Anything Less Than Real: Warren G. Harding Rings In The New Era

Anything Less Than Real:
Warren G. Harding Rings In The New Era
by
R.E. Prindle

Dedicated to Ann Coulter who is the only other person I have heard of who realizes the importance of Warren G. Harding.

It is time to reevaluate the Harding presidency as well as perhaps the Republican Interregnum between the Socialist Wilson and FDR administrations.

Perhaps the first thing to do is to dispel the notion that the Harding Administration was extraordinarily corrupt as administrations go. If one is going to call the administration corrupt then it must be against a normal standard and not isolated as a phenomenon. While Harding inherited Wilsonian corruption after the Great War, Roosevelt created the corruption of post-WWII. The money involved in the latter dwarfed anything that preceded it by incalculable amounts.

A major source of corruption after the Great War was the disposal of stores purchased for the war. These were fairly trivial amounts by later standards. In contrast the Roosevelt administration sequestered some piddling amounts of Japanese property and mega enormous amounts of German property including huge companies and scads of patents, copyrights and trademarks. Yet one never hears of these thefts, only a couple refrigerators left on back porches by Japanese. Ask yourself why? These German properties were under the personal authority of Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the officer of the Alien Properties Custodian of David Bazelon. Bazelon was both a Jew and associated with the Super Mob and Chicago’s Outfit.

After the war Bazelon used his office to enrich both Jews and criminals by selling off the pittance of Japanese properties and, in today’s values billions and billions of German properties for a penny or so on the dollar thus stealing from the Germans and defrauding the US Government of billions.

I don’t think it is necessary to list other financial malfeasances; Bazelon alone surpassed any corruption of the Harding years including Tea Pot Dome and Elk Hills. So yes, there was the inevitable postwar corruption in the Harding Administration, but not by it, of negligible proportions compared to Roosevelt.

Having put that out of the way let us now consider the state of the nation Harding inherited from the Democratic Wilson Administration. Two new developments, unprecedented developments, had occurred that were novel for a new administration to deal with. One was the terrible advent of Prohibition and the other was the women’s vote.

In this first election in which women cast their ballots we had the first landslide victory in US history. Harding captured sixty percent of the vote and all but a hundred or so of those of the Electoral College. Apropos of that Harding has been ridiculed because his campaign manager, Harry Daugherty said that Harding looked like a president should. Well, he did.

His opponent, Cox, on the other hand, looked like a mousy dip, which isn’t to say he was one, he looked like one. He was unhandsome. The choice for women thus was between a nice, big handsome Harding who looked the part and a mousy Cox who didn’t. The election was the first landslide in US history. I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

The ground rules had changed whether you believed in it or not, elections could no longer recite the issues as men understood them but campaigns had to be crafted to include the very different concerns of women. In my estimation Harding clearly benefited from the female vote.

Prohibition was an entirely different challenge. Prohibition was an achievement of female politics. The campaign for it was carried out by criminal means. The most famous prohibitionist was the violent, psychotic Carrie Nation who entered people’s places of business and began laying about with an axe. She was allowed to get away with it. The promoters of prohibition were too limp brained to think the matter through to its conclusion apparently unaware that alcohol could easily be smuggled in from abroad or even, heaven forbid, manufactured illegally.

Some form of alcohol, wines and beers, had been part of civilization from its inception and gave some surcease from the cares of life. While the vast majority of drinkers were able to manage the pleasures there was naturally a percentage who abused alcohol. When distilled liquors became available the problem of abuse was compounded.

Nevertheless, wine, beer and strong spirits comprised a huge industry employing undoubtedly tens of thousands of people. In the reformers’ mind, as always, it seemed better to punish the majority to suppress the few.

It should have been obvious to these unhappy reformers trying to make everyone’s life as miserable as theirs that an entire illegal industry would rise from the ashes of the legal and that that illegal industry would necessarily have to be criminal and clandestine. What can one say about reformers?

Thus when the Volstead Act was passed an unprecedented wave of criminality swept over the country like a tsunami. We can blame Prohibition on the Wilson Administration on whose watch the bill was passed and enforced. Thus the Harding Administration was called on to deal with this enormous level of corruption generated by do gooders. Once again Prohibition far exceeded any of the usual political corruption of the twenties.

Now, the control of prohibition passed into the exclusive control of two immigrant groups, those of the Italians, actually Sicilians, and the Jews. Using the incredible profits of Prohibition Jews and Sicilians then were able to assume a dominant if not controlling position in US politics while being able to buy into legitimate businesses. As incredible as it may seem by the mid- to late thirties many people considered crime as just another way of doing business, an industry. Needless to say bootleg profits were used to corrupt politics at every level. How could the Harding Administration escape? Once again, just look at the FDR Administration with open eyes.

The US has always taken a romantic or sentimental view of immigration, still does. As if it justified immigration the Romanticists said that the immigrants were only seeking a better life, content themselves in the superiority of having created not only a better life than anywhere else but the best life. Liberals believe in their own superiority.

One imagines that the only reason to emigrate from one’s homeland at any time in history was to seek a better life. Perhaps invaders drove you from your country making it necessary to find a life, better or worse, somewhere else and at someone else’s expense. Perhaps one’s situation was so bitter that any place else was more attractive. Actually the prime motivating force was US employers seeking cheap labor. Not very romantic really.

Nevertheless unlimited immigration began after the Civil War during the seventies increasing yearly until 1914 when the Great War began cutting off all emigration. It was then that problems not seen as too significant became prominent. US immigration had been from Europe and when the continent went to war these old national loyalties caused fractures. It became apparent that the Melting Pot notion had failed and as Teddy Roosevelt said, the US was nothing more than an international boarding house. Sentiment was strong for the Central Powers, who we have all been taught to despise, but not as strong as that for the Allies, who we have all been taught to revere.

The Irish acting on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend openly sided with the Central Powers against the English hence targeting US shipments to England for sabotage. The Jews whose chief enemy was the Russians refused cooperation with the Allies until Germany took Russia out of the war and then at that time and only at that time, the Jews gave the Allies full cooperation against the Germans who they then believed that they could include in the Bolshevik Revolution post war.

The Italians took a stance but issued a recall of men back from the US to fight in the war. After the war Mussolini attempted to send the Italian wounded back to the US to be medically cared for at US expense.

Of all the immigrants US nativists considered Jews and Italians as unassimilable. If nothing else, Prohibition proved that assertion as US laws meant nothing to either group. Thus it was left to the Harding Administration to deal with the long deferred problem of immigration. It would do so for the first time from a realistic perspective rather than a sentimental or romantic one.

A concomitant of immigration was that a great many of those ’seeking a better life’ had left their homelands a step or two ahead of the police as either criminals or political fugitives. They were revolutionaries seeking to overturn their own governments, Communists in a word. Their position had been strengthened by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia while the Wilson Administration was actually Socialist in sentiment and had the war lasted a year or two longer, in fact. Wilson was on the verge of establishing a third term dictatorship to do just this, not unlike what Roosevelt achieved, when he was struck down by his stroke thus aborting that plan.

The Revolution did not confine itself to Russia but was actually being attempted through 1919 and 1920 into 1921 and the Harding Administration. The country was nearly in total disorder when Harding was sworn in, March of 1921. A necessity of the first importance was to restore order, that is, put down the Revolution. Harding was equal to that task. The Chinese proverb and curse is that may you be born into interesting times. While the elements defeated by Harding have successfully maligned his memory Warren G. Harding was actually one of the greatest US presidents.

2.

No historian I have ever read regards the problems Harding had to solve or his lack of experience in doing so. Harding was the editor of the small town newspaper of Marion, Ohio, West of the Alleghenies in Middle America. Harding worked hard, applying himself intelligently, making a success of his paper.

He became friends with Harry Daugherty, an Ohio politician who propelled him first to the Senate and then in 1921 to the Presidency. Years before his election Harding began an affair with a young women by the name of Nan Britton by whom he had a child. Naturally Harding had no desire to have this publicized yet he behaved honorably always supporting Nan and his child. He was a decent and good man.

Much has been made of this affair as though this were immorality of an extreme nature. Historically affairs and illegitimate children have been common. No big deal. How can one be expected to condemn Harding when the later John F. Kennedy had mistresses in the White House when Jackie was not about. What is one to think of Kennedy when he had his secret service agents rounding up prostitutes from the street, three at a time, for his dalliance?

FDR publicly lived with his mistress in Georgia while his beauteous wife, Eleanor pined away up North. Bill Clinton kept his member limber by having his female aides give him fellatio during business hours in the Oval Office. Hillary didn’t object.

Was Harding a moral reprobate? Hardly.

Then, the historians attempt to make him an ignorant oaf. A competing presidential candidate William McAdoo described Harding’s oratorical abilities, not surprisingly, as ‘an army of pompous phrases marching across the landscape in search of an idea.’

Oh well, politicians, how much sense do you get out of one of them? As an example of supposedly meaningless blather they offer this pre-election statement of Harding:

Quote:

America’s present need is not heroics but healing;
not nostrums, but normalcy;
not revolution but restoration;
not agitation, but adjustment;
not surgery, but serenity;
not the dramatic, but the dispassionate;
not experiment, but equipoise;
not submergence in internationality, but triumphant nationalism…

Unquote.

Rather than the nonsense it is portrayed as by his detractors, the speech details the problems the country was facing and the results Harding hoped to bring about and in which he largely succeeded. I’m sure his audience would have understood, whether consciously or unconsciously, exactly the issues to which he was referring. Only absurd historians have made a jumble of it. What the list amounts to is an eight point program not too different in approach than Wilson’s fourteen points. So we have a sort of political continuity between the administrations.

Let’s consider the list:
1. Not heroics, but healing. Refers to any number of problems, the waves of industrial unrest, hysterical politics and what not, a general calming down, a reduction from hysterics to the dispassionate.

2. Not nostrums but normalcy. A nostrum is a pet scheme for bringing about some social or political reform. There were enough of those going around- Prohibition, Communism et al. The issue here was the use of the word normalcy which in 1920 was incorrect although in common usage now. Normality would have been the correct word but normalcy actually carries the correct meaning that normality misses. His use of normalcy was a cause of immense hilarity and satisfaction to his detractors.

3. Not revolution but restoration. An obvious reference to the Bolsheviks and the social unrest they were causing.

4. Not agitation but adjustment. Once again political and social agitation were rife calling for the discard of current ways for impossible utopian ideals.

5. Not surgery, but serenity. Agitators called for drastic social surgery when once again calm and reflection were called for.

6. Not dramatics, but dispassion. Calm down, lower the level of hysterical passion.

7. Not experiment, but equipoise. Prohibition was a disastrous social experiment from it conception, what was needed was balance.

8. Not submergence in internationality, but triumphant nationalism. Clear enough, the League Of Nations was unworkable, out; tariffs were in, America First. The Naval Treaty.

As Harding was elected by a landslide one has to believe that the electorate knew exactly what Harding meant and whole heartedly approved of his choices. Nor did Harding disappoint; he was very popular during his presidency only successfully denigrated after his death when he was unable to defend himself.

3.

In office only two and half years before he died in suspicious circumstances how did Harding conduct his administration? One can’t imagine today the tremendous political energy released by the Bolshevik Revolution. The world was terrified while an angry civil war ensued across the Western world financially and militarily over an exhausted Europe. The civil war lasting for several years was fought on several fronts. The war had turned from a national war to an ideological war. Reds versus Whites. In Russia the ideological war was fought on three fronts, the North of Archangel, South in the Ukraine and in Siberia East of the Urals. American troops and munitions were involved. In the end the Whites, or Czarist troops lost.

Revolutionary activities sprang up in all countries including the US. While the US was aiding the Whites, the Jews raised enormous amounts that they traitorously funneled to the Bolsheviks under the eyes of the Wilson Administration. Jacob Schiff, the Jewish Prime Minister, was called to Washington by Wilson to defend himself against charges of Bolshevism. Wilson let him off the hook. Thus as in the Viet Nam war of the 1960s and 70s Government efforts were nullified by Fifth Columnists aiding the enemy.

The Bolshevik victory in Russia gave Socialism a political base from which to operate so the Socialists and Communist cells in the US were activated lending their support to Soviet efforts. Suddenly a socialist presence was clear in labor, the churches, the arts, publishing, across the board. While official Communist membership was relatively low so that it could be denigrated as no threat it must be remembered that the successful Bolshevik Party in Russia was just a splinter of US numbers, so size is irrelevant; organization is the key.

America’s first reaction was sharp as A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General of the Wilson Administration rounded up several thousands of Communists for deportation to Russia. Here the Fifth Columnists sabotaged this wise response citing peacetime US practices for this wartime attack instead of the wartime provisions Wilson had used during WWI. Palmer was compelled to release all but a couple hundred who were put aboard ‘the Soviet Ark’ and sent to Russia including Leon Trotsky who had been living in New York City and without whom the Russian Revolution might have been reversed. Trotsky was actually temporarily detained but then released for some reason.

There were substantial crackdowns on all Socialist activities including the IWW or Industrial Workers Of The World who were reduced to impotence. Their leader, Big Bill Haywood was spirited out of the country to Russia. As Harding came to office there was a virtual civil war in progress. The fact has been obscured or erased by subsequent historians who are compelled to take the Red point of view.

At the same time as this undeclared war was being fought the troops were being brought back from the land of hinky, dinky parlay voo. How ya gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree. Even though their lives had been totally disrupted very often destroyed for no reason now that their job was done they were thrown on the trash heap. Except by Warren G. Harding, the new president.

A not overly favorable biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams, writing in his biography of Harding, The Tragic Years, comments favorable thusly, p. 284-5.

Quote:

The glory of heroes is soon departed. The public which welcomed with oratory, banquets, and ticker-tape our fighters, returning victorious from Europe, quickly forgot those of them most sorely in need of care. Two years after the Armistice the plight of war’s human debris was pitiable. Of these the most desperate cases were 71,000 mental patients and 38,000 tuberculosis victims. F.W. Galbraith, Jr., National Commander of the American Legion, estimated on the basis of an investigation, that there were 10,000 of the disabled in cellars, poorhouses, and insane asylums. T.W. Salmon, a disinterested and competent investigator, thus reported:

“Veterans with nervous or mental troubles were without provision for care and were quartered in institutions for the criminal insane, addicts, and vicious degenerates, without Federal supervision.”

No agency in Washington was equipped to handle a problem of this magnitude. Nor was there any special public interest in it. The war was over. “Let’s forget its’ expressed the attitude of a people sated and bored with emotion.

The President (Harding) did not feel that way about it. His humanitarianism revolted from such neglect. He acted wisely and constructively in welding the disparate, overlapping guardianships into one official entity, the United States Veterans Bureau…

Unquote.

Compare that to the neglect and humiliation of the returning veterans of Viet Nam. The so-called Red tribunes of the people, these creeps who sabotaged their brave men’s efforts on the battlefields, heaved garbage on them as they debarked from ships and planes.

Even WWI vets who had been promised a bonus or tip for the needless disruption of their lives were denied their due by the People’s Commissar Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They were compelled to storm Washington in a semi-violent attempt to compel the fulfillment of the government’s promise. The same army they had served in was turned against them. So much for FDR and the New Deal.

With the end of the war a whole host of what were actually revolutionary acts were released. Palmer of the Wilson Administration certainly treated them that way. As a result his house was bombed putting his teeth on edge. A huge bomb not unlike that used in OK City of recent memory was detonated on Wall Street. Law and order was rapidly breaking down. Mail robberies were a daily occurrence while millions of dollars of stolen Liberty bonds were being traded. Those millions today would represent a billion dollars or more. This was big money happening. Incredible amounts of money that no group of individuals could possibly spend. Where was the money going?

A very able member of the Harding cabinet, Post Master General Will Hays tackled those problems and solved them in short order. Such a man was a danger to the Lords of Misrule. What happened to Hays? In addition to all the other problems, the Guardians of Decency were alarmed, justifiably so, at the moral content of movies. Rather than accept outside censorship of the movies the moguls decided to police themselves and as their Top Cop they lured Will Hays away from his post by an offer he could have refused but found it impossible to do. The offer was for 100,000 dollars a year. That right 100K in 1922. Was that bribery or what? After only nine months in office Hays was offered the equivalent of five million dollars a year to supervise Hollywood morals. Who wouldn’t take that while being flexible enough not to lose the job?

Since the offer came from Hollywood that tells you who was behind the mail robberies and stolen bonds and lets you know what they were worth.

Harding outlawed the Communist Party briefly in 1921 getting right on that offense too but the Fifth Columnists got that overturned.

Thus within months of being in office Harding had cleaned up a large part of untoward activity while if couldn’t actually suppress Communist activity he was at least able to force them to turn their damper down while forcing them into even deeper clandestine activity.

But, as you can see he was building up a lot of enemies who wished him dead while wanting his memory exorcised.

And then Harding had to deal with the problem of immigration, also within the first months in office. The cry for the restriction of immigration, whether it came from North, East or South had been voiced at least as early as the 1840s when the potato famine drove a couple million Irish to the New Island. Really teeming masses. And then the Forty-eighters came over as a result of the failed Communist Revolution of 1848, more wretched refuse, that led ultimately to the post-war revolutionary activity.

These members were relatively small but in the 1870s Jewish immigration from the Pale of Russia began in earnest resulting in several million people who the restrictionists believed, as it turns out, rightly, were unassimilable. And then in the nineties the Sicilians added New York to the terminal end of their migratory route from Buenos Aires through Brazil and Central America. These people too were thought rightly to be unassimilable.

And then those sweet little old ladies hacked Prohibition through the Amendment process apparently believing that the law was the law and everyone would abide by it. They held that futile belief even though they had engaged in rampant lawlessness to get the Amendment approved.

Well, a void had been created and you know what nature thinks of voids. They get filled; nature abhors them or, so we are told. What people rushed in where angels, or at least, less venturesome mortals fear to tread? These two unassimilable peoples, the Jews and Sicilians.

Nobody gets credit for being right in such situations the restrictionists were right.

In most analyses of any period the activities of Jews are always suppressed; you never are allowed to see them until they want to be seen. Nobel awards time being one. While being Omni-present we are asked to believe that their only effect on society is to win Nobel prizes. In point of fact Jews, having great presence of mind, always work behind and under the scene. Thus to understand their effort on the America of the Harding Administration one has to set a background. I’m not going to go back too far settling on the transfer of the Jewish World Government from France when the Alliance Israelite Universelle was sent to the US and became the American Jewish Committee by 1906. This was the international Jewish government that Henry Ford referred to in his Dearborn Independent articles later collected and published under the misleading but accurate title: The International Jew. The articles were published during the Battle For Ford Motors largely during Harding’s tenure.

The leader or Prime Minister of the world Jewish government was a man named Jacob Schiff, himself descended from the German Forty-eighters rather than being a Russian Jew.

In the Jewish war against the Russian Czarist government Schiff played a leading part. He was personally responsible for engineering the Russian defeat during the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.

During that war the Jews of Europe and the US denied the Russians loans to conduct war properly while Jacob Schiff personally provided the Japanese with the funds without which they couldn’t have waged war.

While Schiff himself lacked enough of the ready for the war he was on the board of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. The Equitable was sitting on a hoard of 200 million, in today’s dollars, billions. Schiff illegally used this money to loan to the Japanese. The loan caused a tremendous scandal in which Schiff skillfully avoided detection shifting the blame to the other directors.

The peace treaty was chaired by Theodore Roosevelt in the US at which proceedings Schiff led a delegation of Jews who participated as a Jewish National delegation. Stacking the deck against the Russians.

Not content to punish the Russians for alleged injustices toward Jews in Russia, Schiff and ‘the international’ Jews worked to cause the US to sever diplomatic relations with Russia which result was achieved in 1913. Thus the US became dupes of the Jews.

In 1913 the Federal Reserve System was created as a private corporation owned by ten other corporations of which nine were Jewish firms from the US and Europe. The tenth was the Rockefellers. This private firm printed US currency that it loaned back to the US government at interest, thus creating a tremendous income to be used for worldwide Jewish machinations for which there was no accounting. I would call it a brilliant move but when you’re dealing with Liberal suckers it isn’t much of an achievement.

