyrants. This danger is one of the principal reasons for the checks and balances baked into the system. Specifically, the power of impeachment was the ultimate check against a demagogue chief executive. So what is a demagogue? We might judge from one revision to the records of the convention, in which Elbridge Gerry states that “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” This term, pretended patriots, had originally been taken down as “demagogues” and was later changed. This sentiment seems rather anti-democratic at first blush, as if the people don’t know what’s good for them and need governing, but in fact, his concern is exactly that some authoritarian ruler may fool the American people into raising him up, that the populace might be exploited by one who only pretends to serve them but in fact serves only himself. I’ll revisit the quote from James Fenimore Cooper that I shared in my first episode, “The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people…. The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners and…appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning…instead of manifesting the frank, fearless qualities of the democracy he so prodigally professes.” In that first episode, without stating it outright, since back in 2016 it seemed gauche, I implied, rather heavy-handedly, that this described Donald Trump to a T, as it were, and I went on to compare him to Lewis Charles Levin, a 19th century nativist demagogue. Now, today, there are many valid reasons that the public fears U.S. democracy may be in peril, such as polarization, misinformation online, loss of trust in the media, etc. But without leaning too heavily on the I-told-you-so button, I must argue that the principal threat to our democracy in recent years has been and continues to be incorporated in the person of the former president. There are many historical parallels to the danger we now face and the threat he continues to represent, and we will examine them, but it must be conceded that this existential threat to American democracy, embodied and incited as it is by a disgraced former leader of the country, is utterly unique.

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, by Howard Chandler Christy (1940)

After the failure of the Capitol Insurrection on January 6th 2021, it seemed Trump had finally been revealed as the anti-democratic force that he clearly is. More than a year later, with the revelations of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s central role in inciting the insurrection made more and more clear, it has been truly disheartening to see so many Republican representatives and talking heads on conservative media fall in line to defend the indefensible. And now, since the FBI search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago and the revelation that Trump illegally took classified documents out of the White House and kept them at his private residence for years, it has been further dispiriting to see Trump’s civilian foot soldiers launch more than one assault on FBI offices. These criminals who have taken up arms against federal law enforcement in what should rightly be considered a second insurrection do so because they think the agency is wrongfully persecuting Trump, and they believe Trump’s explanations that he was just taking work home with him because don’t we all do that? When it was revealed that the “work” Trump removed from the White House included classified and Top Secret documents, these true believers credited Trump’s further explanation that he had actually declassified the documents he took home, under a standing order that anything he took out of the Oval Office be automatically declassified. This last claim was called “preposterous” by national security experts who explain that the classification system has been established over the course of numerous executive orders since World War II, requiring the head of whatever department or agency originally classified the document to review them before declassification and to consult with any other agency or department that may have some interest in the classified material before officially removing the classification marking from the document. Anyone who would believe that the very act of removing the document from the Oval Office declassified it just because Trump said it did, without any official executive order to change the declassification process, simply doesn’t understand the matter and should defer to the experts. The fact of the matter is, Trump appears to have broken numerous laws by taking these documents home with him. Section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code specifies that a person removing classified information without authority and keeping them “at an unauthorized location” can be fined and imprisoned for five year. Of course, Trump is arguing that, as the chief executive, he had that authority, but the Presidential Records Act of 1978 further clarifies the powers of a sitting President when it comes to document handling. It is pretty fitting that Trump, who is the only U.S. president to have been impeached twice, has now run afoul of a law passed because of Richard Nixon, another flagrantly corrupt President who made history as the only president to have resigned in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office. When Nixon resigned in 1974, he wanted to take all of his presidential documents home with him, including recordings that were important evidence of his crimes. Fearing that evidence would be destroyed, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, making Nixon’s records public property. And in 1978, having learned our lesson about what a corrupt president might try, the Presidential Records Act was passed so that no future president could remove documents from the White House like Nixon tried to do. Under this law, the American people own those records and documents, and upon a president leaving office, they must be removed directly to the National Archives. Trump’s further explanation that his exit from the White House was simply chaotic, and that the documents were taken by mistake, is perhaps more believable but does not excuse his actions. What it reveals is that he was so certain that he would succeed in overturning the election that he never bothered to pack and ended up having to do what many call an old fashioned shit-shove. However, ignorance is no justification, and since it has come out that someone in his inner circle informed the FBI that these classified materials were in his possession, it seems apparent that even if he didn’t realize what he'd taken at the time, he certainly must have known a year and a half later, especially after a grand jury subpoenaed Trump for the documents in June and he still did not surrender them, necessitating the FBI search of his home.

In fairness, we do know of at least one other American president to have taken home classified documents, and it was a Democrat: Lyndon B. Johnson. Of course, this was years before the passage of the Presidential Records Act and decades before section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. In 1969, when Nixon took office and Johnson vacated the White House, he secretly told a staffer to smuggle out some highly classified documents. The contents of the documents and the reason for their removal takes us back further, to the 1968 presidential race, when Richard Nixon, who had previously been Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president and had been thwarted in his presidential aspirations by the popular John F. Kennedy, Johnson’s late predecessor, ran against Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s VP. This was during the height of the war in Vietnam and the anti-war protest movement. In fact, the American public’s widespread opposition to the war was one of the principal reasons LBJ chose not to run for president again, though he had only served one term as an elected president. As election day drew near in 1968, Johnson saw a path to ending the war in Vietnam in a way that would be acceptable to him, and wanted to pursue it, believing that any indication of his administration ending the war might help Humphrey beat Nixon. However, Richard Nixon became aware of these efforts, and in a stunning betrayal of his country, worked to sabotage peace efforts. Through Anna Chennault, who raised funds for the Republican Party and led the political support group “Republican Women for Nixon,” Nixon made contact with the South Vietnamese government and put pressure on them not to cooperate with Johnson’s peace initiatives. President Johnson, in turn, became aware of Nixon’s sabotage and ordered the FBI to place Chennault under surveillance. From wiretaps, he uncovered evidence of Nixon’s plot “to monkey wrench it,” as one of Nixon’s aides put it. Unsure of what to do with this information, Johnson was on the eve of the election convinced by his cabinet advisers to bury the story. Their reason was that disclosure of the story would be bad for the country, in that it would irreparably harm the American people’s trust in their elected leaders. Certainly this would have been the case. Nixon was elected the next day, but even if disclosure of the story right before Election Day had resulted in a victory for Humphrey, the story would have shown a former vice-president and popular presidential candidate playing politics with the lives of soldiers. In between 1968, when the war in Vietnam might have ended, and 1975, when it did end, countless further lives were lost that might have been saved but for the callous political chess game played by Richard Nixon. And in hindsight, it seems Johnson’s noble motives for keeping Nixon’s treachery a secret were all for nothing. The American public was already disillusioned with the government and its elected leaders. They had been since the start of the Vietnam War and especially since the assassinations of the 1960s that many believed had been orchestrated by our own government. And certainly after Watergate, any vestiges of trust in the American presidency were obliterated regardless. Johnson’s surveillance of Americans in contact with the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington, D.C., was not, at the time, illegal, nor was his removal of classified documents relating to what that surveillance uncovered. In fact, in telling this story, I would argue that rather than comparing what Trump did to what Johnson did, a more apt comparison is to compare Nixon’s betrayal of the country to Trump’s alleged treason.