While the Jews had had no presence in Washington DC prior to the Wilson Administration, beginning in 1913 Wilson flooded his government with them much to the consternation of the English led government of the previous hundred years plus since independence. You know, it’s not like people couldn’t see what was going on.

Coincidentally as Jews were taken into government the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith was established to counter any objections on ethnic grounds. Wilson himself was a socialist so that when the US entered the Great War a socialist takeover of the industrial system began. The railroads were immediately nationalized while the War Industries Board required all industries to submit financial details and to submit them for governmental regulations by the WIB controlled by Jews under Bernard Baruch essentially setting them up for seizure.

Of course, this provoked a violent reaction especially from Detroit and the auto industry. Ford and the Dodge Brothers objected strenuously. The Dodge Brothers used intemperate language reflecting on Baruch’s ethnic heritage that Baruch never forgave. Ford was more restrained but tarred with the Dodge’s brush. The Dodge Brothers died mysterious deaths in 1920 while their company went into limbo for years until Wall Street persuaded Walter Chrysler to take the company. An attempt was made on Ford’s life. This confrontation was also the beginning of the Battle For Ford Motors, begun in 1918 but aborted by the war ending. It was begun again on a financial front by Jewish banks trying to force a takeover.

So, the Socialist/Communist takeover of the US was very narrowly avoided. Yet the Socialist revolution had to be financed with hard cash that the Socialists didn’t have. Where was the cash to come from? From the US. The Jews had created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 very fortuitously it would seem just before the major expansion of the money supply caused by the World War. That war from the Allied side was financed entirely by the US. At war’s end the European debt to the US was enormous while it would never be repaid. It was just forgotten. Consider that when you get exercised by the current US debt. It can be forgotten too.

Yet the ten merchant banking firms who owned the Federal Reserve collected interest on every dollar of that debt. Thus the US dollars went to nine Jewish firms in both the US and Europe plus the Rockefellers.

As I have noted, as soon as the Bolsheviks seized power, Jacob Schiff rushed huge loans provided by those banks to finance the Bolshevik takeover. At the same time the devastation of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe was total. There were still roughly five million Jews in those areas. Jewish American ‘charitable’ organizations operating under the name of the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee began to funnel enormous amounts of cash and supplies destined only for their co-religionists into this volatile political environment where the first people on their feet would have a commanding role. Socialism or no socialism money was the key, as always. As the aforementioned Liberty bonds in Jewish hands had been stolen that was a pile of free money that was laundered. Crime was about to be organized in a way that would provide other funds in large amounts. There was a succession of Jewish crime lords that generated the money. The first in the teens was a fellow called Monk Eastman, as his criminal methods became outdated he was sent to jail to be replaced by the notorious Arnold Rothstein who set up the modern organized crime structure but as his methods became outdated he was replaced, murdered, and Lepke Buchalter took over the role to be replaced in the forties by the major fund raiser Meyer Lansky who engineered that huge cash cow, Las Vegas and gambling. As different methods were needed he, in turn, was replaced by Sidney Korshak of the Super Mob. Thus the Jewish over world was integrated with the Jewish underworld functioning as a unit.

In celebration of these criminals the Jews recently created the National Museum Of Organized Crime in its capitol of Las Vegas, Nevada. The nationality referred to in the National Museum is that of the Jews otherwise they would have called it either the American-Jewish Museum or simply the American Museum Of Organized Crime. So you can go to Vegas and admire the criminals deeds of these stellar Jews.

Seemingly almost a gift from heaven to the criminals, Prohibition came along in 1920. This gave the financial basis for organizing crime as a ‘business’ thus opening vistas only dreamed of before the Volstead Act. Prohibition also created an insuperable problem that plagued the Republican Interregnum. Amazingly Prohibition began in a Democratic Administration and ended almost by fiat in the Democratic Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt twelve years later, one of the those coincidental linkages between Wilson and FDR. Upon taking office Roosevelt held up a glass of obviously bootleg beer and announced that Prohibition was over. Just like that. Was the fix in from the beginning to end or wasn’t it?

But, back to the Battle Of Ford Motors for a moment. The bankers wanted Ford Motors not only because they hated Henry Ford but because Ford Motors was a bonanza waiting to be realized almost bigger than Prohibition.

Ford valued his company at something over a billion dollars. He had completely vertically integrated his company. That means he not only made the cars but he owned the metal mines and smelted the ores, he owned huge forests he cut and processed, coal mines to fuel his furnaces and even the railroad that carried the coals from the Line to River Rouge. He had subsidiaries worldwide. By 1920 Fords could be bought actually in any country in the world. Like Sherwin-Williams boasted of their paints, Ford covered the world.

The value of the company was compacted. In the bankers’ hands the company could be broken up into its component parts increasing the stock market value to three or four billion, all free money, especially as they were trying to buy Ford at the bankruptcy rate of 10 cents on the dollar. So you see how fiercely the Battle For Ford Motors was fought. You can see why Ford fought back by running his exposes of Jewish machinations, which were true, in his Dearborn Independent. The Independent was also the first nationally distributed newspaper by the way.

Henry Ford won the battle but ultimately lost the war.

So as you can see, Harding was elected into one of, if not the, most tumultuous times in American history and acquitted himself extremely well. His efforts were also appreciated by the American public that awarded him the highest approval ratings during his term in office.

His actions also made him many enemies not least of whom were the Communists and Jews. While Jews were prominent in Washington during the Wilson years and again in the Roosevelt years they were conspicuously absent during the Republican Interregnum. The Communists too, while if not destroyed, were harassed and suppressed forcing them to adopt different tactics while frustrating their desire for an immediate conquest.

On the immigration front too, Harding’s policy of realistic restricted immigration frustrated the desires of the sentimental immigrationists. Harding passed a restrictive bill quickly in 1921 that was augmented under Coolidge’s Administration in 1924 and survived almost intact until 1965 thus giving the country much needed breathing room to attempt to assimilate those already here to attempt to turn them into one national unit. It didn’t happen.

It is not particularly well known but in 1914 the Jews had formulated a plan and organized it to transfer the entire Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement to the US utilizing the ports of New Orleans and Corpus Christi, those ports being less conspicuous than New York City and Boston.

The war, of course, aborted that plan, and just as the Jews were about to activate the plan after the war Harding slammed through a restricted immigration act based on quotas seemingly aimed directly at excluding Jews period. This was an unforgivable crime in Jewish eyes while also forcing them to change their plan of the conquest of the New Promised Land.

Harding also dealt with internationalism rejecting the League Of Nations in favor of nationalistic policies. In the first years of the new century the Japanese had sent paramilitary troops for the pre-invasion of California, thus all the Japanese immigrants were men without women. The Californians who had already forced passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 objected vehemently to the Japanese invasion. Rather than offend the Japanese by protecting his own country the Teddy Roosevelt Administration came to a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ whereby the Japanese would no longer send ‘working men’ but only doctors and lawyers. I think Teddy called his administration the Square Deal. He must have known what he was talking about; that solution was certainly square.

After the war then with no military invasion imminent these men demanded women. Thus began the strange phenomenon of the Japanese Picture Brides. The men and women exchanged pictures making their selection on that basis and then the women were sent to California for marriage. Many interesting situations arose from that.

Still there was a great deal of hostility between the US and Japan. The hostility was actually caused one sidedly by the US. Very embarrassing situation. It began in 1853 when Admiral Matthew Perry ‘opened’ Japan at the mouths of his cannon. What’ll it be he sneered from the poop deck: Yes or no.

The relationship was exacerbated in the 1870s when anti-slavery Yankee planters landed in Yokohama and forcibly abducted a hundred or so Japanese to labor on their old plantations in Hawaii. I can see how the Yankees got so exercised by Southern slavery in the US. So, while I have to side with the US the Japanese have always had a legitimate grievance that could only be satisfied by war. I mean, come on, they had to regain their manhood after having been emasculated in 1853.

Nevertheless in 1908 TR said we would have to fight those fellows within thirty years and he only missed by a few years.

Thus in 1922 the Washington Naval Treaty was negotiated as, we suppose, an example of triumphant nationalism as opposed to the internationalism of the League of Nations. The Naval Treaty limited the size of naval fleets inadvertently favoring the Japanese. But the belligerence remained at a high level that left the then territory of Hawaii vulnerable. Naval fuel was shifting from coal to oil so while coaling stations had been established there were no oil storage facilities on Oahu the site of the Pearl Harbor Naval Station.

This was a dangerous situation. It was difficult to get Congress to act so some enterprising American oil men, Doheny and Sinclair, set about to remedy the situation on their own. Now, too oil fields, Tea Pot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills near Bakersfield, had been set aside as Naval Preserves. The storage facilities in Hawaii would be naval, so there is a connection.

Doheny and Sinclair set about to build the oil storage on their own and to fill the tanks they negotiated to use the naval preserves Teapot Dome and Elk Hills for oil supplies. This deal was used as an excuse to create a huge scandal, although after Harding’s death. Nevertheless the storage facilities were built and filled with oil so that when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor duly came the US was duly prepared.

Two and a half years into his presidency Harding began a tour of the West Coast during which he suddenly died. Some said poison some said heart attack but they got him into the ground so quickly there was no autopsy. Anytime the rules are broken its cause for suspicion. Some said his wife killed him but I have a hard time believing that.

Of course we have no way of knowing whether he was assassinated or not but there were many who may have wished his dead. Harding had sidetracked the Revolution, derailing it, while forcing the Bolsheviks further underground. His immigration act had thwarted Jewish plans to bring over five million fellow Jews. So actually Harding was ‘responsible’ for the death of all those Jews in the holocaust although I don’t think he’s ever been officially accused.

Neither the Jews nor the Communists have earned a reputation for being forgiving so both groups certainly had a motive. But, the problem is incapable of solution so let it drop.

Harding was only in office for two and a half years but what a two and a half years, hey? What a bunch of insoluble problems dealt with and well. He defused the Revolution, ended unrestricted immigration, tried to limit naval armaments and battled old Demon Rum. I suppose if he had had the chutzpah of FDR he would have said simply that Prohibition was nonsense and refused to implement the law. Would he had.

The profits of Prohibition went to establish Organized Crime. And from booze the criminals went on to gambling breaking down US legal resistance by using States Rights to legalize gambling in Nevada. From Nevada it has spread to every State in the Union. Carrie Nation is ultimately responsible for creating Organized Crime and hence the corruption of the Nation. That’s what happens when you put the girls in charge. And the little girl didn’t even have the vote. No, but she had the Power Of Positive Thinking. Just get it done.

My point is that Warren G. Harding rather than being the worst president of the United States was perhaps one of the greatest. It was just that he offended some vindictive people and they had the power of the press…and radio…and the movies…and…

The Protocols of Zion were so Nineteenth Century. Post-war America was the New Era of the Twentieth Century.

Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Revolt Against Civilization

Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Revolt Against Civilization
A Review Of
Lothrop Stoddard’s 1922 Eponymous Title

By

R.E. Prindle

Stoddard, Lothrop: The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman, 1922, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, First Edition.

In the name of our To-morrow we will burn Rafael
Destroy museums, crush the flowers of art,
Maidens in the radiant kingdom of the Future
Will be more beautiful than Venus de Milo.
Quoted by Stoddard p. 202

A perennial problem in Burroughs’ studies is what did he believe? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Was he an irredeemable bigot? Shall we just say he was not of a contemporary Liberal frame of mind. If you listen to Richard Slotkin author of Gunfighter Nation and a professor at Case Western Reserve at the time he wrote his book a couple decades ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs was an evil man responsible for all the evil in the US from 1912 to the present. Slotkin even sees him responsible for the My Lai massacre of Viet Nam.

Himself a Communist Slotkin can overlook all the crimes of the Soviet Union in which tens of millions were exterminated to find the ultimate evil in the killing of a few dozen people in Viet Nam.

Slotkin, who rampages through his history disparaging any non-Liberal writers as atavistic bigots firmly attaches Burroughs’ name to two scholars, Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race of 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard and his historical studies of the twenties. He considers the two hardly less evil than Burroughs. To someone less excitable, perhaps, or lessLiberal, the two writers have written responsible and astute studies. I certainly think they have.

When I first read Slotkin I rejected the notion that Burroughs had been influenced by either. Ten years on I have to retract that opinion. It is now clear that Burroughs read both while being heavily influenced by Lothrop Stoddard, especially his 1922 volume, The Revolt Against Civilization. While the studies of both Grant and Stoddard would at best supplement Burroughs already developed opinions The Revolt can easily be seen as a template for Burroughs’ writing after he read it. While the study complemented his own developed social and political opinions I am sure that Stoddard’s explication of the history provided Burroughs with many new facts. Based on its opinions that appeared in ERB’s novels I would place the reading somewhere about 1926 or 1927.

Contrary to what some admirers want to make him ERB was what today would be considered a very conservative man, today’s Liberals would be anathema to him. He was decidedly anti-Communist, a Eugenicist, while not bigoted he was not a Negrophile or Semitophile. He was essentially a man with a social and historical outlook that was formed before 1900, a pre-immigration outlook formed while the Indian wars were still in progress. In short he was a man of his times.

Thomas Dixon Jr. to whom he is often compared was one of the most successful writers of the period who carefully examined both the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as the growing Socialist/Communist movement. He was not a bigot as he is always construed but a man of his own people. Burroughs was influenced by his work and thought well of him. He did not abhor him. ERB read many of Dixon’s novels and admired the movie based on his books, The Birth Of A Nation. He sympathized with Henry Ford in his struggle for the welfare of America and read the Dearborn Independent, Ford’s newspaper. In short, Burroughs was a stand up guy.

Now, what evidence is there he read The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman? Let’s begin with this quote, p. 34 et seq.

Quote:

Down to that time the exact nature of the life process remained a mystery. The mystery has now been cleared up. The researches of [August] Weisman and other modern biologists have revealed the fact that all living beings are due to a continuous stream of germ plasm which has existed ever since life first appeared on earth and which will continue to exist as long as any life remains. This germ-plasm consists of minute germ cells which have the power of developing into human living beings. All human beings spring from the union of a male sperm-cell and a female egg-cell. Right here, however, occurs the basic feature of the life process. The new individual consists, from the start, of two sorts of plasm. Almost the whole of him is body plasm – the ever multiplying cells which differentiate into the organs of the body. But he also contains germ- plasm. At his very conception a tiny bit of the life stuff from which he springs is set aside or carefully isolated from the body-plasm, and forms a course of development entirely its own. In fact, the germ-plasm is not really part of the individual; he is merely its bearer, destined to pass it on to other bearers of the life chain.

Now all this was not only unknown but even unsuspected down to a short time ago. Its discovery was in fact dependent upon modern scientific methods. Certainly, it was not likely to suggest itself to even the most philosophic mind. Thus, down to a generation ago, the life stuff was supposed to be a product of the body, not differing essentially in character from other body products. This assumption had two important consequences. In the first place, it tended to obscure the very concept of heredity, and led men to think of environment as virtually all important; in the second place, even where the importance of heredity was dimly perceived the role of the individual was misunderstood, and he was conceived as a creator rather than a mere transmitter. This was the reason for the false theory of “the inheritance of acquired characteristics,” formulated by Lamarck and upheld by most scientists until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Of course, Lamarckianism was merely a modification of the traditional ‘environmentalist’ attitude: it admitted that heredity possessed some importance, but it maintained environment as the basic feature.

Unquote.

Now there you have the argument of God in Tarzan And The Lion Man of 1933 nearly word for word. I hink it unlikely that ERB actually read Weisman who published following 1900 and who ERB may never have heard of, so his source was in all probability Stoddard.

Stoddard’s presentation nicely straddles the change of consciousness from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It sounds a trifle naïve to our ears but was cutting edge at the time. Weisman’s theories were a big step in the direction of the discovery of DNA a short 26 years after Stoddard’s study.

It is important though to remember that more than fifty percent of the US population today rejects the concept of evolution while being more Lamarckian in outlook than might be supposed. We are as a whole not quite as advanced as we think we are.

As a quick affirmation of the influence of Stoddard on ERB on pages 95-96 he gives an account of the famous Jukes family of degenerates that appeared in ERB’s 1932 novelette, Pirate Blood.

Stoddard was well aware of what was happening historically and presently and one can see that he passed that understanding on to ERB. Almost as though writing today, on page 237 Stoddard writes:

Quote:

Stressful transition is the key-note of our times. Unless all signs be faulty, we stand at one of those momentous crises in history when mankind moves from one well-marked epoch to another of widely different character.

Unquote.

Extremely prescient observation in 1922 while his study has been borne out in detail. The chapter titles give a clear outline of the contents:

1. The Burden Of Civilization
2. The Iron Law Of Equality
3. The Nemesis Of The Inferior
4. The Lure Of The Primitive
5. The Ground Swell Of Revolt
6. The Rebellion Of The Underman
7. The War Against Chaos
8. Neo-Aristocracy

As can be easily seen novelists such as Rider Haggard, ERB, Edgar Wallace as well as many others from 1890 to the 20s were grappling with the problems indicated by the chapter titles.

The natural tendency in humans is to be rather lax in mental activity. Precision calls for an active mentality and concentration. Not everyone is capable of this, yet, beginning in the nineteenth century such mental qualities were increasingly necessary. Such disciplines as Chemistry and Physics didn’t allow for personal vagaries or individual style. One couldn’t bend the disciplines to one’s own desires, precise measurements were necessary requiring mental concentration. A little bit off and who knows what might happen. In a way then the Overman and Underman were created. Either you could or you couldn’t and if you couldn’t you slipped beneath- an Underman. Higher civilization was impossible for you.

Burroughs addressed this problem continually. In his character Tarzan he resolved the problem giving his creation a split personality, in a loin cloth he was one man, in a tuxedo he was another. Two separate gorillas in one and always a beast. In real life society split into two possibilities- the Over and Underman.

Worse still scientific methods were able to measure the ineffable, the unseen. In chemistry sub-tiny atoms were able to be detected and their sub-miniscule weights actually measured. Measurement is the bane of the Underman. A Mole contains 6,022 x 10 to the 23rd power of atoms, an incredible incomprehensible number that still might weigh 12 grams or less. Astonishing. Beyond the comprehension hence belief of the Underman. As the process can’t be seen it can’t be believed.

In human intelligence the Englishman Francis Galton began to devise measuring devices of intelligence in 1865 shortly after Darwin announced Evolution in 1959. Thus uncertainty about mental capacity was eliminated. As Stoddard calls it, The Iron Law Of Inferiority. Biology and measuring excluded something like eighty-five percent of the population from the ranks of the most intelligent. Without that high measurement of intelligence 85% of the population was automatically excluded from the possibility of higher attainment while at the same time being prejudged.

Big strapping fellows, all man, were relegated to manual labor while wimps like perhaps, John D. Rockefeller, became billionaires. Not right, the big strapping fellows said, but not measuring up in intelligence, which they couldn’t see, they were condemned to the shovel for life.

Intelligence measuring tests were improved between 1865 and 1920 although not as accurate as could be desired. Men entering the armed forces in WWI were an excellent testing group. Of 1,700,000 tested intelligence levels were fairly accurately determined. It was then discovered that only four and a half percent were very bright with another seven or eight percent bright, while the huge bulk were C+ to C- descending from there.

One imagines Burroughs read this with extreme thoughtfulness.

So, now as the bulk of the good things were going to those who could do, what were those who couldn’t do about it? The great issue since 1789 has been equality; the Underman demanded equality as a first condition. He could organize. He could sabotage. He could rage. And that is what the Underman has done.

The Communist Party was formed. And what was their chief demand? Equality. Absolute equality. As they couldn’t rise to a natural equality then the only other feasible solution was to bring the Superior intelligences down to their level. Thus they raged against that great equalizer, education. Screw science, screw physics, screw chemistry, screw biology. Who needed what you couldn’t see and that especially included intelligence measuring?

One of ERB’s bete noires was the I.W.W.- The Industrial Workers Of The World, syndicalists. Imagine his reaction when he read this:

Quote:

Viewed in the abstract, technical sense, Syndicalism does not seem to present any specially startling innovations. It is when we examine the Syndicalists’ animating spirit, their general philosophy of life, and the manner which they propose to obtain their ends, that we realize we are in the presence of an ominous novelty,- the mature philosophy of the Under Man. This philosophy of the Under-Man is today called Bolshevism. Before the Russian Revolution it was known as Syndicalism. But Bolshevism and Syndicalism are basically one and the same thing. Soviet Russia has really invented nothing. It is merely practicing what others had been preaching for years- with such adaptation as normally attend the putting of theory into practice.

Syndicalism, as an organized movement, is primarily the work of two Frenchmen, Fernand Pelloutier and Georges Sorel. Of course, just as there were Socialist before Marx, so there were Syndicalists before Sorel. Syndicalism’s intellectual progenitor was Proudhon, who in his writings had closely sketched out the Syndicalist theory. As for Syndicalism’s savage, violent, uncompromising spirit, it is clearly Anarchist in origin., drawing its inspiration not only from Proudhon but also from Bakunin, [Johann] Most, and all the rest of that furious company of revolt.

“Revolt!” This is the essence of Syndicalism: a revolt, not merely against modern society but against Marxian Socialism as well. And the revolt was well timed. When, at the very end of the nineteenth century, Georges Sorel lifted the red banner of Syndicalism, the hour awaited the man. The proletarian world was full of discordant and disillusionment at the long dormant Marxian philosophy. Half a century had passed since Marx first preached his gospel, and the revolutionary millennium was nowhere in sight. Society had not become a world of billionaires and beggars. The great capitalists had not swallowed all. The middle classes still survived and prospered. Worst of all, from the revolutionary viewpoint, the upper grades of the working classes had prospered, too. The skilled workers were, in fact, becoming an aristocracy of labor. They were acquiring property and thus growing capitalistic; they were raising their living standards and thus growing bourgeois. Society seemed endowed with a strange vitality! It was even reforming many of the abuses which Marx had pronounced incurable. When, then, was the proletariat to inherit the earth?

The Proletariat! That was the key word. The van, and even the main body of society, might be fairly on the march, but behind lagged a rear guard. Here, were, first of all, the lower working class strata- the “manual” laborers in the narrower sense, relatively ill paid and often grievously exploited. Behind these again came a motley crew, the rejects and misfits of society. “Casuals” and “unemployables”, “down-and-outs” and declasses, victims of social evils, victims of bad heredity and their own vices, paupers, defectives, degenerates, and criminals- they were all there. They were there for many reasons, but they were all miserable, and they were all bound together by a certain solidarity- a sullen hatred of the civilization from which they had little to hope. To these people evolutionary, “reformist” socialism was cold comfort. Then came the Syndicalists promising, not evolution but revolution; not in the dim future but the here and now; not a bloodless “taking over” by “the workers” hypothetically stretched to include virtually the whole community, but the bloody “dictatorship” of The Proletariat in its narrow revolutionary sense.

Here, at last, was living hope- hope, and the prospect of revenge! Is it then strange that a few short years should have seen revolutionary Socialists, Anarchists, all the anti-social forces of the whole world grouped under the banner of Georges Sorel? For a time they went under different names syndicalists in France, Bolshevists in Russia, I.W.W.s in America but in reality they formed one army, enlisted in a single war.

Now, what was this war? It was, first of all, a war for the conquest of Socialism as a preliminary to the conquest of society. Everywhere the orthodox Socialist parties were fiercely assailed. And these Socialist assaults were formidable, because the orthodox Socialists possessed no moral line of defense. Their arms were palsied by the virus of their revolutionary tradition. For however evolutionary and non-militant the Socialists might have been in practice, in theory they had remained revolutionary their ethics continuing to be those of the “class war”, the destruction of the “possessing classes” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The American economist, Carver, will describe the ethics of socialism in the following lines: “Marxian Socialism has nothing in common with idealistic Socialism. It rests not on persuasion, but on force. It does not profess to believe, as did the old idealists, that if socialism be lifted up it will draw all men to it. In fact, it has no ideals; it is materialistic and militant. Being materialistic and atheistic, it makes no use of such terms as right and justice, unless it be to quiet the consciences of those who still harbor such superstitions. It insists that these terms are mere conventionalities; the concepts mere bugaboos invented by the ruling caste to keep the masses under control. Except in a conventional sense, from this crude materialistic view there is neither a right or wrong, justice nor injustice, good or bad. Until people who still believe in such silly notions divest their minds of them they will never understand the first principles of Marxian socialism.

“Who creates our ideas of right and wrong?” asks the Socialist. “The ruling class. Why? To insure their domination over the masses by depriving them of the power to think for themselves. We, the proletarians, when we get into power, will dominate the situation; we shall be the ruling class; we shall determine who is right and wrong. Do you ask us if what we propose is just? What do you mean by justice? Do you ask if it is right? What do you mean by right? It will be good for us. That is all that right and justice ever did or ever can mean!
Unquote.

People ask what Burroughs believed? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Well, Burroughs’ beliefs can be extrapolated from the above quote as well as Stoddard’s whole book. If Burroughs could have expressed himself concisely he would have written The Revolt Against Civilization. You don’t have to look any further.

There could be no more ardent anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-IWW than ERB. The book was published five years after the Russian Revolution, a mere three years after the narrow quelling of the Communist disturbances of 1919 while in 1922 the Harding administration was putting the finishing touches on the suppression of that Communist revolution in the US. Make no mistake the crimes of 1919 were part of an American Bolshevik revolution. Things would not return to what Harding called normalcy but it would be a reasonable facsimile that would endure until the engineered great crash of 1929 opening the way for the Communist revolution of FDR in the US.

These were perilous times ERB was living in no less than those of today. One can’t be sure when Burroughs read Revolt but many of the same themes almost in quotation were employed in his 1926 novel The Moon Maiden. And from the Moon Maiden he went to the more sophisticated approaches of his great political novels from Tarzan At The Earth’s Core to Tarzan And The Lion Man.

As Stoddard thinks the Underman breeds at a very fast rate while the Overman limits his family the obvious consequence is that people of intelligence decrease rapidly in relation to the Underman. Of course Stoddard has all kinds of tables and charts to prove his point. As this was published in 1922 the results are heavily skewed to prove the English are the top of the heap; a result not uncongenial to Burroughs’ sensibilities.

One imagines that as of induction time in 1917-18 a great many of the recent immigrants at least had underdeveloped English language skills that affected the results but at this point it no longer matters; the general idea has been proved sound.

As we have a war between the Underman and the Overman and make no mistake, as far as Sorel and the Syndicalist/Bolshevik ideology goes it is a war to the knife, it may be asked what Stoddard’s formula for the Overman’s success might be.

This returns us to the Underman’s great fear that science, that is objective analysis supported by an array of facts will condemn him to the virtual condition of servitude. It might be surmised that this is an intolerable but inescapable conclusion unless education and science are destroyed reducing the more intelligent to the masses.

Stoddard then relying on Darwinian and Weismanian evolution and the notion of Eugenics introduced by Francis Galston resolves the problem by ending the reproduction of the ‘defective’ classes, that is, forced sterilization. Forced sterilization was actually employed. It is interesting that he never brings in the issue of race thus on the surface his book is neither racist for anti-Semitic. However as the book assumes that the superior intelligences are English or Nordic the text qualifies as anti-Semitic in Jewish eyes and hence has been placed on the Jewish Index Of Forbidden Literature.

One may be horrified at the Eugenic solution to the intelligence problem but one must be equally horrified at the Underman solution to their Overman problem. Liquidation is more horrifying than sterilization and Liquidation was employed by the Underman in Russia and will be employed again if they can consolidate their gains in the US and Europe today.

The problem is that while being founded in reality it is impossible in execution. The human mind is too subjective to be trusted with such a great responsibility. Many statues were placed on the books commanding forced sterilization and many such were executed.

Schools classes were organized based on supposed mental aptitudes. How objectively I will demonstrate by my own example. Until Jr. High in my home town schools did not systematically differentiate based on mental capacity, however at the end of the ninth grade just before I.Q. testing in the tenth there were three options, Trade School for those deemed not of academic ability, in other words destined for the labor force, and once in high school a division between business, that is white collar, and college prep. This was still a process of self-selection thus I signed up for high school however someone changed my papers to trade school.

Thus when I showed for classes at high school, I was told I was enrolled at trade school. Now, this was the fight of my life, and for it. I was told I was in trade school and to get out. I said I wasn’t leaving and sat down where I waited for four days for the situation to resolve itself. My argument was that the law required that I be given an education and it wouldn’t be at trade school. Whatever the behind the scenes machinations were I was reluctantly allowed to enter but they then insisted it would be business level while I demanded college prep. With an unexplained prescience I was told that I would never go to college so I should be in business. Nevertheless I won that struggle too.

I am sure that if enforced sterilization had been possible at the time I would have been compelled to undergo it.

Now, here’s the kicker. Came time for I.Q. tests and I placed in the upper four percent. I have no idea what the reaction to that was although my critics had to tone down their act. So human passions invalidated the whole Eugenic idea.

In other words there is no equable solution to this terrible human dilemma.

In that sense the solution offered by Aldus Huxley in his famous comic novel Brave New World is of some interest. In Huxley’s story he enlists science, chemistry, to produce different levels of mental competence. The zygote is nurtured in test tubes while at certain levels of development certain chemicals are introduced limiting the development of the fetus. Thus the labor problem is solved by creating classes only capable of menial tasks. The upper classes are bred like race horses to various degrees of excellence. Huxley was tongue in cheek to be sure but, actually the only solution to this otherwise insoluble problem.

Stoddard didn’t introduce any ideas to which Burroughs wasn’t already familiar and in agreement. At best Stoddard’s superb research and explication clarified ERB’s understanding for him. I don’t know how familiar he was with Georges Sorel. Today Sorel is unknown except to specialists although I am beginning to see his name pop up so with the Communist regime of Barack Obama perhaps the way is being prepared for Sorel’s extreme measures of exterminating the Overman.

At any rate I have come to the opinion that Richard Slotkin is correct in thinking the Burroughs had read and was in accord with both Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. However Slotkin evaluates their work through the distortion of his own Communistic lens which is only valid to those of his point of view.

His view does not make Burroughs a racist or anti-Semite. It makes him an objective and accurate observer and analyst of the situation of his time. As indicated above Burroughs absorbed Stoddard’s information, that point of view and used it to create his wonderful works of the late twenties and first half of the thirties. If one bears Stoddard’s book in mind while reading those novels it will make them make great sense while presenting his view of the political and social situation

Of course the novels are not confined solely to dealing with these issues; Burroughs had a much more far ranging mind, both subjectively and objectively.

Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization is a major study as relevant today as the day it was written. The last ninety years have only borne out his theses. The Revolt Against Civilization is well worth a read, perhaps two. At any rate you will have an accurate idea of Burroughs’ social and political beliefs.

Tarzan The Invincible Pt. 9: by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#14, Tarzan The Invincible

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 9: Politics

The Entertainer

 

The Big Bwana

 

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

–L.P. Hartley- The Go Between

I would like to take a moment to organize the content and direction of the Tarzan oeuvre within the context of Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant.

It is close onto a century now since Edgar Rice Burroughs burst onto the international literary scene.  He was not literarily well regarded by the intelligentsia.  In the language of the time he wrote adventure novels.  They were thought of as sub-literary.  In our times after literature has evolved from Burroughs’ time into its various genres that didn’t exist as such back then he would more properly be designated as a fantasy or sci-fi writer.

Even though very great minds wrote ‘adventure’ stories their efforts  are usually classified as sub-literary, relegated to the teen section.  There has certainly never been a more profound writer than H. Rider Haggard nor is his literary style inferior in any way to the pretensions of literary fiction.  Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs all had a great deal to offer.  If it is necessary to say so their work has remained popular while most literary heavyweights of the past are unknown and unread in non-specialist circles today.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is not usually accorded the dignity of being ranked with even the above adventure writers.  It pains me to say it but I think the literary consensus is that Burroughs is a semi-literate lightweight trash writer with no other value than ‘entertainment’ or a diversion for men and women who haven’t quite grown up yet.   I receive sniggers and raised eyebrows whenever I am forced to admit I write what I hope are scholarly essays on Edgar Rice Burroughs.  I have to scramble to find any scrap that will give me a little dignity.  But that’s not the way I see it myself.  The way I see it is that there are two groups of people who do take Burroughs seriously.  The small group of which I am a member that sees something of value lying like a huge diamond in the tall grass and a much larger group of Left-Liberals who quite correctly see Burroughs as a threat to everything they wish to believe.

Burroughs’ publishing career has not been well researched or examined.  The research I have done leads me to believe that ERB was exploited while his career was sabotaged by McClurg’s from the start.  Although MClurg’s seem to have had no intent to promote his work from the beginning they nevertheless tied him up with a contract that went on forever.  Compare it with MGM’s contract twenty years later.

Ten years after ERB’s death with the firm of McClurg’s on the edge of bankruptcy ERB, Inc. had to buy out the contract.  This is all so contradictory it boggles the mind.   Rather than attempting to maximize sales and therefore profits McClurg’s took the opposite approach of minimizing sales while reducing profits both for themselves and ERB to the lowest possible level.  If it hadn’t been for the movies Burroughs’ benefits from his efforts would have been minimal, a fraction of what they should have been.

From 1914 to 1919 politics do not seem to have been involved; there is some other reason for McClurg’s behavior.  Then from 1919 to 1924 ERB’s relationship to the Liberal Coalition took form.  His Under The Red Flag of 1919 let the Reds know where he stood politically.  Also in 1919 he was felt out by the American Jewish Committee for his stance on Semitism.  He failed this test by taking an insubordinate stance.  So from 1919 to 1924 he seems to have been under attack from the Left.  He remained defiant through his Marcia Of The Doorstep with its very reasonable criticism of Semitism but then he seems to have been ovewhelmed by economic pressures that were exacerbated by his own poor decisions.

While McClurg’s should have been supportive of their, or what should have been their walking gold mine, they strangely continued to get in his way.

Burroughs wanted his reissues to be sold at a dollar but G&D and McClurg’s adamantly insisted on 50 cents which gave ERB a very small return.  Why McClurg’s should have resisted higher prices that would have doubled their own income must remain a mystery.  A dollar doesn’t seem unreasonable to me but there seems to have been the intent to restrict Burroughs’ income as far as possible.

By the late twenties the Liberal Coalition was also actively interfering in Burroughs’ career.  There seems to have been a blacklist against making Tarzan movies from 1922 to 1928.  As Hollywood was controlled by the Coalition it was possible to restrict Burroughs’ income from movies to zero.

The blacklist was broken in 1927 when Joseph Kennedy’s FBO Studios made a Tarzan film.  ERB also began searching for another publishing arrangement.  Not finding anything satisfactory he took the last ditch recourse of self-publishing.  He established the Burroughs imprint.  As this act was taken just as the stock market crash took place the move was fraught with dangers.

Now freed from publishing restraints does it seem like a coincidence that the first title under the Burroughs imprint was Tarzan The Invincible?  Or, with its success it was followed by Tarzan Triumphant?  Perhaps taking vengeance for 1919′s snub of Under The Red Flag, Tarzan The Invincible is a full scale attack on the Communism in general and Uncle Joe Stalin in particular.

Perhaps also responding to 1924′s rejection of Marcia Of The Doorstep the succeeding novel, Tarzan Triumphant parodies the Jewish religion while making some not so subtle comments about big noses and receding chins.  Either book would be difficult for the Liberal Coalition to misunderstand.

While Burroughs would publicly proclaim that he undertook self-publication because he was too greedy for high royalties, certainly tongue in cheek,  privately he complained that McClurg’s refused to promote his books, turning them over immediately to reissue houses depriving him of his just royalties.  I’m sure the industry understood the irony of his first reason while the second is true.

Tarzan The Invincible is both a defense and a counterattack.  Burroughs himself said that defensive wars could never be won.  One must take the offensive.   With Invincible he was doing just that in what was in fact a literary and cultural war.

The power arrayed against him was terrifying.  The Reds could prevent the publication of his books through regular channels.  I believe they did.  ERB publicly said he took up self-publication in the relentless pursuit of the dollar.  What else could he say?  One doesn’t go around saying people are out to get you.  That’s giving your enemies ammunition.

Ask, is it a coincidence that the first novel under the Burroughs imprint is a direct attack on Liberal Communism?  A work that almost certainly would not have been published by any mainstream publisher, including McClurg’s.    There isn’t a Freudian in the world who believes in coincidence.  I sure don’t.  Burroughs launched his publishing effort in 1930 the year after the depression began in 1929.  The guy was either crazy or knew something other publishers didn’t wish to acknowledge.

When he met his former publisher, Joe Bray, of McClurg’s afer the crash he sneeringly told Bray who was complaining about business that he was doing very well with the Burroughs imprint and he was.  In the height of the depression Burroughs’ books turned a profit.  That was a profit no publisher seemed to want.  McClurg’s certainly never exploited this literary gold mine.

Was it political?  Well, Burroughs’ first publishing venture certainly was.  And remember that Tarzan The Invicincible must have caused a reaction.  The Reds had to say among themselves omething like ‘Don’t worry we’ll get that bastard yet.’  It had to be, nor did his even more sneering Tarzan Triumphant smooth anything over.  Think about this for a moment; let it sink in, this is open warfare.  There must have been a retaliation.  What was it?  The Reds did not cease their campaign of vilification during his lifetime nor have they ceased to this very day nor will they cease until either the Reds or Tarzan is triumphant.

I have discussed Richard Slotkin’s  Gunfighter Nation several times previously.  Slotkin in his book tries to pin responsibility for the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam on Burroughs.  He uses nearly seven hundred pages of fine print to try to prove that My Lai was the inevitable result of Burroughs’ writing.  The guy’s got a job at a prestigious university too.

While one can discount the hysteria of Liberal academics heavily no one necessarily attacks someone they do not consider a threat.  So what Bibliophiles have to ask themselves is whether there is a basis for the Liberal reaction or not?

I think my analyses of Tarzan books so far shows that Burroughs had a much more serious political intent than is commonly thought.  Underneath the buck and wing, the old soft shoe of the entertainer is some very serious thought and reflection.  Also his means of expression itself is the very antithesis of Liberalism.

 

Joseph P. Kennedy

Burroughs’ writing does reflect the sea change in world history noted by such academic analysts as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.  Whether ERB ever read these thinkers or not there is no conflict between their conclusions and his own.  ERB is of the same mindset so on that basis Slotkin is correct.  None of the three writers is eiher wrong or evil it’s just that Liberals think any opinion but their own is inherently evil in intent and ought to be censored.  I say censor the censors.

Liberalism is a religious reaction to the Scientific Consciousness.  Their core constituent, Judaism’s sole purpose is to defeat Science and reimpose the religious yoke of absolute conformity to its religious ideal.  As I’ve noted, American Liberalism which evolved from the quasi-Hebrew sect of Puritanism is in complete accord.  Combined of fundamentalist Christians, who pursue an Old Testament program not much different from the Liberal agenda and the insurgent Moslem fundamentalists, the challenge to Science and all that Burroughs represented is formidable.

The determined effort to plow the concept of Evolution under is a supreme threat to the whole Scientific Consciousness.  Of course, the Liberals talk peace, while as the Old Testament proclaims, peace, peace, everyone talks peace but there is no peace.  There is no peace anywhere on earth and there never will be.

Burroughs realized that war was inevitable.  He decried the disarmement movement and applauded preparedness.  In Triumphant he makes the wry comment that the Chicago underworld gunner, Danny Patrick, and his fellow criminals believed in pareparedness, always having a gun with them.

Burroughs was brought into a world of conflict, nor so far has the world disappointed his expectations.  As he says the only good defense is a terrific offense.  Defensive wars cannot be won.  I believe he has been proven right there too.  Whether you’re looking at John Carter, Tarzan or any of his protagonists you will see that they never barricade themselves.  They are always on the offensive, nor do they hesitate to kill as part of that offense.  My god, Tarzan ripped a man’s head off in Ant Men.  His Beyond The Farthest Star posits a world of never-ending war.  Prefigures the Cold War in its way.  Any concept of ‘peace’ is merely a temporary cessation of hostilities; war by other means.  The Liberal, Slotkin, may lament such a reality but being a man of ‘peace’ making endless  appeasements and concessions to belligerents can end only in disaster to oneself.  There aren’t any Americas left to bail civilization out; that possiblility ended with WWII.