Richard Nixon gives a speech on the conflict in Vietnam, which he prevented from being resolved in order to win the presidency.

Here we address more clearly what makes Trump a clear and present danger to American democracy. Clearly he was unwilling to give up power and sought to unlawfully overturn the election and steal the presidency. Anyone who denies this now is performing mental gymnastics and ignoring all the evidence presented in the January 6 Committee hearings. But what makes both the insurrection he clearly orchestrated AND his removal of highly classified documents from the White House even more egregious is the evidence that he has improperly colluded with hostile foreign governments. In the wake of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, when it was revealed that some of the classified documents seized were marked above Top Secret, or S.C.I., which stands for sensitive compartmented information, and that among these were documents containing U.S. nuclear secrets, speculation has run rampant that Trump may have been enriching himself by selling secrets to foreign governments. What evidence is there that Trump has actually done this? The evidence is mostly circumstantial. For example, in the weeks before the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump hosted a controversial Saudi-Arabian funded golf tournament at his golf course in New Jersey, and the timing between this event and the revelation that the FBI recovered classified nuclear documents from Mar-a-Lago resurrected some former allegations raised in 2019 by the House Oversight Committee that the Trump administration attempted to “rush the transfer of highly sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia,” even suggesting that his actions may have violated the Atomic Energy Act. Even more recently, since it’s been revealed that a Russian-speaking woman “infiltrated” Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s circle, by posing as a member of the Rothschild banking family, Russia is brought to mind. If we are going to worry about Trump betraying American secrets to a foreign government, we should really be talking more about his collusion with Russia. Throughout his presidency, as the collusion between Trump’s election campaign and Russia was being investigated, Trump maintained that it was a baseless conspiracy theory, but unlike most baseless conspiracy theories, there is overwhelming evidence that his campaign worked with Russia, even if he managed to insulate himself personally. Also unlike baseless conspiracy claims, the evidence for Russian collusion has been vetted and uncovered by credible investigative journalism, not fringe researchers. Again, denying Trump’s involvement with Putin’s Russia takes a purposeful refusal to acknowledge overwhelming documentary evidence. Though Mueller’s report, heavily redacted by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, didn’t explicitly implicate Trump himself, his investigation resulted in the conviction of numerous advisers and aides to Trump who had lied about their involvement with Russia, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Steve Bannon. Then there are the uncovered connections between Russia and his administration and close family members, like his Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, his White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his son, Don Jr. As for Trump himself, even discounting the questionable contents of the so-called Steele Dossier, the opposition research that purported to reveal that Trump had been cultivated for years as a Russian asset through blackmail, Trump’s very public praise of Putin in the years leading up to the 2016 campaign, his public call for Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee—which they promptly did—and his actions favorable to Russia while in office all go to support, if not prove, that he may have had, and may still have, an inappropriate relationship with a foreign power that should cause all Americans even greater concern after learning that he attempted to secretly keep classified nuclear documents after being voted out of office. 

The warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago did not actually list the Presidential Records Act as a reason for their search. Rather, it cited the section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that criminalizes the destruction or concealment of documents intended to obstruct an investigation, as well as a section of the U.S. Code dealing with the concealment of public records, and, rather importantly, it cites the Espionage Act. This law was passed in 1917, during World War I, long before Harry Truman penned the first executive order governing the classification of sensitive documents. When searching for a historical parallel for potential prosecution under the Espionage Act of persons accused of mishandling nuclear secrets, one cannot help but consider the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the summer of 1950, amid the height of the Second Red Scare, as the Korean War began, a number of Jewish members of the American Communist Party were arrested for conspiracy to commit treason. It began with Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass, who worked in the nuclear program as a machinist and was charged with stealing secrets related to our atomic bomb technology. Greenglass pled guilty and named Julius, his brother-in-law, as a co-conspirator. The Truman administration then leaned hard on Julius Rosenberg to get him to name others in their spy ring, but Julius maintained his innocence. The Truman administration claimed Julius was the head of the ring and arrested Julius’s wife Ethel, with whom he had two young sons, despite Greenglass’s insistence that his sister was innocent in the matter. Ethel’s arrest seems to have been only a means of coercing Julius to talk, but he remained uncooperative. So they pursued a death penalty, still, it seems, mostly to scare Julius Rosenberg into giving up others in the ring. However, what Truman seems not to have counted on was the clamorous mob mentality of the American people at the time, who had been led to fear Soviet infiltration and to mistrust all Jews as Communist conspirators. According to polls taken at the time, almost three-quarters of the country wanted to see the Rosenbergs executed. Internationally, however, there were nearly universal calls for clemency. Finding himself in a bind, Truman simply passed the buck to his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who feared looking weak and, over the protest overseas as well as the counsel of his own advisers, chose to capitulate to the bloodlust of the people, and sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their deaths in 1953. To the end, they maintained their innocence, and for decades, many social critics and scholars likewise argued that the case against them was weak, with evidence predicated on the testimony of an informant trying to save his own skin, evidence as absurd as a Jell-O box being in their possession that was said to be carried as a signal to other spies in the ring, when of course, in the 1950s, one would be hard-pressed to find a household that did not contain a box of Jell-O. These critics were mostly silenced, however, in 1995 with the public disclosure of certain cables intercepted by the Venona project, a U.S. counterintelligence program, which showed that, indeed, Julius Rosenberg had been part of an atomic spy ring.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in custody.