I think it fair to say that in today’s war situation versus the Moslem and Mexican invasions ERB would take the aggressive position of throwing them out.  As the Shona state explicitly, and believe me the Mexicans and Moslems are no different from them, if you need to hear it from an African there are those who dominate and those who are dominated, which is another way of saying perpetual conflict.  Either Americans will dominate Mexicans and Moslems or they will be subservient to them.  Need anyone go further than to look at the condition of both Matabele and European in Shonaland?  It is a given that Burroughs would rather dominate as Tarzan does at the end of Invincible.  If you’ve got to fight you might as well win.

Let us never forget that Burroughs participated in the opening of the frontier and he saw its closing.  He lived through the two most devastating wars in history.  One must fight or die was the lesson he learned.   Tarzan still lives.

And then we must deal with the persistent charge of racism brought against ERB.  One finds it difficult to understand what Liberals mean by the term ‘racism.’  There is nothing more inherent in human nature than pride in one’s own kind.  In that sense all peoples are racist.  What then?  Racism is the natural state of affairs.  Certainly Liberal heroes like Robert Mugabe and the Shona are as racist as could possibly be, yet, he and they are Liberal heroes.  There must be something else going on.

Liberals themselves are responsible for passing racial laws that would have staggered the imagination of Adolf Hitler.  Someone who they say they despise.  Whereas Hitler called his laws what they were, Liberals are more adept at disguising their intent, still they appropriately call their laws ‘hate’ laws which is exactly what they are.  The unspoken assumption behind them is that ‘White’ males ‘hate’ everyone who is neither White nor male, excluding homosexuals, and that they therefore have to be socially isolated and denied.

The apparent belief is that only White males are capable of ‘hating’ while the rest of the world is a loving brother and sisterhood.  Of course such a notion leaves the Moslem attack on the Twin Towers unexplainable as well as the Shona extermination of Black brothers like the Matabele.

Hey fellas, it’s the exception, even multiple exception that proves the rule, isn’t it?

I have no doubt that ERB would have been opposed to such ridiculous racial laws no matter what language was used to disguise them.  He does seem to have been aware of the dangers of the evolutionary collision of the human species.  ERB was an evolutionist.  His novels explore evolutionary possiblities in enormous variety and detail.  While much of his speculations and jokes seem ridiculous in the light of current knowledge, at the time of composition most if not all of the speculations would have appeared to be not that far fetched, even possible.

At the least Burroughs was on the side of Science at that time when the controversy really raged, while even today over fifty percent of Americans reject evolution in favor of religious explanations, that’s one hundred fifty years after Darwin, while the Moslem invasion of the world is rapidly spreading the slime of superstition over scientific knowledge.  As I understand it, it has progressed so far that I could be put in jail in France, Germany or Austria for blaspheming the prophet and Allah by referring to their atavistic religion as ‘the slime of superstition.’

Within just a very few years since 9/11 an intolerant superstition like Moslemsism has overturned the scientific attitude of the Enlightenment.  May Georges Chirac burn in hell forever and a day.  If President Obama doesn’t  back off, him too.  Don’t any of these guys listen to what people are saying about them?

As I have noted, by the second decade of the twentieth century more sensitive minds perceived the sea change in the relationship of the various human species.  Among these, in fiction, were Sax Rohmer with his Fu Manchu stories and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Prominent in non-fiction were Madison Grant with his Passing Of The Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard ‘s Rising Tide Of Color.

At the risk of repeating myself, I flatter myself that at least some Bibliophiles have been reading my stuff for the last few years, let me place a quote  from Darwin here that clearly explains what happens when similar species compete for the same territory on the same economic basis.  Darwin:  On The Origin Of Species, Chap. III, Para. Struggle For Existence- Struggle for life most severe between individuals and varieties of the same species:

As species of the same genus have usually, but by no means invariably, some similarity in habits and constitution and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between species of the same genus, when they come into competition  with each other, than between species of distinct genera.  We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species.  The recent increase of the missal thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush.  How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates!  In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it itx great congenor.  One species of Charlock will supplant another, and so in other cases.  We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.

As we are certain that Burroughs read the Origin Of Species we can be sure that he read the above passage.  If it struck him as forcibly as it strikes me then we share the same basic outlook on life and the passage shaped his way of looking at the intra-genus conflict between Homo Sapiens species.

As most agree that Homo Sapiens has an African history of 150K to 200K years, most assume, and this is only an assumption, that the First Born of Homo Sapiens were black because the indigenes of Africa today are black.  This may or may not be true, we have no way of knowing, but let us assume it is.  There are no people in Africa today who can absolutely trace their descent unbroken from the Last Hominid Predecessor or the first specimen of Homo Sapiens.  No one knows what the individual looked like or what his mental constitution was compared to the various African races of today.

It therefore follows that over that course of a very long history peoples have been exterminated to make way for others innumerable times.  One wave of rats, one wave of cockroaches after another have succeeded for a moment only to be replaced by another in due time.  This is how evolution and nature work.  Homo Sapiens is not outside either history or nature and it is foolish to act as though it were.  One must understand the natural process and adjust one’s actions to it.

To use the Shona example.  The Shona are not indigenous to the soil.  At one time they must have exterminated and displaced a predecessor people in what they now consider ‘their’ territory.  Beginning about 1830 the Ndebele Zulu as an incoming wave of new people began to exterminate and displace them.  There is no difference between this Ndebele invasion of Shonaland and the Moslem and Mexican invasion of the United States.  Nature is red in tooth and claw.  What can one say?

Had the Matabele, to use the Ndebele’s other name, not been interrupted by another wave of incoming people, the Europeans, (color and race have no real bearing on this issue of Nature and evolution) the Zulus, (the Matabele were Zulus) would have completed the process and today the Shona would be at best a memory.  But the succeeding wave of Europeans did come crowding after the Matabele.  So far Darwin’s thesis is correct.  One species of rat drives out another.  Had the Europeans behaved normally they would have exterminated their predecessors and driven them before them.

But then evolution throws in a clinker.  The Europeans were evolutionarily more advanced than the Blacks.  While the fact that the evolution of the human species is continuing is clear from the visual physical evidence,  scientific research has proven it beyond any quibble.  So, even though those at the turn of the century lacked the evidence to prove their case they were right.  The most obvious evolution is taking place in the brain and it is not taking place in all human species.  Only one species is evolving while the others are now sterile.  Hard thing to accept but it’s true.  Thus Europeans had developed consciences that prevented them from doing what Nature commanded them to do.  Instead they set themselves up as a parasite class believing they could control the Blacks without special intermixture forever.

As Burroughs would have noted this put them on the defensive and no defense outlasts a good offense as the Shona have proven.  Thus the Shona having been given a breathing space reorganized, regained the initiative and won the dominant position.  They are now doing the natural thing exterminating or driving out both the Ndebele Zulu and the Europeans.  If you won’t fight or can’t, you lose everything.

So, you have the Darwinian struggle for existence presented to you in plain terms in a human context that cannot be misunderstood.  No rats or cockroaches as necessary examples.  One must be intolerant of other species.  One must be a ‘bigot’ as the Shona are or go under.

Now, not having the will and perhaps no longer having the power to do as Nature commands Europeans attempted to retreat, to withdraw within their own territories.  As anyone knows they all come out at the first sign of weakness.  One would have to be stupid or utopian not to realize that.  As a sonsequence Europe and America are being invaded by the other human species in the Darwinian sense.  I mean, folks, they call evolution science.  Science means knowing.  Anyone who does not act on certain knowledge is foolish or, perhaps, too religious.

However in the first two decades of the twentieth century the Liberal ideology was formed by the weakest and lamest members of Western civilization.  Not understanding actual differences between the human species, even denying them on religious grounds, they used conscience as a weapon to first emasculate themselves, and I mean this in the literal sense, and then they shamed those who knew better into silence.

Among those silenced were Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs.  Although all these men were initially very influential telling Americans the nature of evolution and its consequences their reputations were dismantled.  By the beginning of WWII Grant and Stoddard were regarded as mere ‘racist’ cranks.

It is time to debunk the debunkers.  The wheel has turned.  Bunk is bunk and shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone.

Burroughs who hadn’t left himself quite so open was provoked into acts of defiance so that sanctions could be applied against him as much as had been done to Henry Ford.  Ford is another whose reputation should be rehabilitated much as Khruschev rehabilitated the reputations of various Communists after the death of Stalin.  The tool preferred by the Liberal Coalition to discredit someone was the charge of  ‘anti-Semitism’, a religious charge be it noted.

The most potent weapon in the Liberal religious armament is the term ‘anti-Semite.’  It is used liberally usually combined with Fascist to defame and control an opponent.  Oddly enough they couldn ‘t make it stick on Burroughs.  Even Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation only hints that ERB might have anti-Semitic tendencies.

I know it is unpleasant to discuss the Semitic issue but I think the time has come to discuss the issue head on especially as Burroughs was and is involved to a much more serious degree than might be apparent at first blush.  The problem of Asia, from whence the Semites come, and Europe has roots in prehistory.  Indeed it is a tale of two species.  This is one of those eternal conflicts that will not be settled until one side annihilates the other much as the Shona are doing in Zimbabwe to their competitors.

In ancient days both the European Greeks and the Mediterranean Egyptians were in a constant conflict with what the Egyptians referred to as ‘vile Asiatics’, the Greeks as ‘barbarians.’  The Asiatics were vile not on the basis of race but because of the differing view of life of the two species.  As regards the Egyptians and the Semites one or the other had to be exterminated.  If you know anything of Egyptian history you will know that few true Egyptians still survive.  The Semites have exterminated the true Egyptians.

Thus the related species of HSII, the Egyptians and HSIII, the Europeans found the Semitic species unassimilable.  We are back to Darwin’s competing species of rats and cockroaches.  In the religious terms in which the problem is usually stated one says the animosity is racial or in other words, moral;  in scientific terms one says that it is genetic or special.  In other words, the problem is much deeper than mere surface appearances.  It extends to the genetic development of the brain.  The Semite cannot understand as any other human species understands and vice versa.

Thus the current problem in the Sudan between Negroes and Semites which is genetic or biological can only be resolved by the extermination or expulsion of the other.  The whole course of this new African conflict can be projected historically and scientifically.  It may be delayed but it cannot be stopped.  Compare it with the Shona in Zimbabwe.  There is no question as to what course the conflict will take.

Why Liberals choose to make an issue of Darfur while they ignore the South Sudan and Zimbabwe and South Africa where genocide is also going on is known only to themselves.  It is absolutely necessary to analyze the matter in scientific rather than emotional or religious terms.  These are not matters of race but species.  The mental capabilities of the Negro, the Semite and the European are different and irreconcilable.  An unpleasant fact, perhaps, but true.

The conflict between Europe and Asia or the Semites and Indo-Europeans began according to legend with the Semitic abduction of the European woman Io from Argos.  The history of the Mediterranean in ancient times was the perpetual warfare between Europeans and Asiatics or Semites.  At one time the Semites seemed to be besting Europeans and then turn about.  For the long Hellenic and Roman period the Europeans seemed to have won.  But, and this is a big but, they failed to exterminate or drive the Semites out.  A very bad mistake.

Two things happened.  The Jewish Semites began a peaceful infiltration into Europe which came to a head in the long Jewish Wars that lasted from 66 AD to 135 AD.  The Jewish Semites were militarily defeated in their homeland but came to spiritually dominate Europeans through the Judaeo-Catholic religion.

None of this struggle went unobserved by the Semitic peoples of the Arabian penenisula.  In the seventh century the Arab or Ishamelite, to use the Jewish term,  branch of the Semitic peoples led by Moslem ideology which had its base in Jewish ideology overran North Africa, large parts of the Eastern Mediterranean into the steppes of Asia and over the Hindu Kush into India.  More or less following the path of Alexander.  The Indo-European Persians, now known as Iranians, were Islamized or Semitized which they remain today.  They were stultified hence their ridiculous position today.

The southerly Egyptians, the native Copts, are on the verge of extinction or what the modern world fondly describes as genocide.  There are few surviving true Egyptians today.

Thus the Hellenic-Roman hegemony was reversed.

The Semitic Arab incursion into Europe which was a continuation of the multi-thousand year conflict between Europeans and Semites was defeated by Charles the Hammer at Tours in the heart of Europe.   Over the next nearly thousand years the Moslems were expelled from Western Europe but they advanced in Eastern Europe.

From the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 the southern Med if not the Med itself was controlled by the Barbary pirates.  During that period Europeans supinely submitted to a slave trade that greatly resembled that of sub-Saharan Africa.  Even as Negroes were being transported to the Americas countless Europeans were captured on European soil, transported to Africa and enslaved.  So, the Africans have no cause to complain of Europeans.  Some people whine some people don’t.

No one European State was strong enough or determined enough to clear the seas of the Moslems while they were unable to concert a united attack.  The piracy and enslavement continued until France annexed Algeria in 1830.  Rightfully so.

In Darwinian terms it is quite clear that the struggle was one of the replacement of one population by another.  Thus when France conquered Algeria it behove them to either exterminate or drive out the existing population replacing it with Europeans.  They ought to have relentlessly warred on every North African people until North Africa was once again European.

The attempt to coexist was a defensive war that could only end in defeat.  The defeat was adjudicated by General De Gaulle in the nineteen sixties.  The French stupidly and erroneously thought the war was over, but in reality the momentum shifted once again to the Semites.

As noted by Lothrop Stoddard the Wahabi Moslems went onto the offensive.  No longer able to comptete militarily with Europeans they resorted to guerilla warfare, something the West now chooses to call terrorism, combined with an infiltration of Europe using their reproductive capabilities as a weapon.  The situation now is a replica of the 3000 BC infiltration of Sumer.  Hence the balance of power of the age old war between the Semites of Asia and Europeans has once again shifted toward the Asiatics.

As the Libyan, Moamar Qadaffi gloated in May 2006 there are fifty million Moslems in Europe.  Europeans have the option of fighting or submitting.  He knows whereof he speaks.  As the war will now be conducted on European soil with the certain loss of the entire cultural superstructure of the last two thousand years there seems little chance of any European resistance.  Notre Dame will be renamed and become a mosque.

If there is resistance then Burroughs’ prophecy of a flattened Europe turned Black over the centuries is a distinct, nay, certain probability.  In addition to their submission to the Wahabi Arabs, Europeans seem incapable of resisting the Black Moselm invasion from sub-Saharan Africa.  Thus once Blacks and Moslems have the strength they will undoubtedly follow the ancient plan of killing the men and keeping the women.  Need I point to Haiti after the slave rebellion as an example?  Within three or four generations both Arabs and Europeans will be absorbed into Black Africa.

Any discussion of the problem is now impossible in Europe as the blackest censorship has been imposed on dissent.  Astonishing that the enlightenment could disappear just like that, isn’t it?  Anyone who dissents from the Semitic program is liable to imporisonment, heavy fines or both.  The term Semite includes both the Jewish and Arab branches.

Once the Moslem are powerful enough to direct the European military it will mean the end of Israel as that State will be completely encircled by Moslem powers with irresistable might and control of all land, sea, air and satellite communications.

With European technological war materiel at their disposal the Moslems will be able to isolate the United States by depriving it of oil or with the huge and growing population in the US sabotage any war effort if threatened.  Let’s have a round of applause for the brilliant leadership of Chirac, Blair, Bush and Obama not to mention the morons of the US Senate.

Burroughs foresaw the results of the West’s waffling before the Communists, the Moslems and perhaps the Africans but he was prevented from examining the problems too openly for fear of bringing the Liberal Coalition with its charges of anti-Semitism down on his head.  Both he and Henry Ford were having a tough fight for survival.  W.R. Hearst.

Burroughs had already called attention to himself by questioning a survey sent him by the American Jewish Committee in 1919.  It seems apparent the survey drew his attention to Jewish matters which he had ignored up till that time.  This resulted in the character of Bluber in Tarzan And The Golden Lion as well as several characters in 1924′s Marcia Of The Doorstep.  As the AJC would have considered these characterizations ‘anti-Semitic’ the publication of the book was prohibited.  Censored as it were.

Probably as a result of questioning the AJC survey he was put under surveillance.  While a number of movies had been made from his books, in 1921 movie making from his novels ceased reducing his income potential drastically at a very critical time in his finances.  For whatever reason there was a hiatus in the production of Tarzan films that lasted until 1928.  It is only fair to assume that Tarzan had not lost his box office appeal which is the usual Hollywood cover for blacklisting.  One also imagines that Burroughs would have leapt at any movie money.  Indeed, in 1922 the Stern Bros. and Louis Jacobs, a trio of Jewish movie makers, tied up the rights to Jungle Tales Of Tarzan and Jewels of Opar for $40,000.  This was a very decent sum to spend yet the movie makers made no effort make the movies, they were content to tie up the titles.  Whether Burroughs was being disciplined for being ‘anti-Semitic’ or not can’t be determined for certain at this time.

 

Richard Slotkin

Hollywood was notorious for being a Jewish industry.  W.R. Hearst was one of the few goys making movies.  D.W. Griffith was being increasingly marginalized.  In the interim then, the noted ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the future president John F. Kennedy, formed or bought FBO Studios.  The story of this multi-cultural struggle for dominance has never been adequately researched for obvious reasons, but what with the Ford conflict with the Semitic Jewish culture flaring in the foreground it is not unlikely that there was a great deal of maneuvering in the background.  It will be noted that when RKO was formed which incorporated FBO Studios the R for Radio came from RCA and KO for Keith Orpheum were retained while FBO was deleted.  The R and KO were Jewish concerns while FBO had been a great goyish disrupter.

Nevertheless, as Burroughs was blacklisted by Hollywood which the Hollywood historian Neal Gabler describes as a Jewish empire, it is noteworthy that an ‘anti-Semite’ broke the blacklist making Tarzan movies again.  It would have been the equivalent of Dalton Trumbo being allowed to script movies under his own name again in the 1960s.

The blacklist broken, the Stern Bros. and Jacobs then decided in 1928 to exercise their rights to the two Tarzan novels to release Tarzan The Tiger and Tarzan The Mighty.  Calling Tarzan a tiger may have been a slam at Burroughs who erroneously introduced tigers into Africa in the magazine version of Tarzan Of The Apes.

The silent era of movies over, MGM produced the first talkie of Tarzan in 1932.  Watch the dates.

Now, in both Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant Burroughs takes undisguised hits at Communism, pointing fingers and naming names; in Triumphant he continues his open attack on Communism and covertly ridicules the Jews in his portrayal of Midians with their enormous noses and receding chins.  Both attributes are well known caricatures of Jews.  Was this a gratuitous insult or was he responding to insults to himself?

If he had been given courage by the presence of Joseph Kennedy and FBO Studios then he might have relaxed his vigilance a little.  However his open and blatant attack would not have been unresented by Judaeo-Communists.  While Hollywood had always been run by Jews, by 1930 Communists had also made much more serious inroads than is usually admitted.  In other words, ERB’s well being in this multi-cultural war zone depended on his sworn enemies.  As both a goy and counter-revolutionary ERB was an odd man out.  It could not possibly be any other way.

There can be no question that he would have to be gotten for what could only be seen as egregious insults to both Communists and Jews. In fact, the two were nearly one.  The question then was how best to get Burroughs short of outright assassination.  The blacklist had already been broken by Kennedy but possible a movie could be made to make ERB’s great creation ridiculous.  Destroy him in that way, you see.

Thanks to technological marvels like DVDs it is now possible to study old movies at will.  I have a sets of most of the films.  I have viewed Tarzan Of The Apes a number of times.

Bearing in mind that Burroughs was in a struggle with both Communists and Semites as exemplified in 1930′s Tarzan The Invincible and 1931′s Tarzan Triumphant while being surreptitiously listed as an anti-Semite by the American Jewish Committee, I think it worthwhile to speculate on the intent of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg’s productions.

Having watched the movie a number of times while bearing  books Invincible and Triumphant in mind I have come to the conclusion that the movie’s ulterior motive was an attempt to ridicule the Big Bwana into oblivion.  We all know that ridicule is a most effective weapon, especially when it can’t be answered.  It was undoubtedly thought Tarzan could be destroyed in this manner.