The fact that the Espionage Act was invoked on the FBI’s warrant to search Mar-a-Lago does not indicate there is any evidence that Trump was selling or disclosing information related to national defense. The Act is used not only to prosecute those who spy for a foreign power but also those who mishandle secrets, including those who leak secrets to the media as whistleblowers. It seems pretty clear, however, that Trump, who openly reviles leakers and all legacy media outlets, was not doing the latter. However, even if he were caught giving American secrets to Russia or the Saudis, let me be clear that I am not advocating for the death penalty. Even in the case of the Rosenbergs, I would argue that justice was not served by taking their lives. Certainly the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg was inconclusive. She was accused over the denials of their informant, and the only evidence against her was a set of notes that she allegedly typed, but it’s impossible to ascertain who actually typed the document. The extent of her crime might have been some vague knowledge of her husband’s activities and tacit approval of them, but this should not have been enough to extinguish her life and leave her children parentless. Even if you do believe that her passive involvement earned her a capital punishment, there is the matter of the unequal apportionment of such sentences. David Greenglass’s wife Ruth was just as likely to have been aware of their activities, but she was never charged. And Greenglass himself, who was more directly guilty of stealing atomic secrets, was sentenced to 15 years and only served nine of them. We might attribute this to his cooperation with investigators, but others involved also were not sentenced to death, such as Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who actually worked directly on the bomb at Los Alamos and only served 9 years. When we consider the Rosenberg case with this context, they appear to have been singled out, perhaps because of Julius’s alleged leadership position in the ring, or perhaps because they had been uncooperative, or perhaps because they were Jews from an immigrant family. Whatever the case, I agree with scholars who argue that in trying not to appear weak, Eisenhower clearly demonstrated his weakness by sacrificing their lives to boost his approval ratings. Ironically, though, while I would not advocate for Trump to face the same sentence as the Rosenbergs, even if it were proven beyond doubt that he did indeed sell or surrender nuclear secrets to a foreign power, he does advocate for death sentences in such cases himself. Speaking about Bowe Bergdahl, Trump on several occasions advocated for shooting traitors.

One should not ask whether or not the former president is capable of treason. He is a human being, and thus fallible. He is capable of it. He has shown throughout his careers, both business and political, that he has no qualms about putting himself before his country. Consider his years of tax avoidance, or his serial disregard of the Emoluments Clause as he used the power of his presidency to enrich himself. If you’re unaware of any of these facts, I might suggest that you choose different news sources. Regardless, though, asking whether he betrayed his country in his handling of Top Secret documents is something of a moot point. The very fact that he incited an insurrection at the Capitol in his efforts to overturn the legitimate results of an election and retain power against the will of the American people is proof enough that he has already betrayed his country and done damage to our democracy. However, as I said, he is just one man. The fact that this man, who openly admires dictators, was elected U.S. president and was thus able to do all this damage is more of an indictment on those who voted him into office, though, than it is to him alone. It is the people who raise up demagogues. And it is the fact that so many Americans voted for Trump and continue to support him despite everything that really has the historians who met with Biden worried. They compared the political climate today to other times in U.S. history when American democracy was at risk, such as before the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln cautioned, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Does this mean we face the threat of another Civil War, as we did in the disputed election of 1876? Or is our situation more like the years before the U.S. joined World War II. I favor this analogy, since just as today we see an entire wing of the support for Donald Trump coming from White Nationalists, the threat to American democracy in the late 1930s was not just from Hitler but also involved a rise in fascist sentiment and anti-Semitism within America, fueled by demagoguery. While fascism was spreading across Europe, Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a radio program, spread fascist ideology to his some 30 million listeners. He had started out as a booster of Roosevelt and the New Deal, but his broadcasts turned more and more anti-Semitic, until finally he was praising fascist policies implemented by Hitler and Mussolini. In a kind of deplatforming akin to what happened to InfoWars demagogue Alex Jones, Roosevelt eventually intervened to get Father Coughlin’s program cancelled and make his newspapers illegal to mail. Father Coughlin faded into obscurity after that, unlike Alex Jones. Perhaps it is counter-democratic, but history has shown that the best way to weaken a demagogue is to deny them a platform. Donald Trump, however, is a different beast entirely. Having once held the highest office in the land, voted into office by 63 million citizens and winning the vote of 74 million Americans even when he lost his reelection, he simply cannot be deplatformed. When social media companies tried, validly citing his spread of misinformation and incitement of unlawful acts on January 6th, he simply started his own platform, and his followers, as is their nature, followed.

Father Charles Coughlin giving a speech.

In the years since Trump’s election, numerous books have been published pondering the future of democracy, with titles like, How Democracy Ends, and How Democracies Die. The number of magazine, newspaper, and web articles about democracy being in danger, or in crisis, or decline are countless. And this spring, the Brookings Institution started The Strengthening American Democracy Initiative. Tellingly, the 1930s saw the same rise in alarmed concern for the health of democracy. All over the country, lectures were delivered with titles like “The Future of Democracy,” “The Prospects of Democracy,” “The Crisis of Democracy,” and “How to Save Democracy.” And the similarity did not end at the fact that they faced the spread of authoritarian ideology via demagogues over mass media, just as we do today. Their concern, much like ours in the wake of January 6th, also stemmed from what appeared to have been a failed coup. In 1933, shortly after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, numerous right wing paramilitary militias, most of them explicitly white supremacist, formed for the express purpose of inciting rebellion against the progressive president. If this reminds you of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, it should. In this volatile climate, it was not so surprising when, that summer, a Marine Major General named Smedley Darlington Butler informed the FBI that he had been approached by a cabal of Wall Street businessmen and asked to lead a fascist coup, marching on Washington at the head of an army of veterans, to eject not only FDR but also the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and every other politician in the order of succession. In their place, Butler was tasked with raising up a dictator. Just as Trump-supporters and their complicit media outlets today call the Russian scandal a hoax, so too did much of the press declare that the Business Plot, or the Wall Street Putsch, as it was called, was a hoax, but the congressional committee tasked with its investigation found it to be all too real. And neither were they in the business of just stirring up baseless political controversy. In fact, according to Butler, the committee actually protected the wealthy conspirators by having their names redacted from their final report. It might be tempting to say worries in the 1930s were nothing but hand-wringing, and that the same is true today, that the Wall Street Putsch never would have succeeded in overthrowing democracy, and neither were the Capitol insurrectionists really capable of doing irreparable harm to our democracy. Maybe that’s true. But what about the next time? What about the next demagogue, the next coup?