MGM did not negotiate to obtain rights to any particular story but, and this is important, they bought the right to use the characters as they thought fit.  Thus as the movie poster picture in Bibliophile David Fury’s book Kings Of The Jungle on p.63 published by McFarland, it is stated that the movie is ‘based on the characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.’  In other words, this is not the Tarzan of Invincible and Triumphant.  Oh no, no.  This is Tarzan The Defeated, Tarzan The Buffoon.

The vision is no longer Tarzan Of The Apes but Tarzan, The Ape Man.  A subtle but important shift in emphasis.  Tarzan is no longer a man raised among apes he is a man who is an ape.  The fabulous brain of Tarzan which allowed him to master reading and writing with the aid of only a picture book, that allowed him to learn new languages instantly has now been replaced by an inarticulate moron who does five minutes of  ’me Tarzan, you Jane.’

This was free love in the jungle between a hunk and a babe.  Apparently it slipped by unnoticed at the time until it was picked up thirty years later by an astute librarian.  Tarzan and Jane are no longer married in the movies, Jane just began cohabiting with Tarzan because he was such a handsome hunk.  Fortunately she, he, or both were infertile.  Thus Tarzan was subtly defamed, his universality removed.  His audience constricted by that much.

Having slipped this bit past the censors, as incredible as it may seem, in the next movie, Tarzan And His Mate, not wife but mate, you know, a live in,  MGM included the famous nude swimming scene that did not get past the censors.

Both these items would have had the effect of defaming Tarzan and constricting his audience.  A certain type of viewer would be offended by these items and refuse to see the movies while another type would gratified by such items and drawn to the movies but lower the quality of the audience moving Tarzan toward porn.  Thus by degrees Tarzan movies would gain the reputation as porn flicks.  Porn is porn even if it is Tarzan so you aren’t going to let your kids eat popcorn in front of dirty movies nor are legitimate first run theatres going to show them.  At least, not then.

Thus MGM was well on their way to making Tarzan porn before the censors forced a change in plan.  There was nothing Burroughs could have done about this as he, or rather his office manager signed away all his rights to his character.

The MGM poster then portrays Tarzan as a criminal freak:

Mothered by an ape- He knew only the law of the jungle- to seize what he wanted.

The ‘to seize’ is in attention grabbing italics.

Mothered by an ape is ambiguous and meant to be repulsive.  It could mean that Tarzan was fathered by a human on an ape or it could be so obscure as to be meaningless.  If you were familiar with the books you could probably guess what was intended but if you weren’t who knows what it could mean to you.    Remember the first volume, Tarzan Of The Apes, was no longer in print even in 1930 so the original story couldn’t even be bought.  The later volumes don’t recapitulate his birth and raising so there may have been actually few who knew the whole story.  We are led to believe that the MGM Tarzan is completely lacking in morality.  If he wants something he just steals it.  Not the Tarzan I would want to emulate.

The director was W.S. Van Dyke who had just had a major success with his Trader Horn, another African picture.  That one had been phenomenally successful and Tarzan is billed as “Another Miracle Picture directed by W.S. Van Dyke, Creator Of “Trader Horn.”  Van Dyke was certainly not the creator of Trader Horn as the movie was adapted from the book by Trader horn, there was such a man, thus in a way Tarzan, The Ape Man is subordinated to W.S. Van Dyke and Trader Horn.

What is called ‘the adaptation’ is done by someone called Cyril Hume.  As the dialogue was written by Ivor Novello I presume that both the storyline and the alterations to Tarzan’s character can possibly be attributed to Hume.

There is little on Hume on the internet but a New York Times review that was cribbed from All Movie Guide.  It says ‘…During the 1920s, Hume proved a worthy rival of Fitzgerald with such lost generation novels as Wife Of The Centaur and Cruel Fellowship.’  An interesting couple of titles in relation to this Tarzan movie.  The review then goes on to say ‘…During the 1930s , he was the principal writer of MGM’s “Tarzan ” films, bringing prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect…’  That’s one man’s opinion anyway.

As we all know the attributed movie writer frequently has very little to do with the finished script so we will assume that Hume’s script went through many revisions by many minds with perhaps different agendas than his.  One wonders why Ivor Novello, who was a well known playwright of the time was broght in to do dialogue.  Apart from the Tarzan yell, with which Novello is given no connection, that seems to be the major portion of the dialogue along with the famous ‘Tarzan-Jane’ sequence,  there seems to be little dialog that an amateur couldn’t have written.

The net result is a movie that seriously demeans Tarzan as conceived and portrayed over fifteen novels.  In order for their ridicule to be successful MGM did have to produce a movie that someone would go see.  They were apparently successful beyond their wildest hopes or fears as the movie was described as a ‘surprise’ hit and an enormous grosser.   Now MGM was stuck with the character.

If it was a surprise hit then one can discount the publicity that the movie cost a million dollars to produce.  There are no well-known stars in the movie, while much of it is footage left over from Trader Horn which had already been amortized with the rest being shot on lot.  If the movie cost MGM a quarter  million I would still be astonished.

In their attempt to ridicule Tarzan they were too clever by half.  The character of Tarzan may not have that of the books but audiences still found it satisfying, especially the yell.

Those of us who have read the books have always been uneasy with those MGM movies although Johnny Weismuller was perfectly cast in the role of the Ape Man.

So, while the NYT reviewer may believe Cyril Hume brought ‘prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect’ there are dissenting opinions other than mine.

Another interpretation was that of the first movie Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, who commented to ERB “the house seemed to think it was a comedy.  Why do they portray Tarzan without dignity?…with the right treatment and portrayal, Tarzan could a romantic, thrilling character, and still have the sympathy of his audience…I don’t like to see him treated as a clown…”

Elmo Lincoln and I both see the MGM version in the same light, while I have to question the interpretation of the NYTimes writer.  I think Lincoln was right, the movie was a comedic effort meant to defame the persona of ERB’s great creation and thus destroy Edgar Rice Burroughs.  After all ERB, Inc.’s  publishing arm was dependent on sales of Tarzan’s.

By 1932 the troublesome ERB had learned which side his bread was buttered on so he publicly endorsed the MGM movies, after all this was big money, bigger than any other souces of income combined.  It may be said then that just as Henry Ford recanted and apologized for offending the Jewish Cultural entity in the ongoing culture wars so Burroughs bent the knee to Liberal suzerainty.

As ERBzine reports, privately Burroughs had other thoughts:

Daughter Joan Burroughs revealed:  “Dad found it hard to reconcile himself to the movie versions of the Tarzan stories and never did understand the movie Tarzan.  He wanted Tarzan to speak like an educated Englishman instead of grunting.  One time we saw a movie together and after it was over, although the audience seemed enthusiastic, my father remained in his seat and kept shaking his head sadly.”

So Burroughs and Lincoln both resented the screen adaptation based on the Tarzan ERB had created.

There was nothing Burroughs could do about it.  His rights had been signed away by his agent Ralph Rothmund.  Rothmund must have been aware of the tension between Burroughs, Communists and Jews, yet he essentially gave the courthouse away.  He placed Burroughs in the hands of his enemies.  He gave Tarzan to MGM stripping Burroughs of his only weapon and asset.  Why?  Did he contact MGM or did MGM contact him?  Why did he negotiate behind Burroughs’ back presenting him with a fait accompli? Why not tell his employer,  ‘I’ve got this deal worked out with MGM.  Do you want to take it?’

Presented instead with a check, Our Man seduced by vain desires went out and bought five Packard automobiles.  Ah, ERB…

Did he repent of this deal?  I believe so.  Trapped by the contract his only way of retaliation was a futile one through his novels.

Louis B. Mayer

Can it be a coincidence that Tarzan And The Lion Man written over February to May of 1933, published by ERB, Inc. in book form on September 1, 1934 (Septimus Favonius BB#55 p. 34) ridiculed MGM, Irving Thalberg and Trader Horn.  The second MGM movie Tarzan And His Mate was released on April 16, 1934.  Bear these two dates in mind, the movie was released five months before the book leaving time for a revision of the book text.

Certainly severely wounded by the MGM adaptation of Tarzan Burroughs had been beaten.  He had lost the culture war between himself, the Communists and the Jews.  Having lost control of his character in the vital field of movies his only recourse was to lampoon MGM in a book which he did in Tarzan And The Lion Man.  Strangely his illustrator St. John chose this book to experiment with an unrepresentative cover that was believed to have killed sales.  Thus this magnficent achievement was undersold.

Lion Man recounts W.S. Van Dyke’s movie making in Africa, telling it in a ridiculing manner.  MGM’s version of Tarzan is portrayed by a character named Stanley Obroski, perhaps a takeoff on Johnny Weismuller, who is a pale imitation of the real Tarzan.  Burroughs makes a careful comparison showing what a joke the MGM Tarzan was.  In a fit of pique he kills the fake Lion Man off.

One of the more interesting characters is Balza- The Golden Girl.  After escaping from the Valley of Diamonds she joins the movie company where she cavorts about in the nude.  This scene has baffled me but if one remembers that in Tarzan And His Mate Maureen O’ Sullivan is stripped by Tarzan followed by the nude swimming scene, the novel makes sense.  ERB had seen the movie in April of 1934 possibly an earlier studio screening and incorporated the changes in his text for the 9/1/34 release date.

So his retort against MGM while ineffective made for what must rank as one of his very best efforts.

Just as an aside note that while this struggle was going on in Hollywood Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January of 1933; Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President of the United States in March of ’33.

One of FDR’s first deeds was to recogtnize the USSR regime of Joseph Stalin.  In late 1933 a chubby little ex-draper’s assistant acted as a go-between for Stalin and Roosevelt.  Having first visited Stalin,  H.G. Wells carried his messages to Roosevelt.  Thus under the very eyes of the world some very important communications were passed back and forth.  Nineteen thirty-three was also the year the former draper’s assistant wrote his Shape Of Things To Come.

These things can’t be stated with absolute certainty but the character of God– the formerly handsome Englishman in Lion Man, is certainly based on the pompous little H.G. Wells.

Thus while I at first objected to Slotkin’s accusations against ERB, barring the My Lai stuff, I think I am beginning to see ERB’s relation to the cultural wars between Communists, Jews, Liberals and Conservatives.  there is more going on here than meets the eye.

But let us look at some of the religous aspects of this interesting situation.  The religious war between Semitism and the Astrological Religion as represented by Tarzan Of The Apes.

 

Weissmuller As Tarzan

 

 

 

A Review Pt. 6: Tarzan The Invincible by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#14 Tarzan The Invincible

Part VI of X

by

R.E. Prindle

Inside The Gates Of Opar

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Life is just too short for some folks,

For other folks it just drags on.

Some folks like the taste of smokey whiskey

Others think that tea’s too strong.

Me, I’m the kind of guy who likes to ride the middle

I don’t like this bouncing back and forth.

Me, I want to live with my feet in Dixie

And my head in the cool blue North.

–Jesse Winchester: Nothing But A Breeze

     And now we come to the heart of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  One reason he is literarily disdained is that the story is not the story.  Porges, p.524:

     As the story progresses the perceived theme of a worldwide conspiracy is abruptly abandoned.  Burroughs in his contempt for the communists refuses to allow them to be sincere even in their Marxist goals.

     This is not true.  Porges has misconceived the story.  To quote the sixties Jewish revolutionary Mark Rudd:  The issue is not the issue.  By that Rudd meant that the Jews had created a diversion to mask the true issue which was the establishment of the Jewish culture as top culture or dictator in this multi-cultural world.

     Burroughs intent is exactly the same as regards Tarzan.  True, Burroughs has contempt for Communism but that is merely a frame story and a side issue.  The true issue is that Tarzan’s authority as guardian of Africa is being challenged on the spot.  The duel is between himself and Sveri mano a mano.  He discredits the collectivity through the individuals.  Thus at novel’s end Tarzan sits in state as Guardian or Emperor disposing the fates, godlike, of the remaining conspiritors.  Magnanimously he allow Paul Ivitch (Paulevitch) to be escorted out of Africa rather than be thrown on his own resources that would have resulted in his certain death.

     The issue within the issue, as always, is Burroughs attempt to resolve his psychological difficulties.  Thus one has the Colt-Drinov combination, possibly reprsenting ERB and Emma, an episode within Opar of Nao who may represent Florence releasing him from the prison of his marriage to Emma, and Colt-La, the Anima and Animus problem.  Tarzan and Colt change partners so that La nurses Colt and Tarzan nurses Zora.  But to that in the next section.

     While one expects a pure shoot out with the Communists, Tarzan is not going to defeat them by direct action but by a terrorist campaign of which Tarzan is the jungle master.

     To compound the problem Burroughs confuses realism with dreamwork.  This is not a realistic novel but a dream fantasy.  It was said that Burroughs wrote out his dreams which has a basis in fact.  The scenarios may have originated in his sleeping dreams but then he modifies them in day dream style while consciously molding the story for political and commercial purposes.  A writer does need readers.

     To give a basis for comparison for the dreamwork I’m going to play Freud here and offer up a dream of my own; it is similar to Burroughs’ in many way.  Since integrating my personality I don’t have wonderful dreams like this anymore.  As Jung correctly surmised when one integrates the conscious and sub-conscious minds memory destroys the symbolic basis of your dreams.  I can analyze the common place dreams I have now even as I dream them.  Something is lost, something is gained, but it might be of lesser value.  I think I like the mysterious flavor of the smokey whiskey even though the water I have to drink now  is better for me.

     In my dream I began on the edge of a vast desert dotted with a few oases while far off in the distance twenty years away, rather than miles, away in the the distance a great white shining mountain arose.  The distances were so vast they were measured not in miles but years.  Indeed, the years of my life.  I had to traverse the vast desert reaches between the oases.  Each oasis merely refreshed me for the next perilous journey.  Having traversed the years I came to the great white shining mountain.  One might compare it to the tor containing the treasure vaults  of  Opar out on its desert.  These are symbols common to multitudes.

      I then came to the white shining mountain which might compare to the city of Opar.  Censorship prevented me from climbing the mountain at that time.  In other words in the control of my subconscious, consciousness was denied me.  I approached the mountain from the back where I noticed a trickle of water leading into and down the mountain.  I tried to drink the water but as it ran through a pure salt bed it was too salty.  Unlike Burroughs who was in the pits of darkness I was always bathed in a clear light which came from nowhere.

     I followed the little stream down the subterranean path into the mountain.   Thus I had all land and no water, a barren psychological situation.  Following the cave down I came to a series of gates made entirely of steel.  I hesitated to go forward but there was no going back.  I was impelled into one of the gates which turned into a chute that spilled me out onto a steel floor where unseen hands seized me pushing me into a steel room as the steel door slammed shut.  Like Tarzan beneath Opar I was a prisoner with no seeming way out.

     As I looked around I realized that this was a laundry room.  All steel, of course.  While I had no food I now had sinks full of water.  My situation had been reversed from all land to all water, from the pure masculine to almost pure feminine.  Where before I was barren now I was spilling over with wisdom.  I knew I had to get out of there reasonably soon or I would starve to death.  There was impenetrable steel all around.  But I had plenty of water.  Too much water.  Looking around I spotted ventilation ducts along the ceiling.  I conceived the notion that I could drink lots of water then urinate in the ducts which would create a foul odor that would be distributed throughout the rooms above.   They would search for the source of the odor thus opening the door of my prison.

     The ducts were difficult to reach but I was able to urinate in them.  As I expected voices came down the duct asking ‘What is that smell?’.  The door to my prison opened inward so I stood to the side that opened waiting.  Sure enough a couple maintenance men flung the door open bursting into the room.  I slipped out the door behind them unnoticed.

     I now descended still further until I came to a bank of elevators.  One door was open for which I made a rush.  The elevator was packed with boys I knew from high school.  With doubled fists they pushed me back refusing to allow me in the elevator with them.  Mocking me as the doors closed I was left alone way down there.

     There was a flight of stairs but censorship prevented my using them.  I waited in vain for another elevator.  As with dreams I next found myself at the back of the mountain but the path into the mountain had disappeared so I now had to climb The Great White Shining Mountain.

     If, like Burroughs, I were writing a story I would provide a plausible story line for my escape but I’m not.  I’m merely transcribing a dream.

     The reason the mountain shone was because it was covered by snow several hundreds of feet, possibly thousands, thick.  As previously the water in the stream was too salty to drink now it was frozen.  The sun shone brightly, not only brightly, but brilliantly, as I began my climb.  I had left the subconscious for the conscious as I strove for the light.   The climb was long from the back of the brain to the forebrain but not tiring.  Apart from the barrenness of the snow I was enjoying myself.  Would it be too offensive a pun if I said I enjoyed being high?  After a long climb I came to a precipice past which I could go no further.  Nor could I go back.

      As I studied my position I looked down this sheer precipice to the desert thousands of feet below.  There was snow all the way to the desert floor.  Down there, way down there, I could see the tiny ant-like people in the barren sands doing obeisance to the moutain which they apparently treated as a god.

      Looking down the sheer face of snow I could dimly perceive the outlines of a great face carved in the snow.  This god, then, retained all the water behind his visage that could make the desert bloom.  Just as I had used water to escape the prison of my subconscious I conceived the notion that I could release the water and make the desert bloom freeing the people from their bondage.

     Now, this was hard snow.  I had no trouble walking the surface without breaking through while if the snow didn’t give way as I jumped on it to destroy the snow god I would plummet several feet into the desert.  Neverthless I leaped up landing on my bottom.  The snow gave way as I rode the avalanche several thousand feet down the mountain side to land on the desert floor while I destroyed the god who had been impounding the water.

     Many streams now flowed out from the mountain.  The desert bloomed turning green and bursting with flowers.  Now that we have a comparison let us examine Burroughs’ great dream of Opar.

      Opar first found expression way back at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913.  Appearing at the end of The Return Of Tarzan the story was included in Burroughs’ fourth published story and fifth written story, the Outlaw Of Torn had been written but not published yet.

     As with Invincible the story of The Return was not the story.  The story was what Burroughs hung the details of what appeared to be the story on.  Hence Return was rejected by Metcalf Burroughs’ first editor at Munsey’s who undoubtedly couldn’t understand it.  This is the novel in which Tarzan makes his first raid on the fabulous treasure vaults of Opar.  Burroughs will continue his wonder stories of Opar through three more books.  Each return occurs at a crucial point in his life.

     That Opar is a dream location is proven by the topography of the location.  It is not too dissimilar to any dream.  The jungle grows right up to the base of towering mountains behind which Opar is hidden.  On the other side of these it is a dry dusty desert exemplifying Burroughs’ life as the twenty year desert in my dream did mine.  Entry into the valley in this story is through a narrow defile apparently several thousands of feet high above which the peaks of the surrounding mountain range tower several thousand feet more.   This entry also closely resembles that of Haggard in King Solomon’s Mines.  Haggard is never far from Burroughs’ mind as he writes his stuff.

     Working your way down into the dreamscape is considerably more easy than climbing it.  And then off in the distance rose the shining red and gold domes and turrets of Opar.  A dream city if there ever was one.   One is reminded of the two great literary and psychological influences on Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard and L. Frank Baum.  Of  Haggard’s work beyond King Solomon’s Mines I have Heart Of The World and People Of The Mist most readily called to mind.  It might be appropriate to mention that Freud also read some Haggard.  He specifically mentions Heart Of The World and She but I suspect he probably read others as well.  Opar might be a ruined version of Baum’s Emerald City of Oz.  Opar is red and gold while from a distance its ruination is not obvious.  Mine was a shining white mountain.  Burroughs probably tinkered with his to make a good story better.

     Now, the fabled Thebes of Greek mythology had seven gates.  Cities Of The Sun had up to a hundred.  Opar doesn’t have any.  The entrance is a narrow cleft in the wall on which on entering this narrow 20″ gap for which Tarzan had to turn his massively broad shoulders sideways and then immediatley climb a flight of ancient stairs.  This appears to be a reverse birth story in which Tarzan is reentering the womb, an impossible feat, but then, Tarzan goes where even devils fear to tread.  Try some of the books of the psychologist Stanislav Grof.  There’s definitely a sexual image that requires a little thought to understand.  Hmm.  No gates but a narrow cleft too narrow for the shoulders and a flight of steps leading back into the what, womb?  Whose cleft?  ERB mother’s, Emma’s, possibly Florence’s by this time, or that of his Anima figure?  Well, the last is waiting for him inside the domed inner chamber of this sacred city who is aptly named La, which is French for She.   ‘She’ was Ayesha the heroine of Haggard’s novel She.  I’m sure Burroughs is not writing consciously here.

     At this point Tarzan is accompanied by fifty of his brave and faithful but superstitious Waziri.  In fact, in this story as Tarzan goes through his incarnation of a Black savage he is Chief Waziri, eponymous head of the Waziri.  P. 42:

     As the ape man and his companions stood gazing in varying degrees of wonderment at this ancient city in the midst of savage Africa, several of them became aware of movement within the structure at which they were looking.  There was nothing tangible that the eye could grasp- only an uncanny suggestion of life where it seemed that there should be no life, for living things seemed out of place in this weird, dead city of the long dead past.

     Dead city of the long dead past.  That’s what dreams are all about, one’s own long dead past.  Thus the ridge separating the lush live jungle from this dry, dusty plain eight years wide was Burroughs own dead past.  I suggest the mountain range, perhaps sixteen thousand feet high, represented ERB’s confrontation with John the Bully when he was eight or nine.  On the jungle side was his early life as a Little Prince while on the dry dusty side was his blighted, blasted life after John.   Opar represents his ruined mind inhabited by the suggestion of life and the Queen of his dreams the beautiful High Priestess of the Flaming God, the woman of indescribable beauty, La of Opar.

     La is obviously a combination of Haggard’s She and L. Frank Baum’s Ozma Of Oz.

     Tarzan is seized by the Frightful Men, bound and gagged and left lying in a courtyard at high noon.  The rays of the Flaming God bear down on him.  Whether this is merely part of an ancient  Oparian religious rite or whether Tarzan becomes the chosen Son of theSun a god among men, isn’t clear to the reader.  The Oparians have their own ideas.

     Burroughs describes this rite in a really masterful way.  The maddened murderous Oparian who disturbs the ceremony just before Tarzan is to be sacrificed is nicely handled.  Believe me, I feel like I am there.  As La looks down on Tarzan’s form on the altar she recognizes the One, the Son of the Sun, the One for which she is destined.   Once again, Haggard’s She.

     Freed in the melee caused by the crazed Oparian Tarzan is taken down to the Chamber of the Dead by La where she hides him.  As she said nobody would look for him in the Chamber of the Dead.  This Chamber answers very well to the laundry room of my dream.  Tarzan/Burroughs is in a stone dungeon with walls fifteen feet thick, fourteen in Invincible, in total darkness while I was in a steel room with no exit but bright light.  These locations answer to the rigid confines of one’s owned damaged psyche.  There is no way out but there is, there has to be.  While palpating this stony prison at the back of the cell Tarzan discerns a flow of air coming through.  This scene is a replication of one in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines while becoming a B movie staple.  The big Bwana discovers some loose stones.  He is able to dislodge these creating an exit through the fifteen foot depth of stones of the fortress wall.  Somehow Burroughs has worked his psyche to give himself a chance.  Once beyond the foundation walls, free of the Chamber of the Dead (I once dreamed I was looking for my soul in the House of the Distraught) but act among the living, Tarzan feels his way down this long dark corridor.   One can’t be certain of ERB’s age when he achieved this escape.  As it takes place just before Tarzan marries Jane the time might have been 1898-99.  Perhaps when he was in the stationery business in Idaho.  Perhaps something he read acted as a lever.  Apart from Darwin’s Origin Of Species I would venture to say he read Eugene Sue’s Mysteries Of Paris a copy of which is in his library while traces of it are here in his earliest work.

     Sue’s rare mentality permeates every page of this first visit while Sue’s extraordinary consciousness is everywhere apparent throughout ERB’s entire corpus.  Burroughs himself is absolutely incredible in the manner he associates with numerous other writer’s intellects, seemingly simultaneously within a given passage or even sentence.  Myself, Adams, Hillman, Broadhurst, Burger and others have written extensively on these influences.  Hillman even goes so far as to virtually twin Burroughs with some of his major literary influences.  Burroughs does make all these writers his virtual doubles.

     I have stressed Sue’s influence in several earlier essays.  I can only urge you to read Sue’s Mysteries Of Paris- a big three-volume work and too short at that- which Burroughs in his own reading found a life changing experience.  Possibly he did read it in 1898-99.  I found it a life changing experience; I’ve never been able to free myself of its influence, while it appears that Burroughs couldn’t either.  A lot of the late nineteenth century writers make reference to Eugene Sue.  H.G. Wells based the beginning of an early novel on Sue.  The remnant remains only as a short story.

     Sue wrote from outside the bounds of sanity.  Privately I consider him insane but so brilliantly rational as to transcend the very meaning of insanity.  He’s a dangerous writer.  His last work was confiscated by the French authorities.  It undoubtedly had such a private personal sense of morality that I am sure it would have undone society much as the pornography from Hollywood has undone ours.  DeSade and Restif De La Bretonne, who in some ways Sue resembles, were mere unbalanced pornographers who disturb only the disturbed.  Sue’s vision of morality is coldly clear, it forms the basis of Tarzan’s but is always on the side of reason and virtue.  This fact makes it no less dangerous to a weak mind or that of the obsessive-compulsive Liberal.  Still, only the strong survive.  I heartily recommend you take your chance.

     Tarzan freed from the prison of the psyche, was he insane?  was I?  or were we merely trapped by a device of other’s making?  I can’t say but ERB’s sanity after he escaped was conditioned by that of Eugene Sue.  I, of course, rise above all influences.

     Progressing down the corridor Tarzan comes to the First Censor.  He finds a gap in the floor into which he might have fallen had he not been careful.  He would have fallen into the unknown but he would have been alright.  He would have fallen into water which in his condition would have been life-giving water rather than dangerous or perhaps he might have drowned in the waters of the subcoscious or Oblivion. 

     In high school I had a teacher who used to chalk a half dozen slogans on the black board, one each morning.  The only one I remember is ‘when you reach the end of your rope tie a knot and hang on.’  I did this for a couple decades then one day I let go.  The joke was on me.  There was nowhere to fall.  I was only a fraction of an inch from a solid surface.  However Tarzan culdn’t have known this since he didn’t fall in, this time.  He would three years later.

     By chance he looked up where he saw some light entering to discover he was at the edge of a well.  Yes, you see, the water of life.  He dimly descried the other side fifteen feet away which was child’s play for him to leap.  Thus he passed the First Censor.  Mine was at the elevators which I apparently merely disregarded.

     Continuing on for some time in total darkness, so far that he believes himself outside the walls of Opar he enters the treasure vaults.  These vaults are filled with what appears to be forty pound barbells of solid gold.  Now, this gold is old.  So old that no Oparian knows that it is there nor do any old legends even mention it.  This is an intriguing part.  The gold was mined millennia in the past after the sinking of Atlantis.   This raises the question of what did Burroughs know of Atlantis and did he believe in it?  I can’t answer the sources of the former but I’m betting on Ignatius Donnelly as one of them.  As to the latter I believe he did.  He mentions Atlantis in Invincible with a confidence and familiarity that convinces me that over the eighteen years since Return he has read and thought enough to convince himself of the reality of the lost continent.  He appears to accept a mid-Atlantic location.

     The gold represents the income he’s receiving for his stories.  The stories spring from his dead past.  That the vaults are outside Opar indicates he freed his mind from its prison or that the money comes from outside the prison, i.e. his publishers.  That the gold is Atlantean indicates that his stories are based on his own ancient experience.  In other words he is mining his past already completed as ingots or accomplished facts.

     What experience then catalyzed his ability to write?  I believe that from 1908-10 when he read L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz, Dorothy And The Wizard Of Oz and The Emerald City Of Oz he found a means to express himself.  These books bypassed his last censor allowing him to write Minidoka.  That book was not suitable for publication but it freed his genius so that he immediately followed it with A Princess Of Mars.

     Now, outside the gates of the Emerald City/Opar in the midst of the equivalent of  Baum’s Great Sandy Desert he found the handle on his own destiny.

     Tarzan locates the fifty faithful but superstitious Waziri loading them up with two forty pound ingots each and points them toward the coast.

     At the same time Fifty Frightful Men from Opar who are tracking him discover Jane instead.  Dreamy enough for you?  Given a choice between Tarzan and Jane I’d take Jane and so did the Fifty Frightful Men.

     So now Jane’s on the altar under the sacrifical knife of La.  Skipping the irrelevant details La discovers Jane is Tarzan’s beloved.  Interesting confrontation between Tarzan/Burroughs real life woman and his Anima.  La is shattered as Tarzan rejects her for Jane.

     This is a key point in the oeuvre.  This is what makes the novels so repulsive to the literary mind.  The story is not the story; the issue is not the issue.  Opar is the story within the story that will be told in four short parts over eighteen years.  So we have part one here without any indication the story will be continued.  A segment of the story is just plopped down into The Return Of Tarzan, sort of irrelevantly.

     Weird style actually.  I’m not even sure it works, but it nevertheless must be effective else why would the stuff still be in print a century on.  You’re on your own, Jack, I can’t even attempt to solve that one.  Not today anyway.

     The next novel examining this psychological is the 5th novel of the oeuvre, Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar of 1915.

     At this point Tarzan, a profligate if there ever was one, has run through the two tons of gold the fifty faithful Waziri brought out and is broke.  Two tons of gold in three years.  Think about it.  He needs to make another run on Opar.

     The character of the series changes with Jewels Of Opar from the character of the Russian Quartet, the first four novels.  They not only have an Oz influence but they become Ozlike.  Burroughs apparently drew on The Beasts Of Tarzan as the foundation for what is essentially a new series.

     After writing five Oz stories, in the sixth, The Emerald City Of Oz, Baum attempted to abandon the series.  He closed the series off with the news that there will be no more communication from the fairy kingdom.  Because Oz has been invaded three times now, what with the advent of airplanes that will be able to spot Oz from the air Ozma is making the kingdom invisible.  Is it coincidence that Opar disappears from the oeuvre after the third invasion?

     Baum’s Emerald City Of Oz appeared in 1910.  It was the last of the stories to be datelined Coronado in his prefaces.  When he was forced to begin writing Oz stories again in 1913 they were datelined Ozcot in Hollywood.  In 1910 Hollywood was just a pleasant Los Angeles suburb.  The movies didn’t begin to make Hollywood the center of the world porn industry until 1914.

     Whether Burroughs knew that Baum left Coronado in 1911 isn’t known but I find it signficant that when he went to California in 1913 his first choice of residence was Coronado where he perhaps thought he would be close to Baum who afer all had a close connection with Chicago.   Baum wasn’t in Coronado so Burroughs moved across the bay to San Diego.

     The question then is: did Burroughs make a pilgrimage to Ozcot to see Baum in 1913?  I have to believe he did.  Tarzan was one heck of an entree such that Baum could hardly refuse to see ERB.  How long or how often the men met then is conjectural but I think it was long enough for Baum to give Burroughs some tips on fantasy writing.  Already an ardent admirer of the Oz books Burroughs would have had no trouble accepting advice from this master.

     Thus when Burroughs returned to LA and Ozcot in 1916 it is certain that they met while they were probably already familiar with each other.  In 1919, when Burroughs moved to LA permanently, Baum was on his deathbed so there was no chance to renew the acquaintance.  I also believe that Baum’s Ozcot influenced Burroughs in naming his own estate Tarzana.

     In any event Tarzan returns to Opar in 1915.  Except for the first visit when Tarzan following the directions of the old Waziri, chief of the Waziri, visited Opar to take the gold, in the rest of the visits he is battling interlopers who wish to steal the gold from him.  It might  pay to look at the nature of the intrusions and the intruders.

     In 1911-12 Burroughs had for the first time in his life come into more money than he could spend, only for a brief moment of course.  Thus Tarzan removes the gold more on a whim not really knowing what to do with it.  One might think this a strange attitude for one who had tasted the night life of Paris; but a foolish conisistency is the bugbear of small minds as one of those venerated old timers once said.  I don’t wish to be thought of as small minded so we’ll let the observation pass.

     By 1915 having lost his two tons of gold in some bad investments Tarzan has better learned the value of money or, at least, the absence of it.  And so, perhaps, has Edgar Rice Burroughs.  One can see the ghost of old George T. shaking his head muttering:  ‘When will that boy ever learn?”  Well, George, it would take more time than allotted to him.

     After 1912 Burroughs had created something of value.  That value could be stolen or at least exploited.  In 1914 McClurg’s offered him a publishing contract.  Nicely crafted it gve all the advantages to McClurg’s and none to Burroughs.    Burroughs undoubtedly did not understand the legal implications of what he signed.  I can’t explain this but McClurg’s made no effort to merchandise a sure fire hit.  They didn’t even publish the full fifteen thousand copies called for in the contract.  They released the book to reprint publisher A.L.  Burt after p;rinting only ten thousand copies themselves.   Explain it how you will but there was a guaranteed huge absolutely visible market waiting for book publication.  Syndication in newspapers had guaranteed the book’s success.  So why did McClurg’s willfully refuse to take advantage of such a deal?

     Burroughs probably had stars in his eyes at the prospect of 10-15% royalties on hundreds of thousands if not millions of books.  Instead he got comparatively nothing.  The royalties from Burt were miniscule and to be shared 50/50 with McClurg’s.  You can imagine Burroughs’ disappointment as a golden future became brass before his eyes.

     Back to Opar.  Tarzan entered the vaults before his faithful Waziri who were warriors and would act as bearers for no other man.     Alone Tarzan made six trips from the vaults to the top of the tor bringing up forty-eight forty-pound ingots.  That’s 320 lbs. per carry for a total of 1920 lbs or nearly a ton.  According to Freud, and I believe him, all numbers are significant, although I don’t have enough information to delve completely into the meaning of these numbers.  The Waziri then brought up fifty-two ingots.  some two of the fifty got stuck with carrying two ingots or two went back for one more.  That made slightly over a standard of 2000 lbs.

     Tarzan’s forty-eight ingots are roughly half of the total that undoubtedly represents the fifty-fifty split with McClurg’s.  At the time Ogden McClurg, the son of the father who built the company, Alexander McClurg, was the nominal head of the company.  The firm was actually owned by the employees since about 1902, which Burroughs probably didn’t know.  The man he dealt with, Joseph Bray, was probably the real head of the company.  Actually Ogden was away from the company for long stretches on adventures in Central America and WWI so that he would have been unfamiliar with the day-to-day workings of the company.  Burroughs, however, formed a grudge against Ogden McClurg.  I suspect that the Belgian villain Albert Werper is based partly on Ogden McClurg while also being an alter ego of Burroughs.  So, a story behind the story is how Ogden McClurg stole ERB’s royalties.

     At the same time Tarzan spurns La for a second time so the Anima-Animus story of Tarzan, Jane and La continues.  La has Tarzan within her power but in the life and death situation love triumphs over her hurt so she spares the The Big Guy.  Not without consequences.  The Fifty Frightful Men, or what’s left of them after the maddened Tantor tramples a few, led by Cadj, who now makes his appearance, feel betrayed repudiating La.  Thus is begun the conspiracy to replace La which will be the focal point of the next two visits.  You know, love or hate, I don’t know which is to be feared the most.

     In the next visit in Tarzan And The Golden Lion Tarzan has gone through his second two tons of gold.  That is four tons of gold in roughly ten years plus the Jewels of Opar that our spendthrift hero has managed to go through.  Four tons of gold!  That’s 128,000 ounces of gold.  At today’s price of over a thousand dollars an ouce it works out to 128 billion dollars and change.  My friends, that is prodigality.  Good thing there was more where that came from, hey?

     Of course a lot of the loss came from loans to the British Empire to float the Great War.  But like certain other borrowings, to which Burroughs may be making an allusion, the Empire had no intention of repaying.

     Once again this sort of excess had brought Tarzan to the edge of bankruptcy not unlike ERB in 1922.  Just as creditors were besieging ERB for money so some private individuals led by a former employee, Flora Hawkes, attempt to extract the gold from Opar.  Tarzan first fails, then recovers not only the gold but the bag of diamonds.  The significance of the jewels is explained in the Tarzan and Esteban Miranda story contained in Tarzan And The Ant Men.  That story is a duplicate Jewels Of Opar with different details.  The history of the Jewels Of Opar also duplicates the history of Tarzan’s locket in Ant Men.  If you’ve found something good don’t hesitate to use it more than once.

     Fifteen years after the visit in Jewels Of Opar and eight years after the Golden Lion/Ant Men the scene returns to Opar, where once again others are to make a run on Tarzan’s private bank at Opar.  Apparently Tarzan has them baffled from the start as, although they know there are treasure vaults at Opar, they have no idea where they are.  It appears the Communists have read the earlier books, but not with close attention, nor did they bring their copies along with them to bone up during all those idle moments in camp.  Playing cards is alright after reading, but time better spent before.  You can see why these dodos failed.

     Burroughs had read his Oz stories.  One can’t be sure whether he ever reread the stories or whether he was working from twenty year old memories.  There are similarities here with the Emerald City Of Oz of 1910.  In that book Baum attempts to end the series.  He says that it will be the last communication from Oz.  It too involves an invasion of Oz by the Nome King and his horrid allies.  In Baum’s story Ozma refused to defend her Communist State, predating Russia by seven years, but arranges it so that the invaders who are tunneling beneath the Great Sandy Desert emerge in front of the fountain of the Waters of Oblivion.  The fountain has apparently been spiked with LSD as the drinkers get lost in a world of their own returning through the tunnel without a fight.  Perhaps the first military use of drugs in history.  An excellent fairy tale, hey?

      Burroughs’ Communists make two attempts to enter Opar.  Circling the city unable to find any gates to Burroughs dreamworld they do find the narrow cleft in the wall.  Spooky sounds and happenings disconcert the Blacks and Arabs of this multi-cultural coalition so that any concerted action is frustrated.  Although the Russians and the Mexican, Romero, enter, only Romero has the courage to penetrate beyond the courtyard.  The Russians are arrant cowards who flee at the sound of the first Oparian shriek.

     Returning to base camp they find that Wayne Colt, having tramped the breadth of Africa, has joined the group.

     A second attempt is made.  The superstitious Arabs refuse to return being also disgusted by Zveri’s lack of leadership and cowardice.  Taking the six Communists and the Blacks Zveri returns to Opar for a second attempt.  While absent from the base camp the coalition begins to come apart as the Arabs desert the cause, looting and burning the camp while taking the two White women with them.  La has joined Zora but more on that in the next section.

     The second expedition fares no better than the first for the same reasons.  On this attempt both Wayne Colt and Romero enter the sanctuary where they are engaged in a serious battle with the Frightful Men.  Colt is felled by a thrown bludgeon that knocks him down but doesn’t crush his skull.  Romero retreats, Colt is dropped unconscious before the high priestess, now Oah and Dooth.  Cadj was destroyed by Jad-Bal-Ja in Golden Lion so Dooth has taken his place.

     If La is the good mother aspect of the male psyche, Oah is the bad or wicked mother.  Still beautiful but not quite as much so as La. 

     She orders Colt taken to a dungeon to await the full moon or some other propitious moment to sacrifice him.

     Oah’s plans will be foiled because among those present is a nubile young maiden named Nao who falls head over heels for Wayne at first sight.  Burroughs describes Nao as having entered the first bloom of womanhood.  To me that represents a fourteen-year old girl.  Indeed, Nao is fresh as a flower.

     One remembers Uhha who accompanied Esteban Mirands in Ant Men was specifically mentioned as being fourteen.  So the ages fourteen, nineteen and twenty have special female connotations in Burroughs’ stories.  As Freud rightly says people should only be held responsible for their actions and not their thoughts.  Certainly there is no mention of Miranda having relations with Uhha while Nao had to be content with watching Colt disappear into the night after she released him from prison, murdering a man, be it noted, to do it.  All that Priestess sacrificial training with knives comes in handy.

     It will be remembered that ERB is said to have begun proposing to Emma when she was in the first bloom of womanhood at fourteen.  So it is probable that the memory is associated with Uhha and Nao.