As I said at the top of this episode, this is not a partisan argument. Any truly patriotic Republican must be just as alarmed as I am by Trump’s actions and his influence on their party. Really they should be even more concerned. But with the recent primary results, in which so many of Trump’s picks took nominations and most of the incumbent Republicans who voted to impeach him lost their support, his stranglehold on the GOP’s electorate appears unyielding. If deplatforming won’t thwart Trump, the most powerful and probably most destructive demagogue in American history, then prosecuting him for his crimes may. And if it is impossible to hold him accountable for his attempt to unlawfully overturn the election, then we must prosecute him under the laws listed on the FBI’s warrant. We need not lock him up, as he was so fond of chanting about Hillary Clinton when she was accused of being careless with classified communications. Rather, a simple fine will suffice as long as he is convicted under the third law on the warrant, Section 2071 of title 18 of the U.S. code, which criminalizes the removal and concealment of records. Conviction under this law makes him ineligible for holding federal office. As for his followers, who pose the real threat, we must welcome their legal protest but likewise aggressively prosecute those who resort to violence and insurrection, which we know they are prone to do. And afterward, we must remain vigilant. We must work to foil the next demagogues, who may have seen what Trump proved was possible and prove themselves more capable than he of carrying it off. And it is not just the next demagogue we must worry about, but also the next coup, which may not be a coup of force but rather a more insidious legal coup. Take, for example, the pending case Moore v. Harper that will be considered by our abjectly partisan Supreme Court. This case will determine the constitutionality of the “independent state legislature” theory, which if recognized as valid by this packed bench, would give state legislatures not only carte blanche to aggressively gerrymander, but would also grant them the ability to throw out presidential election results and appoint electors as they please. Essentially, it would make the overturning of legitimate presidential election results legal. So raise your voice, cast your vote, and pray to whatever power or principle you hold dear that the Department of Justice and elected representatives who genuinely seek to preserve democracy will have the moral fortitude and courage to do what must be done.

*

Until next time, remember, according to the Democracy Index, the United States is already deemed a “flawed democracy.” If we slip further into the autocratic range of the spectrum, it will have been a pretty short and sad run for a country that prides itself on representing freedom to the whole world. After all, we could only truly consider ourselves a democracy after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making us a relatively young democracy compared to most others, like, for example, New Zealand, which as a self-governing colony became the first country in the world to adopt universal suffrage in 1893. We may like to pretend we were the grandfather of democracy, but for most of our existence, we were a democracy in name only. And calling yourself a democracy means nothing. To illustrate, Hitler and Mussolini were also quite fond of boasting about their “democracies.”

Further Reading

Denton, Sally. “Why Is So Little Known About the 1930s Coup Attempt Against FDR?” The Guardian, 11 Jan. 2020, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-fdr-roosevelt-coup-attempt-1930s.

Farrell, John A. “Nixon’s Vietnam Treachery.” The New York Times, 31 Dec. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/nixons-vietnam-treachery.html?_r=0.

Herenstein, Ethan, and Thomas Wolf. “The ‘Independent State Legislature Theory,’ Explained.” Brennan Center for Justice, 6 June 2022, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/independent-state-legislature-theory-explained.

Krauel, Richard. “Prince Henry of Prussia and the Regency of the United States, 1786.” The American Historical Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 1911, pp. 44–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1832837.

Lepore, Jill. “The Last Time Democracy Almost Died.” The New Yorker, 27 Jan. 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died.

Lynd, Staughton. “Is There Anything More to Say About the Rosenberg Case?” Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 9, Feb. 2011, pp. 43–53. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.14452/MR-062-09-2011-02_4.

Myre, Greg, and Wynne Davis. “The Reason Why Presidents Can't Keep Their White House Records Dates Back to Nixon.” NPR, 13 Aug. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/08/13/1117297065/trump-documents-history-national-archives-law-watergate.

Savage, Charlie. “Laws and Lists in Search Warrant Offer Clues to Trump Document Investigation.” The New York Times, 12 Aug. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/08/12/us/politics/search-warrant-trump-investigation-documents.html.

Scherer, Michael, et al. “Historians Privately Warn Biden That America’s Democracy Is Teetering.” The Washington Post, 10 Aug. 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/10/biden-us-historians-democracy-threat/.

Schwartz, Jon. “  It’s Not Just Trump — LBJ Took Classified Documents Too.” The Intercept, 11 Aug. 2022, theintercept.com/2022/08/11/trump-fbi-mar-a-lago-classified-documents-lbj/.

 West, Darrell M. “Trump Is Not the Only Threat to Democracy.” Brookings, 25 July, 2022, www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/07/25/trump-is-not-the-only-threat-to-democracy/.

Quinn, Melissa. “A Look at the Law Governing Presidential Records.” CBS News, 9 Aug. 2022, www.cbsnews.com/news/a-look-at-the-law-governing-presidential-records/.

Stranger Things Have Happened - Part Three: The Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project

On a summer afternoon in 1752, as storm clouds gathered over Philadelphia and rain spattered the city, writer, diplomat, inventor, scientist and all-around polymath Benjamin Franklin did not seek shelter inside as so many others did. Rather, he saw an opportunity to conduct an experiment that he had been planning for some time. He prepared a kite, but rather than a paper kite, this one was a silken handkerchief stretched over crossed sticks, making it more likely to withstand the wind and the rain of the storm, and he attached to the kite a house key. Most Americans are very familiar with this experiment, but in its countless retellings, it has become a historical myth, with many claiming that, in conducting it, Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity. In truth, electricity had been a recognized form of energy for more than a thousand years. In fact, numerous scientists had studied the nature and effects of static electricity, going all the way back to 546 BCE, when Thales of Miletus (Thay-leez of Meal-le-tus) produced electricity by rubbing wool against amber. The purpose of Franklin’s experiment, rather, was just to prove the electrical nature of lightning. This was a popular theory at the time, winning French scientists accolades for their speculation on the topic, based on the observation that lightning appeared to be attracted to spikes, or high points, a fact about which Franklin himself had formerly been skeptical. The design of his kite experiment, however, clearly demonstrates how much was known about the conduction of electricity. Franklin attached a wire to the top of his kite, and made sure that the twine was wet, so that the lightning, or “electrical fire” as he called it, would be conducted from the wire at the kite’s tip down to the key at the end of the twine, which would collect the charge. And to protect himself from the electricity, at the end of the wet twine, where the key was tied, he attached another string, this one of silk, which he did his best to keep dry, for he held the other end of it. At the conclusion of his experiment, he was able to charge a rudimentary capacitor, called a Leyden jar. He published the details of the experiment, and thus the myth was born. Some other mythical aspects of the experiment have to do with where he stood, with some accounts describing him being in a field, when in fact he explicitly described standing in a doorway so as to keep his silken tether dry. Other versions have it that he climbed the spire of Christ Church to conduct the experiment, but this is a corruption. In fact, he intended to use the spire on Christ Church for his experiment, but at the time the church had no such steeple. Franklin even financed its construction by organizing a lottery, but it would not be built until a couple years after he went ahead with the experiment using a kite instead of a steeple to reach the height necessary. And lastly, most tellings of the story have it that the key-adorned kite was struck by lightning. If that were the case, Benjamin Franklin would very likely have been killed. In fact, the year after, a similar experiment in Russia did end up electrocuting the physicist conducting it. Rather, in Franklin’s experiment, the wire collected the ambient electricity in the storm cloud and conducted it to the key. This experiment, which for a long time was referred to as the Philadelphia Experiment, really happened and was rather momentous in the study of electricity and meteorological phenomena, but like other real incidents in history, it has gathered myths over time. In contrast, today, the term “The Philadelphia Experiment” is used mostly to refer to another momentous scientific achievement around 200 years later. The difference is, this one never really happened. However, it too has evolved into numerous historical myths, including wild conspiracy claims that our government has abducted children for psychic experimentation, opened portals in time-space, and brought actual monsters into our world.