     Colt as Burroughs alter ego thus allows Burroughs to visit Opar and have his fling with Nao as Colt while  Tarzan has his with La.  there’s a sort of joining of the two aspects of Burroughs’ Animus much as there was with Esteban Miranda and Tarzan in Golden Lion/Ant Men as well as Werper and Tarzan in Jewels Of Opar.

     Tarzan himself returns to Opar before the first expedition of the Communists.

     It has been eight years and four novels since Tarzan visited the fabled red and gold city of Burroughs’ dreams.  Tarzan has a number of misconceptions of his relationship with the Oparians.  The high priest Cadj who had become a problem in Jewels Of Opar was killed by Jad-Bal-Ja in Golden Lion.  La had been replaced on her throne with the Bolgani of the Valley of Diamonds as her body guard and the Gomangani, who had no thin veneer of civilization at all, as her slaves, I guess.  Tarzan then sees himself as an Oparian benefactor, not unlike the US in today’s Iraq, who will be received as a friend.  Our hero shows himself a poor psychologist.

     With a light springing step he turns sideways to enter the cleft, bounds up the stairs to enter the inner sanctum where the howling Frightful Men bash him over the head yet again.  Tarzan could have been tagged Skull Of Steel to survive all these bashings with very heavy clubs and grazing by full metal jacket bullets.  I tell you, man, I’d reather read of adventures like this than live them.

     Coming to, Tarzan is surprised to find Oah as High Priestess with Dooth as her High Priest.

     ‘Where is La?’  Tarzan asks.

     ‘Dead.’  Replies Oah.  ‘Throw him in the dungeon.’

     Back to the pits of Opar for the Big Bwana where one imagines his sensitive nostrils will be grossly offended.

     Once again Tarzan escapes his prison.  Seeking a way out he is spotted by some hairy bandy-legged men.  Fleeing down an endless corridor flanked by doors he chooses one and enters.  Whew!  What an aroma assails his sensitive nostrils.  He is face to face with a half starved lion.  The Big Guy hears the hairy men rushing down the corridor just as the lion springs.  The door opens inward, unlike most prisons but apparently commonly in dreamscapes, so Tarzan opens it and steps behind it.  As the lion springs past him he slams the door which was not too swift a move as the bar falls locking him in.  He has the comfort of hearing the lion tearing up the Frightful Men but the stench of the lion’s den for once is so powerful it disguises the aroma of a White woman at the back of the cell.  Surprise!  La isn’t dead she’s been palling around with this lion for a while.  Fortunately as in Ant Men there is a door between her inner cell and that of the lion that she can open.  They built prisons differently back then.

     So, the Animus and Anima are reunited but in prison once again.  As in all dream sequnces there is a way out.

     There’s a lot of shuffling about; this one is fairly complicated.  In order to bring food to La at the back of the cell it is necessary to first feed the lion.  There is a corridor across the front of the cell.  a barred gate separates it from the lion’s den while La’s cell with its unlocked door is at the back.  The corridor leads to a little chamber that is open from above.  The lion’s food is thrown down after the gate has been lifted and closed somehow.  While the lion is feeding in this corridor the attendant picks his way among the lion piles and puddles to take the food back to La.  The chow must be tasteless in this overpowering stench.

     Tarzan investigates then raising the gate for La when she advises him that the Oparians are coming back with the lion.  This is very fast work by the Oparians so you can see the stuff is dreamwork.  Tarzan raises La into the opening following her.

     They follow the winding staircase until they enter a chamber that is the highest point in Opar.  Thus they have ascended from the subconscious to the conscious.  Here La once again confesses her love for the Beast of Beasts.  The Big Guy is still not interested.

     As they are plotting a way to get down from the tower they hear someone ascending a ladder.  As the fellow pops his head above floor level Tarzan seizes the guy by the neck.  My first reaction was to think that this was the Old Stowaway from Tarzan And The Golden Lion who would now be sixty-eight.  Apparently not although Burroughs makes him sound different from one of the Frightful Men.

     The old boy assures Tarzan and La that he is faithful as he as wellas most of the Oparians pine for the return of La.  Plans are made for La to return to her throne.  The Old Boy was a master of deceit however.  Oah, Dooth and the Frightful Men who are still very angry with La and Tarzan are waiting for the pair when they enter from behind the curtain.  A little Wizard of Oz touch.  Humor, I think.

     Tarzan might well have voiced the words of Marty Robbins in El Paso:

Many thoughts ran through my mind

As I stood there.

I had but one chance

And that was to run.

     And run the Big Bwana did in a scene that was almost as comical as when he ran from the Alalus women in Tarzan And The Ant Men.

     Breaking through the ring of Frightful Men Tarzan tosses the slower La over a shoulder and rapidly puts one of his clean limbs before the other.  The bandy little legs of the Frightful Men are no match for the Big Bwana.  Shouting epithets like:  Good riddance of bad rubbish and Don’t come back again if you know what’s good for you. they snarlingly turned back to the City of Red and Gold.

     Far across the dusty plain Tarzan and La climbed the ridge separating Opar from the outside world.  First outside the gates of Opar in 1915s Jewels Of Opar chasing after Tarzan, once again in Tarzan And The Golden Lion to rescue Tarzan, La now makes her longest and most hazardous stay in the great wide world.

Part Seven follows.

 

 

Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconscious

 

Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconcious

Redefining A False Vision

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition,  Orig. Issued 1965, Dover edition of 2004

Movie:  The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, 1932, Fritz Lang, auteur.

http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/something-of-value-i-2/

 

     Sometime after I wrote the first part of Something Of Value (see above for link) I read David Bakan’s Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition.  Bakan’s book confirmed my findings while developing Freud’s relationship to his culture’s mystical tradition based on Bakan’s understanding of the Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah, which I haven’t read or studied; nor do I intend to unless I exhaust my other pursuits which doesn’t seem likely.  You never know though.

     However a point to consider is how Jewish is the Jewish mystical tradition, that is, what are its antecedents?  Are they rooted in Judaism or elsewhere?  Bakan seems to believe that he Jewish Kabbalah is derived entirely from Jewish sources independent of the general milieu.  I don’t believe this to be true.  The Jewish mystical tradition like all others is based on the very ancient Egyptian as is a great deal of ancient Jewish culture.  Bakan believes that the Kabbalah arose in the first century AD.  This is probably true.

     The Hermetic tradition which is equivalent to a European Cabala took form as such in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period when Greek and Egyptian ideas interreacted.  Hemeticism evolved from much earlier doctrines centered around the Egyptian god Thoth.  The Zohar and Cabbalah then is Hermetic material adapted for Jewish needs.  The whole can be traced back to Alexandria.  It will be remembered that there was a large colony of Jews in Alexandria from long before the first century AD.

     The Zohar is a mystical book, which is attributed to the first and second century Rabbi, Simeon Bar Yohai, was rewritten, edited and whatever in twelfth century Spain in the sixteenth century.  Its influence then was transmitted to the seventeenth century Jewish messiah, Sabbatai, Zevi.

     According to Mr. Bakan Freud was familiar with the Zohar and Kabbalah.  I couldn’t go so far as to claim so myself but Mr. Bakan can quote chapter and verse.  While Freud claimed to be scientific Mr. Bakan relates almost all of Freud’s psychology to the Kabbalah showing Freud’s dependence on Sabbatianism and Frankism as I indicated in Something Of Value Part I.

     Thus while seeming to be working from a scientific point of view Freud is actually blending a bit of scientific method acquired from European sources, as there is no science in Jewish culture, with his Jewish religious material to subvert the European moral order.  While Freud himself was at war with European civilization, the international Jewish organizations extended his field of influence to the United States and Canada.  Thus while Freud speaks specifically of Europe he can be taken to mean Euroamerica.

2.

     A further background for his psychology, Freud’s central childhood fixation, appears to the incident in which a European knocked his father’s hat into the gutter which his father meekly, or wisely, depending on your point of view, accepted without a demur.  Because of this story Freud wished to avenge himself on all Europeans.

     Probably at this point Freud assumed the Moses complex that stayed with him to the end of his life.  He, Freud, would lead his people to triumph over the Europeans as Moses had led the People out of Egypt while Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Red Sea.

     However, oddly enough, as he claimed to be wholly Jewish, Freud was conflicted in his attitude toward Europeans.  As a child he had a Roman Catholic nurse who introduced him to Christianity by taking him to church.  Most probably she also tried to wean him from Judaism.  This experience had a great effect on young Freud.  In the following anecdote, as with most fixations, he seemed to have lost the exact memory of the situation.  From Bakan:

     …that my ‘primary originator; (of neuroses) was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great deal about God and hell, and gave me a high opinion of my own capacities.

     On October 15, 1897 he quotes his mother about the old nurse who took care of him when he was very young:

     “Of  course,” she said, “an elderly woman, very shrewd indeed.  She was always taking you to church.  When you came home you used to preach and tell us about how God conducted his affairs.”

     His memory had become confused while it does not appear that he ever exorcised his fixation, for fixation it was.  He apparently loved this nurse at the time rather than hated her.  When she was later accused and convicted of stealing from the Freuds she was dishonored and actually sent to jail.  Freud was heartbroken while changing his opinion of her.  But, he had had contact with Christian Europeans which left a lasting impression on him that he could not consciously recognize or acknowledge.  If I am correct, this impression resurfaced when he came into contact with C.G. Jung who he adopted as a surrogate for this nurse transferring his love and hatred of her to Jung.

     Just as he loved this nurse there were apparently strong homosexual overtones in his relationship with Jung.  As Frued would have known, the compulsion toward repitition wouldhave been a component in his relationship with Jung as with his nurse although he apparently did not recognize this.  So much for his self-analysis.  He found reasons to break off with Jung or drive him away while bitterly claiming to be betrayed by Jung just as his nurse had been accused and convicted of theft thus betraying the love of the child Freud.  Thus once again his contact with a Christian European was brief ending in sorrow for himself.

     A third situation occured late in life when he wrote Moses And Monotheism.  Rather startlingly he claimed that Moses was not Jewish but was an ethnic Egyptian.  This means Freud, who had a Mosaic fixation, split his personality between his Christian longings and his professed Jewish identity.  Another result would be that monotheism was not a Jewish invention but actually a goyish invention so that all the evil arising from monotheism was not the fault of the Jews but the goys.  A neat job of transference.   Thus Freud’s notion of Moses may have been a sort of dream reversal of facts.

     Whatever the results of Freud’s self-analysis back before the turn of the century, it is quite clear that he was unable to resolve his fixations nor, one believes, was he aware of their influence on him.  He never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his subconscious fixations.  No wonder he ignored the conscious mind.

3.

     Like most people Frud had to find his way from adolescence to adulthood band his true ambitions by a circuitous route.

     The editor’s note to 1927′s The Future Of An Illusion says this:

     In the ‘Postscript’ which Freud added in 1935 to his  Autobiographical Study he remarked that a ‘signficant change’ had come about in his writings during the previous decade.  “My interest,” he explained, “after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thiniing.”

     He undoubtedly refers to his experiences in church with his Christian nurse contrasted with the ‘Christian’ who knocked his father’s hat into the gutter.  As Freud is very duplicitous in his use of language one should try to be very sensitive to the meanings behind the general meaning of his words.  Thus I believe his use of the term ‘cultural problems’ can usually be understood as his inner conflict between his Christianity and Judaism.

     As Bakan points out, that while Freud rejected Rabbinical religious Judaism he was deeply immersed in the jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar and Kabbalah.  Thus one can discount his claim to be an ‘atheistic’ Jews.  Or else atheism has a more specific meaning for him.

     I would place the change of emphasis in his writing or, at least the beginning of the change, in 1915.  My guess would be that Freud was unaware of the Jewish Revolution until he joined B’nai B’rith in 1895.  That knowledge would have shaped the direction of his researches.  Whatever science was involved would have been subordinated toward achieving the Revolution.  At the same time that he was working out the nature of psychoananlysis as Bakan indicates he must also have been studying the Zohar and Kabbalah.  I haven’t read or studied either so I have to rely on Bakan’s analysis of their influence.  Bakan traces strong mystical influences running side by side with what passed for science in Freud’s mind.  As Freud persistently says he’s going to ignore the facts if favor of projections one must assume that there is more mysticism than science in Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis- as he says ‘his creation.’

     Bakan points out that Freud transited from the role of physician to that of ‘healer.’  That is analogous to the hands on approach of Christian Fundamentalism.  Freud then for all practical purposes abandoned medicine for healing.  Then, sometime between 1913 and 1915 he abandoned psychoanalytical research for his ‘cultural’ studies.’  In other words, he began to apply his psychological studies to the manipulation of cultures through his developing ideas on Group Psychology.

     Just as Freud learned that there screen memories that transformed more painful memories into something more acceptable to salve those injured feelings so Freud learned that he could develop ‘screen’ language to serve up unpalatable meanings in palatable ways.  Thus what he says has a reasonable meaning to the uninitiated but has a totally different meaning to the initiated- those with the key.  In many ways it is the same as a criminal argot.  Those who understand the argot can discuss topics openly while only those with the key can twig it.  Ya dig?

     The key incident that fixed his mind on ‘cultural interests’ was his father’s story of the guy who knocked his hat into the gutter.  Freud then, in attempting to diguise his hatred for ‘Christianity’  while secretly admiring it because of his nurse who gave him an inflated opinion of his importance, and his desire to avenge his father and hence all Jews through his Moses fixation developed his program.  Thus he acted in his own mind altruistically and need feel no guilt.

     Freud was very seriusly conflicted, also suffering from depression according to Bakan.  Hence his purpose was to knock the whole of European Christianity into a cocked hat in the gutter, which is to say the actual persons of Europe.  Compare Freud to Rebbe Schneerson in America.

     Thus, the use of terms like ‘Culture’ and ‘Civilization’ should always be placed in the context of Jews and Europeans.  In this manner he avoids the appearance of bigotry and hatred while sounding ‘scientific.’

     Now, this obsession and extreme form of vengeance for something that, after all, didn’t happen to him nor did he witness it, might certainly be considered a neurosis, probably a psychosis and possible a degree of insanity.  In reading Bakan there is a hint that he believes Freud had a disordered mind.  Indeed, Fritz Lang’s movie The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse should be held steadily in mind when reading of Freud’s later career.  Lang must have had Freud in mind when he filmed the movie.

     Lang also had a hand in The Cabinet Of  Dr. Caligari from which film he was dismissed.  Lang’s departure from Caligari changed the ending to the conventional note of the victim, or whistle blower, being declared insane.  Lang reversed this by making the perpetrator Caligari/Mabuse insane as in real life with Freud.  Further the disciple of Mabuse, the head of the asylum, Dr. Baum was also declared insane.  Although the problem appears to be solved the threat of the conspiracy continuing from Mubuse’s cell no3w occupied by Dr. Baum looms like a spectre over the ending.

     While Freud was never incarcerated as he sould have been, he was imprisoned in his mind no less than Drs. Mabuse and Baum or the character in Gradiva which held such fascination for Freud.  It is interesting that Freud had a plaster cast of the relief on which the story of Gradiva was based that the displayed prominently in his office.  The story obviously had greater significance for him than his ‘objective’ analysis of the story would lead one to suspect.

     Thus from 1915 to 1935 like Dr. Mabuse he sat imprisoned in his projection of reality churning out page after page, volume after volume of criminal plans for the subversion of civilization which is to say of Euroamerican civilization but not Jewish culture.  He make a definite point of that illusion of whose future he is discussing applies only to Europe and Christianity rather than religion in general which would include his own Judaism.  At this point he is not aware of the burgeoning Wahabi Moslemism so that his message is that Jewish beliefs  are real while Christian beliefs and Scientific reality are illusory.  One has to penetrate the screen language and convert it into the proper psychological intent.

     As David Bakan points out Freud lived his whole life in a sort of Jewish ghetto having very little contact with Europeans.

     His choice of Jung as the potential heir to his ‘creation’ may have had as much to do with a desperate attempt to reestablish a connection similar to that of his childhood Christian nurse.   Thus his overtures to Jung while under extreme stress were driven from his unconscious while he himself was unaware of his true motivations.  This would have been an expression of a repetition compulstion.  Thus as his nurse disappeared from his life under discreditable circumstances he replicate the situation in Jung.  His attempt to convert Moses (hence himself) into an Egyptian may have been a last attempt to replicate and resolve this early contact with Christianity.  His view of European civilization then was filtered wholly trhough a Jewish projection of possibilities.  He really had no intimate knowledge of European mores.

     From 1915 on, then, his writings were obsessed with hatred for Euroamerica and a desire to wreak vengeance on them by destroying the basis of their civilization.  His ideas for the subversion of European civilization were carried to America by the international B’nai B’rith organization to be adopted and employed there.  In addition Revolutionary plans executed in Europe in 1917 were financed and organized by the world Jewish government in the US.  While functioning according to local conditions the Revolution was conducted on an international scale.  Act locally, think globally.  Hence Jewish revolutionaries left the US for Russia after 1918 to aid in the consolidation going on there.  This is really an incredible repressed story in the Freudian cultural manner.  Very Freudian that such phenomenal criminal activity that were best left invisible was repressed into humanity’s unconscious.

     At this point I think it mght be well to examine Freud’s vision of the unconscious in more detail.  While there can be little doubt that there is a subconscious function to the human mind usually referrred to as the unconscious after Freud that had been an accepted fact amongst scienfific researchers for a hundred years.  The exact nature had not been determined nor does Freud determine it.  His view is merely a projection of his own conscious and subconscious needs.

4.

      In David Bakan’s view Freud made a compact with ‘Satan.’

     Certainly not in the literal sense but in the figurative sense that Freud would do anything, abandon any moral precepts, to achieve fame.  Bakan points out the supercription to Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams quote from Virgil: Flectere si nesqueo, superos, Acheronta movebo.  Translated as: If the gods above are no use to me, than I’ll move all hell.  Freud further blurred the line between good and evil or amalgamed the two from the influence of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank who cast off all morality.  Since Freud has been successful in altering bith Euroamerican and Jewish morality toward these immoral or amoral beliefs by false ‘Satanic’ criminal doctrines it is imperatvie to debunk his personal projection of the ‘unconscious.’

     As he ‘made a pact’ with powers below- the unconscious- against the powers above- the conscious- he invested his projection of the unconscious with the attributes of ‘Satan’ or evil.  This view of the subconscious is a self-serving fiction not based on any science.

     He sets up the unconscious as an autonomous entity with the main function of blighting the conscious.  He give the powers of hell supremacy over the powers of heaven.  The notion is mere fantasy; it cannot be.  There is no possibility that the function of the subconscious doesn’t have a positive function in and of itself and in relation to the conscious.  If you actually think abut it for a moment you wil realize this must be true; every part of the body works to the benefit of the whole; there can be no exception for the subconscious.

     Now, nature is not flawless.  The order that the religious seem to find is not there.  Nature functions in a much more imperfect or haphazard way.  It takes only one peek through the Hubble to see that.

     However the relationship between the conscious and subconscious is delicate and easily disrutped especially in the early years of theorganism when it has no experience with which to evaluate the events occurring to it.  The Ego and Anima are not part of the subconscious and possibly not of the conscious but function through the conscious and subconscious minds.

     The conscious mind perceives phenomena and acts on them but the terrific inflow of impressions is more than it can deal with so the day’s input is received into the subconscious for further reference.  Thus a major function of dreams in the sleeping state is to review and process, organize the information into a coherent whole for future reference.  The subconscious then is able to compare incoming information with experience for response.  When the conscious and subconscious minds are attuned, that is to say, the personality is integrated, the system orks properly, otherwise the response is distorted by one’s fixations.  This is very easy to see in Freud.

     However, especially in youth when experience is scant, the mind may be challenged with some devastating new experience for which there are no reference points.  If an appropriate response is made there is no problem.  If an inappropriate response is made against which future experience may be in variance, the earlier response which has become fixated will over rule the current response and substitute the fixated inappropriate response.  Thus the current response will constellate around these earlier fixations which gives one bizarre symbolic dreams and inappropriate responses.

     The inappropriate response will usually result from an insult to the Ego or, in other words, one’s sexual identity.  In turn the response to this insult will be expressed in a sexual affect.