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I described this series as an exploration of the historical and pseudo historical basis of the Netflix series Stranger Things, and it is here that we veer into the decidedly pseudohistorical. Some may protest that the topics I’ve been covering, MK-Ultra human experimentation and CIA-sponsored studies of anomalous mental phenomena, were not the actual basis of the series. Rather, the creators of Stranger Things were inspired not by history but by 80s science-fiction, and this is certainly the case. One of the great pleasures of watching the series is in identifying each bit of homage that they’ve woven into it. But we can see that one of the biggest influences on the show, Steven King’s Firestarter, was itself influenced by the intelligence projects I’ve been discussing. The novel clearly references MK-Ultra drug trials as well as CIA efforts to develop a psychic asset in its premise about a scientific intelligence agency that gives test subjects psychic powers by dosing them with a psychoactive drug. Certainly the first season of Stranger Things, which has government agents chasing after a little girl with psychokinetic powers, owes much to King’s novel and its film adaptation. However, it has been reported that the show’s creators certainly were inspired by the real-life urban legend of the Montauk Project, which I will be discussing in this episode. The original name of the series was actually Montauk, and a couple of years after the series premiere, the creators were sued for plagiarism by a man who claimed to have pitched them a feature film called The Montauk Project, about an abducted child, secret experiments in a military installation, and an inter-dimensional monster. Eventually the lawsuit was withdrawn, either because the case was weak or because the plaintiff was paid handsomely to drop the charges. Regardless, these facts are enough to confirm that the story of the Montauk Project, a wild and thoroughly debunked tale that continues to be believed by many fringe researchers and paranormal conspiracy theorists, was the principle basis for the show Stranger Things. However, before we can even begin to approach the story of the Montauk Project, we must first examine the legend of the Philadelphia Experiment, which would become the bedrock upon which the later legend was built.

Promotional material produced to help sell the concept of Stranger Things, made to look like a dog-eared Steven King paperback, with the original title: Montauk. Via ScreenCraft

The legend began in 1952, when Morris K. Jessup, a UFO researcher, received a letter from someone calling himself Carlos Allende, who took issue with Jessup’s urging of legislators to fund research aimed at completing Einstein’s Unified Field Theory as a means of developing antigravity propulsion and advancing space travel technology. Over the next year, Jessup received more than 50 letters from Allende, who claimed that, contrary to common knowledge, Albert Einstein actually had completed his Unified Field Theory and had used it while working with the Navy on a top secret experiment. For any other lay person, like myself, the Unified Field Theory was the idea that all the forces of nature, specifically the field equations of relativistic gravitation and electromagnetism, must be connected and thus should be describable with a single, integrated theory. This notion obsessed Einstein, who indicated in a 1923 Nobel lecture that he “cannot rest content with the assumption that there exist two distinct fields totally independent of each other by their nature.” He worked on unification for the last thirty years of his life, even poring over his notes on his deathbed, but he never achieved a working theory. Some say this is because he was simply ahead of his time, as back then, only two subatomic particles were known, whereas now we’ve discovered several others. Also, only the two fundamental forces of nature he was trying to unify were recognized, but now we recognize two others, the so-called strong and weak nuclear forces at work inside of atoms. Others will say that Einstein was simply not keeping up with the vanguard of physics in his day because he had rejected quantum mechanics, or they will say he had simply strayed too far from physical reality in his mathematical theories, which more and more had to involve theoretical dimensions in order to work. Today, it’s thought that string theory, which likewise requires the theoretical existence of numerous dimensions, may eventually lead to the Theory of Everything that Einstein sought, though string theorists too have been criticized for straying too far from physical reality and not producing testable theories. However, according to Morris K. Jessup’s mysterious correspondent, Carlos Allende, Einstein actually did complete his unified theory and tested it at a Naval shipyard in Philadelphia, in 1943, when he managed to make a naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Eldridge, disappear. According to Allende, as part of the war effort, Einstein was applying his unified theory in an effort to make the warship invisible, but as an unforeseen result of the experiment, the destroyer was teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, and back again. Allende knew about this because he had witnessed it. He had been a merchant mariner aboard a shipping vessel at the time, and he had seen strange equipment brought aboard the Eldridge, such as transmitters and generators, as well as what appeared to be a Tesla coil that that was wrapped around the entire vessel. Before the ship disappeared, he claimed to have seen it become enveloped in a bright green haze. Over the course of his many letters, Allende described the experiment in greater detail, explaining that sailors aboard the Eldridge became disoriented, that when the vessel reappeared in Norfolk, some crew members’ bodies had physically fused with the solid matter of the ship’s bulkheads, and that some had disappeared entirely.

In the spring of 1957, the year after Jessup had received the increasingly strange letters from Allende, agents from the Office of Naval Research contacted him. They had in their possession a volume of Jessup’s 1955 book, The Case for the UFO, that had been anonymously sent to them annotated by what appeared to be three different people using different colored ink. Something in the annotations, which implied knowledge about the propulsion technology of UFOs and suggested Jessup was too close to figuring out the truth, had interested the agents, and of course this helps fuel conspiracy theories about official cover-ups. When Jessup read the annotations, he found their technical jargon similar to that of Allende and showed the officers Allende’s letters. According to the story, these Naval investigators went to the Pennsylvania return address that appeared on the letters, but found only an abandoned farmhouse. Afterward, the Navy seems to have lost interest—or maybe they had never been all that interested at all?—but Morris K. Jessup grew more and more obsessed. The legend almost died with him, however, when Jessup committed suicide in 1959 without publishing anything about the Philadelphia Experiment. However, Allende would not let it die. He began writing further letters to UFO researcher Jacques Vallee almost a decade later, and word of the strange story spread throughout the UFO researcher community. In 1968, a book was published, and suddenly the Allende Letters, and copies of the annotated Jessup book—called the Varo edition, after the company that made 127 reproductions of it—became nearly mythical among UFO researchers. These conspiracy theorists variously speculate that Jessup was actually murdered—even though there is evidence of his psychological distress before his suicide, resulting from a failed marriage and poor health after an automobile accident—and that Carlos Allende, who remained in hiding for his entire life, posting letters from various locations in America and Mexico, was actually an extra-terrestrial. Then in 1979, the story of the Philadelphia Experiment really reached prominence in the public imagination when a widely read paranormal writer, Charles Berlitz, who had previously popularized the idea of the Bermuda Triangle, teamed up with UFO researcher Bill Moore to write a book about it. Listeners of the show should recognize those names, as Moore and Berlitz were the duo who later popularized the legend about the Roswell Incident, and Moore would eventually be made a pawn in the UFO disinformation games of Rick Doty, helping to torment Paul Bennewitz and propagate the hoax Majestic 12 documents. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I invite you to listen to my three-part series UFO Disinfo, released last year around this time. Moore, who also apparently corresponded with the mysterious Carlos Allende, expanded on the mythology. The experiment was code-named Project Rainbow, Berlitz and Moore wrote, and the research into invisibility may have applied Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, but Einstein’s theory had been completed by Townsend Brown, an inventor of questionable background and character who claimed to have developed in the 1920s an antigravity thrust technology, called the Biefeld-Brown effect, that today is recognized as a misunderstanding of the ionic or coronal wind phenomenon. Furthermore, according to Berlitz and Moore, the application of this unified field technology toward invisibility was developed by mathematician and Manhattan Project collaborator John Von Neumann. Of course, exactly how Townsend’s “electro-gravitation” might have produced invisibility, let alone achieved teleportation, is, unsurprisingly, not exceedingly clear.

Morris K. Jessup

Carlos Allende’s story was, of course, dubious from the start. For example, if he had seen the ship disappear and reappear in Philadelphia, how did he know where it had teleported to? And why was there no record of the event from other witnesses? Even if no others on Allende’s ship had seen it, the sudden disappearance of a destroyer, which would have displaced around 2,000 tons of water, would have been noticed simply because of the resulting turmoil in the waters, as it would have created massive waves that would have crashed through the naval shipyard. In fact, ship logs and naval records indicate that the ship may not have even been in Philadelphia in October 1943, and in 1999, sailors who had served on the Eldridge reunited and said the ship never docked there. And in 1994, in an article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, UFO researcher Jacques Vallee writes about an interview he conducted with one Edward Dudgeon, who had been a sailor aboard the U.S.S. Engstrom, which had been docked at the Philadelphia Naval shipyard in October 1943. Dudgeon revealed rational explanations for everything Carlos Allende might have observed if he really were there, watching the strange activities on the destroyers in the Navy yard at the time. They had indeed been loading unusual high-tech equipment onto destroyers that night. These included new sonar devices as well as new depth charge launchers, and rather than being wrapped in Tesla coils, they were being wrapped in high-voltage cables to alter the ships’ magnetic signatures, making them more difficult for magnetic torpedoes to target. It was a process known as degaussing, and it sometimes produced no smell of ozone, as Allende described. It’s even possible that Allende may have overhead a sailor saying something about how it would make them invisible, not to the naked eye or even to radar, but to torpedos. As for the green haze, this was a common enough occurrence at sea, a weather phenomenon called St. Elmo’s Fire, caused by electrical discharge, which we might assume to have been pronounced by the degaussing process. And Dudgeon even offered an explanation for the disappearance of whatever ship Allende had seen and believed was the Eldridge, as well as its appearance in Norfolk and reappearance at Philadelphia in too short a time for such a journey. According to Dudgeon, who actually claimed the Eldridge was there in Philadelphia, which does conflict with other reports, a destroyer leaving the Philadelphia shipyard one night, appearing in Norfolk shortly thereafter, and then reappearing back in Philadelphia would have seemed impossible to a merchant marine, as their ships would have to take a 2-day trip to the harbor entrance, but the destroyers were able to take the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal, an inland channel, that would make such a short trip possible, and necessary, as Norfolk was where such ships were loaded with ammunition. Therefore, it is somewhat understandable that such a tall tale might be told by a merchant marine who saw the destroyers loaded up with secret anti-submarine technology and witnessed the unusual and definitely classified process of degaussing the ships, and who may have seen the ships engulfed in a strange kind of green fire during the process, and who later that evening noticed a ship had departed but the next morning saw it was present again, and perhaps even later heard through the grapevine that the same ship had been at Norfolk in the middle of the night, a round trip that would have seemed to him impossible to complete in so short a time if he were unaware of the shortcut naval warships were taking between the two Navy yards.

It is impossible, though, to give Allende the benefit of the doubt and suggest he may have actually been there and seen something that he honestly mistook for a ship teleporting. From the beginning, in his correspondence with Jessup, there was evidence that he was perpetrating a hoax. How, for example, could a merchant marine aboard a separate ship have even known all the particulars he claimed to know, down to Einstein’s involvement and his secret completion of the Unified Field Theory? And what else but an elaborate hoax could explain his annotation of Jessup’s book, in which he pretended to be three different people, or rather beings, engaged in a conversation in the margins about mere humans and their inability to grasp the explanations of various paranormal phenomena. The only rational alternative to it being a hoax is it being the product of mental illness. In 1969, though, Carlos Allende, or a man claiming to be him, appeared at the Arizona office of APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and confessed that his letters and annotations in the Varo edition of Jessup’s book had been a hoax. Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz chose not to believe this, though, and Allende later recanted. However, a year after the Berlitz-Moore book, Carlos Allende was discredited once and for all. In 1980, researcher Robert Goerman, who happened to live in the Pennsylvania town Allende had given in his return address, decided to look into it. Apparently little serious research had been done to track down Allende, as the address previously said to have been a vacant farmhouse was not vacant at all, and Goerman was pretty easily able to locate the estranged parents and siblings of Carlos Allende, whose real name, it turned out, was Carl Allen. In fact, it further turned out he knew the man’s father pretty well, and the family was only too willing to share stories about the eccentric drifter he had grown up to be, showing Goerman all the letters Carl had sent home over the years, in which he bragged about being the author of books that he had merely scribbled in, including not just Jessup’s book but Berlitz and Moore’s as well. The portrait that emerged from Goerman’s interviews was of a mischief-maker possessed of a gifted intellect. According to the Allen family, Carl had squandered his potential and had nothing to show for his life but a widely-believed urban legend. That legacy, however, continued on strong even after his discrediting in 1980, with a feature film dramatizing the story of the Philadelphia Experiment in 1984 executive produced by horror master John Carpenter, whose work, including his self-composed synth scores and the 1982 classic The Thing, has been paid extensive homage by the series Stranger Things. Indeed, this film adaptation of Berlitz and Moore’s book seems to have gone on to inspire the next clever fabricators of urban legend who came along, or rather, if they are to be believed, the movie just jogged their erased memories.

Carl Allen, AKA Carlos Allende, fabricator of the Philadelphia Experiment Hoax.

Around 1988, a videotape called The Truth about the Philadelphia Experiment began circulating in ufology and fringe belief circles. The video featured three men talking to a small audience in a private Long Island residence while they shared a slide show projected onto a bedsheet. Underground tapes like these sold for $20-$30 a pop and were copied and shared among likeminded conspiracy theorists who felt like such videos made them privy to secrets of which the sheeple were blissfully unaware, and it was through such independently produced and disseminated media that misinformation and hoaxes were spread before the advent of the modern Internet in the 1990s. In the video, the three men, Preston Nichols, Duncan Cameron, and Al Bielek, spoke about how they had recovered long repressed memories about their involvement with outlandish secret government experiments after viewing the film The Philadelphia Experiment. Preston Nichols claimed that he had been working in the 70s and 80s as a microwave engineer on Long Island but began moonlighting at nearby Montauk Airbase, ostensibly to work on their radar equipment. But he had recovered memories, he said, of his involvement with a series of bizarre experiments in an underground bunker at Camp Hero, a military installation that was at the time officially abandoned. According to the mythos, John Von Neumann, who Berlitz and Moore had claimed was instrumental in the development of the technology used in the Philadelphia Experiment, had gone on to further develop the electrogravitic field technology and apply it to some completely different purposes. Using technology contributed by Nicola Tesla for the Philadelphia Experiment, Von Neumann supposedly designed a chair that amplified and relayed human thoughts to a computer, which through some hocus pocus field technology then materialized that thought into reality. They could think of a can of beer and then it would appear, so real they could drink it. What does this have to do with the Philadelphia Project, you may be asking? Well, so the story goes, the participants used this technology that brought into reality whatever the person in the chair thought about, in conjunction with weather manipulation technology that allowed the opening of vortices, to open wormholes through space and time. Exactly 40 years after the Philadelphia Experiment, they opened one such wormhole and became linked to the field that had teleported the Eldridge from Philadelphia to Norfolk and back. Enter Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron, who claimed to be sailors aboard the Eldridge who leapt overboard during the experiment and landed in Camp Hero, 40 years in the future. Through an astonishing coincidence, Bielek and Cameron were not just any sailors. Bielek was a brilliant scientist-engineer who had been closely involved with the technical aspects of the Philadelphia Experiment, so he went to work at Montauk in the 1980s, and Cameron just so happened to be a gifted psychic, making him the perfect operator of the Montauk chair. All three of them claimed to have only recently remembered these events, after having seen the 1984 film, because they’d had their memories wiped by CIA brainwashing techniques. This is perhaps the least outlandish aspect of their story, but as we saw in part one of this series, it too is hard to credit, since the CIA failed to ever develop any such targeted amnesia effects. But however convoluted and unbelievable the story already sounds, strap in, because it only gets more tortuous and preposterous from here.

In the 1990s, terrestrial radio became a major channel for the spread of such hoaxes and conspiracy claims, and the biggest purveyor was Art Bell, host of Coast to Coast. Al Bielek and Preston Nichols appeared numerous times on Art Bell’s program to promote their claims and, of course, to sell copies of their tape, or of the series of books, co-authored by one Peter Moon, that Nichols began to self-publish in 1992. Over the course of these retellings, as the Montauk Mythos was revealed, or coalesced, or evolved, or was sporadically improvised—however you want to look at it—it grew more and more sensational. Al Bielek claimed to be a man out of time, whose identity had been rewritten. He was actually Ed Cameron, he said, and Duncan was his brother, but over the course of their time travel experiments at Montauk, he had gone back and forth in time and had even been age regressed into a 1-year-old’s body to have his identity erased, which seems far too elaborate a plan to get rid of him when the shadowy group running the Montauk Project could have just had him killed. It conveniently accounts, however, for there being no record of either Cameron on the Eldridge and also explains why there is no evidence that he, Al Bielek, had ever earned the advanced degrees in science and engineering he claimed to possess. As for who that shadowy Montauk group was, as with much of the story, this changed over time. It was a secret government operation a lá Mk-Ultra, involving Nazi scientists recruited via Operation Paperclip, performing experiments on psychic test subjects. Or rather, it was the project of a secret Nazi order that had survived the fall of the Third Reich and, funded by Nazi gold, sought to bring the Reich back through manipulation of the timeline. But then again, it used technology not just developed by Tesla and Einstein, but by extra-terrestrials who had signed a secret treaty with the U.S. government. The projects undertaken with the teleportation and time travel technology developed were equally wide-ranging and fantastical. For example, they claimed to have teleported to a facility beneath the pyramids on Mars in order to deactivate a defense grid that prevented aliens from entering the Solar System, and they described a plot to go back in time, assassinate Jesus Christ with a pistol, steal his blood, clone it, transfuse it into Duncan Cameron and then have him arrive on a flying saucer to Earth, the idea being that when scientists tested his DNA against traces on the Turin Shroud, they would have successfully faked the Second Coming. As with much of the mythos, these supposedly brilliant scientists seem to lack a fundamental grasp of much of the technical claims they make, for example, a blood transfusion does not change one’s DNA. But we will look at the plausibility and logical flaws involved with their story shortly. To conclude, we should point out the parts of their meandering mythology that seem to have inspired Stranger Things. According to the books, the Nazis or aliens or Nazi aliens behind the project began abducting children in the 1970s to experiment on them, torturing them and either uncovering their innate psychic abilities or cultivating them. Finally, in an act of resistance to the project, Bielek’s psychic brother, Duncan, used the thought-form-generating chair to bring a monster into being, and as this monster rampaged through Camp Hero, they ended up having to destroy the lab’s equipment to make it dematerialize, resulting in the end of the Montauk Project. Here we see all the seeds of the Netflix series Stranger Things, from missing children, to experiments on abducted psychic children, to the opening of portals with the power of the mind and the drawing of a monster into our reality. But as we will see, and as you should already be able to discern, the show was not based on anything real. It was inspired by a work of fiction that is even more far-fetched than the show is, and that only masqueraded as a true story.

Al Bielek, supposed time traveler.

As I started to write this section of the episode, which the entire series has built up to, it occurred to me… do I really need to debunk so absurdly ridiculous a conspiracy claim? Is it not enough to stick my thumb toward some of the most outrageous claims these people have made and just shrug? It feels embarrassing to even dignify the story of the Montauk Project by putting effort into disproving it, like it’s beneath me. However, if I were to share it without demonstrating its clear falsehood, I would be engaging in the same kind of media amplification that allows hoaxes like these to spread and achieve the status of legend. So here we go. It should be enough to point out that the burden of proof is on those making the claims, and as they are extraordinary claims, according to the Sagan standard, they require extraordinary evidence, but none has ever been provided. Oh, it’s been promised, though. For the remainder of his life, until his death in 2007, Al Bielek assured the public that he was working on a definitive book that would demystify the science behind all the experiments he claimed to have been involved with, but unsurprisingly, this world-shattering treatise on teleportation and time travel never appeared, nor is there any indication that he ever penned an academic article that he attempted to get published in a scholarly journal, or that he ever made an effort to demonstrate any of his claims to a bona fide scientist. Oh but he sure made the time to coauthor a book on “UFO conspiracies” with paranormal writer Brad Steiger. Likewise, when asked in an interview why Preston Nichols didn’t publish anything regarding the secret scientific advancements he was always on about being privy to, he hand waved the question by saying there was no market or audience for that. I’ll just point out, first, that there would obviously be a massive market for such a scientific breakthrough, including any number of private corporations that would jump at the chance to patent such technology, and second, Nichols was tacitly confessing here that he was in the business of promoting paranormal conspiracy theory because there is an audience and market for that. As for the credibility of the men, consider Bielek, who has been caught in errors both logical and technical and then simply changes his story. Even if you were to believe his claim that his true identity was erased, along with evidence of his higher learning, one fundamental lie about his background has been discovered. He claimed to have never heard of the Philadelphia Experiment before seeing the film and recovering his memories, but UFO researchers have revealed that they had known Bielek since the early 1960s and known him to be obsessed with UFOs and with the Philadelphia Experiment, even owning and sharing a copy of the annotated Varo edition of Morris Jessup’s The Case for the UFO (something Bielek himself eventually conceded), so it’s pretty clear that his entire story is founded on a fundamental lie. As for Preston Nichols, discrediting him takes us to darker places. After the publication of Nichols’ books, when he would speak about Montauk on the paranormal circuit, men began to approach him saying they thought maybe they had been Montauk boys and had their memory erased. Preston encouraged them in their beliefs, meeting with them privately to “deprogram” them of their falsified memories. Numerous participants in these deprogramming sessions, including Nichols himself, describe how he touched the subjects’ bodies with his hands in something like the Mesmeric stroking I recently described in my Blind Spot exclusive minisode on Mesmerism and hypnosis. But more than that, it has been established that Preston Nichols convinced these men that in order to deprogram them, he had to masturbate them, while applying some kind of electromagnetic radiation—a well-known pseudoscientific alternative medicine called radionics. At the end of this bizarre journey, then, it becomes strikingly clear that these men perpetrated an elaborate hoax to make money off of the famously credulous UFO conspiracy theorist community, and at least one of them, Preston Nichols, used his mystique to take sexual advantage of numerous men.

So there we have it, the dark heart of the source material for the Netflix series Stranger Things. I greatly enjoy the show, and I’ll say that I’m far better able to suspend my disbelief while watching it than I am while reading about the Montauk Project. It is very strange to think that it was likely inspired by this outlandish conspiracy claim that has been used to molest its adherents. So after all, we might say that the series Stranger Things is not based on any real history, since the elements of real history it uses were present in the fiction that inspired it, and the story of the Montauk Project is also fiction. Indeed, the books that established and expanded the Montauk mythos, including those written by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, as well as later books written only by Peter Moon, and books written by Stewart Swerdlow, one supposed Montauk boy who underwent the handsy deprogramming of Preston Nichols and then claimed to have recovered his memories about Montauk, all of them are published by Sky Books, Peter Moon’s publishing house, and all of them are officially categorized as fiction despite their claims to authenticity. In fact the Sky Books slogan is “Where science fiction meets reality.” However, if you visit their website, you’ll be directed to their sister website, The Time Travel Education Center, and if you dig in there, you’ll feel like you stumbled on the web presence of a cult. And that’s essentially what it is. In fact, it has quite a lot in common with that other, more famous conspiracy-addled, Internet-based cult, Qanon. Like it, the Montauk cult has become a breeding ground for baseless conspiracy delusion. Qanon’s habit of trying to integrate all conspiracy theories has been remarked on before, including by myself in my series on Illuminati conspiracy claims. Like them, Preston Nichols, Peter Moon, and Stewart Swerdlow have brought every conceivable conspiracy theory into the fold, managing to weave in legendary artifacts like the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the Spear of Destiny, and enigmatic figures like John Dee, L. Ron Hubbard, Aleister Crowley, and Jack Parsons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one talking point of Qanon was being spread by Stewart Swerdlow long before the purported revelations of Q, as Swerdlow was known to claim that the Montauk boys were tortured in order to extract that sweet adrenochrome from their pineal glands… never mind that adrenochrome is derived from the adrenal glands, which are nowhere near the pineal gland. One wonders if Al Bielek ever would have made such an elementary error as this. Really, this is representative of the general devolution of hoaxery that we see today. Whereas thirty years ago, one had to be a clever and convincing storyteller capable of spinning an intricate yarn and firehosing technobabble on live radio, today we have conspiracy influencers like Canada’s Qanon Queen Romana Didulo who just uploads videos in which she claims to be “the only visible leader on this planet,” suppressed by, who else, pedophile globalists, and she still finds dupes to eat it up, turning their sometimes violent ire on whoever she targets, be it healthcare workers for administering vaccines or police for enforcing business closures and masking. Honestly, it’s this nauseating reality today that makes me so nostalgic for my childhood in the 1980s, and for stories like Stranger Things, in which an innocent but savvy group of kids overcome the machinations of bumbling but no less nefarious adults.

The less than impressive Preston Nichols.

Further Reading

Goerman, Robert A. “Alias Carlos Allende.” FATE, Oct. 1980. Carlos Allende and his Philadelphia Experiment, windmill-slayer.tripod.com/aliascarlosallende/.

Margaritoff, Marco. “Inside The Montauk Project, The US Military’s Alleged Mind Control Program.” All That’s Interesting, 7 May 2022, allthatsinteresting.com/montauk-project.

Metzger, Richard. “THE MONTAUK PROJECT: THE IDIOTIC CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT INSPIRED ‘STRANGER THINGS.’” Dangerous Minds, 4 May 2020, dangerousminds.net/comments/the_montauk_project.

The Philadelphia Experiment from A to Z, www.de173.com/.

Tretkoff, Ernie. “This Month in Physics History: Einstein's quest for a unified theory.” APS News, vol. 14, no. 11, Dec. 2005. APS Physics, www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200512/history.cfm.

Valee, Jacques F. “Anatomy of a Hoax: The Philadelphia Experiment Fifty Years Later.” Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 8, no. 1, 1994, pp. 47-7 I. CiteSeerX, citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.541.6200.