     The purpose of psychoanalysis, which is real science, although Freud didn’t see that, is to locate and exorcize them allowing the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind to function properly as a unit.  Dreams are actually important because they are an analysis of life’s experience providing responses.  None of this, of course takes in intellitgence, discipline and other functions of mind and character that Freud dismisses as irrelevant.

     Now, in the cultural war between Judaism and Euroamerica, or as the Jews express it, Christianity, Freud infused the Jewish subconscious with a disregard for morality al la Jacob Frank in relation to Sabbatai Zevi.  Any evil was excused so long as it seemed to advance the cultural war.  While this infusion may not have reached down through the ranks of Jewry- which is to say they behaved in a certain way but didn’t know why- the ideas where throughly planted in the minds of what Henry Ford would call the International Jew.

     The cold war between Jews and Europeans became a shooting war in the wake of the Great War.  Men, money and munitions flowed n a wide steady stream from the United States to Russia.  Coordinators established themselves in strategic locations.  If one reads restricted, censored literature the impression is made that horrible anti-Semites harassed and hated innocent unresisting Jews.  Jews may have been killed but they were not innocent or unresisting.  To the contrary freed from guilt, or supposedly so, by Freuding/Sabbatian/Frankist precepts, abattoirs were established throughout Russia where unsuspectiong Russians were led in one door and flowed out the other in liquid form.  This is not the place to dwell on gruesome details.  The literture exists but the collective Jewish mind has repressed the deeds into the collective unconscious.  In other words, history has been denied and censored to that the crimes can’t be known.  Actually Whittaker Chambers, the Red spy, translated a number of these book concerning the Hungarian atrocities of Bela Kun and Tibor Szmuelly, but those are impossible to come by.  All this slaughter was made possible and justified by the doctrines of Freud.

     In relation to the 1919 atrocities of the Jews in Hungary and the response which expelled them from power it should be noted that Israeli troops were recently introduced into Hungary to reestablish the tyranny of Kun and Szmuelly.  Don’t ever think that historical memories are short.

     Freud sat confortably in Vienna looking on as the carnage occurred.  If, as believed, the tneor of his writing changed in 1925 that was probably due to the death of Lenin in 1924.  By 1925 it was apparent that the Jewish Revolution was on shaky grounds as Stalin began his rise to power so that Freud may have renewed his cultural attack or, on the other hand, as 1928 was the terminal projected year of the Jewish Revolution Freud may have been celebrating the death of European Civlilation when he published The Future Of An Illusion.  By the illusion he meant European Christianity and he meant European civilization was finished.  The Rome of the Popes should have fallen.

     In Illusion and Civilization And Its Discontents Freud makes us believe that the malcontents of civilization are synonymous with civilization rather than being a minority that always exists during great revolutionary changes.  Freud whose Judaism was challenged by the Scientific Revolution as much as Christianity or Moslemism must have been aware of the reactionary ‘instinct’ as he himself was in reaction to both European Christianity and the Scientific Revolution.

     David Bakan closes his volume with these words:

     …under the ruse of “playing the devil” (Freud) served Sabbatian interests.  In this respect, however, just as Frued may be regarded as having infused Kabbalah into science, so may he be regarded as having incorporated science into Kabbalah.  Sabbatian-wise, by closing the gap between jewish culture and Western Enlightenment he acts as the Messiah not only for Jewish culture butr Western culture as well.

     Note that Western Enlightenment is reduced to Western culture putting it on a par with Jewish culture which is a tacit admission that there is no science in Jewish culture and none is wanted in Western ‘culture’.  Language as a screen.

     Bakan’s is a hefty statement.  Under the guise of the Devil Freud becomes the Messiah not only for Jews but for Euroamericans.  Truly in this scenario good comes from evil, assuming that the Messiah is good.  In case you missed it, Freud according to Bakan was the Second Coming.  Narrowing the gap between the two cultures means the imposition of Jewish culture as the Chosen or Abelite people over Western or Cainite culture.  Thus the age old goal of reversing the Cain and Abel story so that Cain is obligated to give preference to Abel is accomplished.

     By infusing Kabbalah into science, science has been subjugated tothe unscientific Jewish culture so that the Catholic/Jewish situation of Medieval Europe has been restored.  The Enlightenment that invalidated Judaism Christianity and Moslemsism has been obliterated, hence the rivial of religion happening today.  Thus in Bakan’s eyes and according to Freue’s intent Judaism has deconstructed Euroamerican society so the reconstruction according to Jewish cultural mores can commence.

     The result has been accomplished by the destruction of the Scientific Consciousness as there is little of science in Freud’s cultural writings.  He just says what he believes and wants you to believe and asserts it as a fact.  As walways there were some Westerners who resented the encroachment of the strick limits imposed by science.  Rider Haggard in his Allan Quatermain made that as clear as possible.  The topic is the dominant theme of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan novels.  Henry Ford and his mass production methods was a symbol of that rebellion against the strict limits set by the clock.  Some denounced it as Taylorism; but with each passing decade the West became more acclimated to the change as the reactionary mood became acclimated to the new reality.

     Freud invents ‘instincts’ and their ‘renunciation’ to give sense to his arguments; the renunciation of instincts’ almost sounds scientfific but it isn’t.  there are no instincts nor does Freud even attempt to demonstrate their existence.  Like the rest or Freud’s psychology the notion is just something Freud made up.  As walways he notes only the negative societal destructive effects.  He says nothing of the ‘instinct’ to be around people which would conflict with his instinct against civilization- the last is a vague enough term the way he uses it.  But as Fritz Lang oints out the hypnotic spell cast by Mabuse negates criticism so that the head psycholgist, the objective scientist himself, Baum, suspends critical judgment falling under the spell of Mabuse to the point of becoming a disciple just as Lang himself did.  Indeed, as the West has.  Hitler was a blessing in disguise for the Jewish Revolution.  The guilt caused by Hitler completely disarmed the West allowing the reconstruction of Western mores to proceed at a faster pace than would have been possible otherwise.  Indeed, the Nazi Era drove the entire psychotic Jewish Revolution to the shores of the United States beginning in the early thirties.  Thus the deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America was assured.

     To return to 1919.

 

 

 

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     ERB scholars have long noted that the entire corpus of novels reads almost as one long book.  I believe this is because ERB records his life in his novels.  If one reads the novels in the sequence in which they were written and if one understands the symbolism used by Burroughs against a background of what’s happening in his life ERB actually records his mental state of the moment.

     In this essay I am going to concentrate on a role of John Carter in the Mars series and that of Ulysses Paxton in the Mastermind Of Mars. 

     In real life before ERB began writing he was powerless on earth.  I would call him an abject failure but even though he appeared one he was only on the verge of being one and if his attempt at a writing career in 1911 had failed he would have been plunged into the abyss.

     As he was a failure or at least an unfulfilled seeker in 1911 he makes John Carter into a mold he admired, that of a Virginian and a soldier who was seeking his post-Civil War fortune in the deserts of the Southwest.  Carter, whose initials are JC, actually finds his gold mine but attacked by Indians he escapes death by transporting himself to Mars.

     Mars has a lesser gravity than Earth so on Mars he has superhuman powers.  Thus unable to realize any of his ambitions on Earth ERB transports himself in his imagination to Mars as the Superman, John Carter.

     Amazingly the idea struck a responsive chord in his soon to be Editor at Munsey’s, Metcalf, who bought the story.  It doesn’t matter for how much, the point is it validated ERB’s lofty opinion of his destiny.  Fortified by this response he brought himself down to Earth in the fantastic form of Tarzan Of The Apes in an imaginary Africa.  Here was the gold mine he as John Carter was seeking.  There was no one, no Indians, to drive him off so he was off to the races.

     The first rush carried him through the line into 1920 when he left Chicago behind and fled to Los Angeles.

     In LA his careless financial habits soon led him into hot water virtually bankrupting him but definitely stripping him of his assets.  By 1926 when he wrote The Mastermind Of Mars he was virtually financially prostrate.

     The hero of Mastermind is Ulysses Paxton.  Ulysses can stand for the Greek wanderer and seeker Odysseus or for the great warrior, Ulysses S. Grant.  So what we have is a duplicate of John Carter.

     ERB is on record as saying that he thought that every man was two persons not unlike Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, some more divided , some less.  Under stress the two personas like Jekyll and Hyde became distinct.

     Now, in 1911 ERB was an unrealized genius but in 1926 he was a failed genius.  In other words he had had his legs cut from beneath him.  He might as well have been dead.  Therefore Ulysses Paxton while serving in the Great War has a shell explode beside him.  When he comes to he realizes his legs have been blown away.  While he lies dying he looks up to Mars as John Carter had fifteen years before.  When he next comes to his legs are restored and he is standing in a garden on Mars.

     Thus in real life ERB imagines himself figuratively in Paxton’s situation returning in his imagination to the Red Planet in the hope of making lightning strike twice.

     He hadn’t written a Tarzan novel since Ant Men four years previously.  He was black listed by the movie colony that refused to make any Tarzan movies even though they would have been lucrative.  He was under attack nationally and internationally by the Reds who were doing everything possible to destroy his sales and reputation.  ERB truly had his back to the wall or figuritively had had his legs cut off.

     Fortune would once again favor him when FBO Studios broke the blacklist against him.  After a couple fumbling attempts at Tarzan novels he would hit a magnificent stride through the Tarzan novels from 1929 to 1936.

    The Mastermind Of Mars was his attempt to recover his career.  His style while revered by his fans was old hat by 1926 so he could no longer take the world by storm as he had in 1911.

     Mastermind is a complex novel of which I haven’t completely broken the code but let us concentrate on two aspects.  The first is ERB’s troubled state of mind over his marriage.  Thus he invents the story of Xaxa and Valla Dia as he fights to deal with his sexual problem.  The second is the religious problem caused by his confrontation with the Jews beginning in 1919 and continuing not only through 1924′s Marcia Of The Doorstep, and 1926 but  to the end of his career.

     In 1926 ERB had not yet met Florence Dearholt although he was probably already familiar with her husband Ashton and through that acquaintance he may already have seen her, and perhaps, also on the screen as she was an actress.  He did meet her in March of ’27 when Dearholt approached him on a movie deal and was either immediately smitten or had the opinion of her he already had confirmed.

     In Mastermind ERB expresses the thought that he has a wife to whom he owes everything but who he hates.  This strong emotion would be realized at his own Emma’s death.

     In this novel Emma is represented by the brain of the horrid Xaxa.  Ras Thavas, the demon mastermind of Mars and physician nonpareil, has transplanted the brain of Xaxa into the beautiful body of Valla Dia and vice versa.  Dia is Latin for goddess.  I don’t know what Valla means.

      The body of Xaxa containing the brain of Valla Dia is held in suspended animation by Ras Thavas.  Bringing the body to life Paxton is smitten by the beauty of Valla Dia’s brain.  Knowing that her body is of incomparable beauty he conceives the notion of restoring her brain to her body and taking her to wife.  Valla Dia may also be seen a version of Helen of Troy.

     I interpret this to mean that ERB’s Anima ideal was the beautiful Valla Dia, perhaps as he had once viewed Emma.  But to his mind Emma had developed an ugly mind that animated the body of his Anima ideal.  the beautiful mind he sought was thus in an ugly body while an ugly mind was in a beautiful body.  ERB’s dilemma was to shuck Emma and find a beautiful mind in a beautiful body.  When he met Florence in 1927 he thought he had found his Anima ideal of a beautiful mind in a beautiful body.  His problem then was how to rid himself of Emma.

     On that level then ERB is struggling with his sexual problem.  In this book his struggle would take the form of an astonishing number of dual and split personalities.  This is quite a study in that sense and an indication of ERB’s extreme stress.  Perhaps Mastermind is a worthy successor to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.

     The second and less resolvable problem is the religious issue.  At this moment in time the Jews of Hollywood have got ERB boxed.  Indeed, they have cut off his legs.  The logjam was about to be broken by FBO Studios which would free ERB up until the late thirties when he was forced into exile in Hawaii.  For now though he has to deal with this very difficult problem.  He has by now learned that freedom of speech ends where Judaism begins.  If I am right he was denied publication of Marcia Of The Doorstep because of the manner in which he discussed his dilemma.

     In Mastermind while the religious issue assumes primary importance ERB puts it into an ecumenical form denouncing all religion.  Does he refer to his Jewish situation in any cloudy form?  I think he does.

     The god in this story is a huge several story high idol named Tur to which all must bow down.  The name Tur is an odd name for a god, at least in my mind.  I have said before you cannot talk about that which isn’t in your mind.  If you haven’t studied religions there is nothing you can say about them. As ERB has a great deal to say it is obvious that he knows something about religion and religions.  Theology isn’t the issue here, that is a separate matter.

     Given ERBs method, when he learned he had a problem with Judaism I’m sure he went out and learned something about it.  It isn’t necessary that he had a profound knowledge; it is only necessary that he learned some things.  We can’t be sure what.  The word Tur is signficant in Jewish historiography.  His use of Tur may be a coincidence but there you have it- Tur is Tur any way you turn it, frontwards or backwards, Tur is Tur.

     The word Tur appears in Judaic lore in this manner:

     …Rabbi Jacob (Yaakov) ben Asher (1270-1343) the “Baal ha-Turim” compiled the Arba Turim, first printed in 1458.  “Tur” is used as shorthand for both the title of the whole work and for Rabbi Asher himself since it is customary in Judaism to call a compiler by the name of his compilation.  The Tur is the predecessor of Rabbi Joseph Karo’s Schulchan Aruch.  The four part structure of the Tur and its division into chapters (simanim) were adopted by Karo in the later code, Shulchan Aruch.  Each of the four divisions of the work is a Tur, so a particular passage is cited a Tur…

     p. 127 Hoffman, Michael, Judaism Discovered, 2008

     While one can’t be certain ERB learned the above fact it isn’t particularly recondite and might have been easily learned.  At the least the use of Tur for the god is a remarkable coincidence.

     Making Tur an idol to which all must bow would have been an egregious offence to the Jews and one which any knowledgeable Jew, who might have read the book, always a precondition, would have picked up on it  whether Burroughs intended it or not.  Paranoia strikes deep.

     The idol itself could possibly be modeled on the Alexandrine Egypto-Greek god, Sarapis.  Burroughs would have known of this from the Bible if not from his readings in the classics.  We know he reread Plutarch’s Lives at least twice with one of those times just previous to writing Mastermind.  If he read the Lives twice he undoubtedly read other classics so there is no reason to believe that he didn’t have knowledge in these matters.

     The manner of Paxton’s posing as Tur and bamboozling the bamboozlers is a mockery of religion in general although given the context of the word Tur the application of the mockery might have been taken more personally.

     Forced to use the most discreet measures to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism ERB may have thought he was undetectably clever while he is certainly having a good laugh.  Paxton congratulates himself  and gives himself a couple pats on the back at the success of his ruse.

     The end result, of course, is that he frees the people from the bondage to the false religion of Tur. 

     I’m not quite clear on the nature of Ras Thavas who is named after the Ethiopian Prince Ras Tafari who became the Emperor Haile Selassie and the namesake of the Jamaican Rastafarians.

     The book is a worthy of the attempted second birth of ERB’s faltering career.  The characters are magnificent and finely drawn.  Ras Thavas is surely one of the great characters of pulp fiction.  Mastermind paired with The Synthetic Men Of Mars makes for one of the greatest diptyches of science fiction.

A Review Part VI: The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

The High Brow And The Low Brow

The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep

Part VI

Living On Tulsa Time

by

R.E. Prindle, Dugald Warbaby and Dr. Anton Polarion

Livin’ on Tulsa Time.

Livin’ on Tulsa Time.

Gonna set my watch back to it,

‘Cause you know that I’ve been through it,

Livin’ on Tulsa Time.

- Danny Flowers

     During the ’60s a lot of energy was put into the notion that one live in the HERE and NOW or someone else’s impression of the NOW.  There used to be a big San Francisco poster with nothing but a black background with the giant word IS in white.  NOW IS NOW.

     They didn’t know how much they were asking.  It is impossible to actually live in the NOW; No one can do it.  Rather the past is a drag on NOW preventing a full involvement with the present.  The period of time it takes to digest the previous NOW and update to an approximate notion of the current NOW is excruciatingly slow.  The sharper the break between the past and present the more traumatic the reaction.

     In the song Living On Tulsa Time the singer, no matter what time zone he is in sets his watch to Central Tulsa time.

     I know where that one is at.  One of my shattering breaks with the past was when I went active in the Navy in ’56.  Sent from Eastern Standard to Pacific Standard I kept my watch set to Eastern Standard time nearly the whole three years of my enlistment.  I only switched to PST in 1959 when I accepted the fact that I would never return East; that California was my new home.

     Brought into contact with a new NOW I was still not ready for the present.  I continued to dress as we did in ’56 well into the sixties.  Got hard to find some new duds.  I only ceased dressing that way when I became a Hippie in ’66 and adopted fantastic Hippie garb.  I was an urban spaceman:

I’m the Urban Spaceman

I’ve got speed,

I’ve got everything I need.

I don’t feel pleasure,

I don’t feel pain,

If you were to knock me down

I’d just get up again.

I wake up every morning with a smile upon my face.

My natural exuberance spills out all over the place.

-Neil Innes

     I was really NOW there for just a little while but I wasn’t alone.  As Bob Dylan said, everytime I looked back the past was just behind.  When the Hippie era ended I reverted to a modified 1956 style.  The past came back again.  All those screaming about living in the NOW in ’67-’69 are still back there claiming they’re still living in the NOW but time has passed them by.  I didn’t wait around, baby, I slid out into limbo and I’m doing fine now, thank-you.

     Thus when ERB began writing in 1911 he was not so much concerned with his NOW as he was in vindicating his past from 1896 to 1905.  His reality in those early novels from 1911 to 1915 continue to reflect his earlier travails.  Thus in the group of novels embraced by The Girl From Faris’s he is trying to vindicate his past to his present and hopefully to his future.

     After nineteen-fifteen he was released from his past to a large extent and began to concentrate on adjusting to the NOW of his altered circumstances.  Change is NOW and ERB was going though a lot of ch-ch-changes.  His nerves were jangling as he was jerked from time frame to time frame but he didn’t enter the Promised Land of NOW.  Oh Lord, he might have prayed, if he could have seen the future- Deliver me from NOW.

     Ten years after and a world of different NOWs the Mucker far in a distant past that had disappeared behind a cloud where he couldn’t see he tackled almost the identical theme in a different world, a fast moving world, a world where NOW was so strange it was unrecognizable from day to day.  The political situation he had grown up with was no longer recognizable; it had been replaced by a new reality.  He was almost living by two different clocks in some strange Einsteinian time zone where the guide posts had been removed and renamed and everything was relative to another reality that couldn’t be recognized by any clock ticking.

     Living on Tulsa time in another time zone.  There I was in ERB’s sunny Southland with my watch running three hours ahead of everyone else’s.  It didn’t matter.  I was on the water where time stands still for everyone.  The crisis came in ’58 when I stepped back on land to journey through the time zones back to Eastern Standard Time.  I was all alone out there, you know, cut off from a past I was soon to learn couldn’t be retrieved.  Wolfe was right, you can never go home again.  The only secure place, as dangerous and that was, was my ship.  My terminal place was also a realtively secure harbor but I was stuck in the middle for six days between the time zones in which I had no place and no identity except the tenuous one of my leave papers.  A queer cop threw them into the wind and let those blow away in Illinois.  After that I was naked to the universe.  I’ve hated cops ever since.

     I wouldn’t recommend hitchhiking to anyone.  My life was on the line for twenty-five hundred miles and six days.  Twenty-five hundred miles and six days on the road without food or sleep.  I’d add without drink but in a gas station in Gary I downed six seven ounce bottles of Coca-Cola in a row.  Created a minor sensation.

     After surviving a lunatic who picked me up on the western edge of the Mojave who wanted to kill me because he was convinced I had two hundred dollars on me, which by a strange coincidence I had, I was picked up Mountain Standard in the Panhandle of Texas by a couple homosexuals who wanted a different treasure I possessed and dropped off Central Time in Tulsa.  My watch was only one ahour ahead by then.  I was getting close to some kind of NOW or was I?  No.  Time is much more relative than that.  I was soon to be living a strange combination of NOW and THEN.

     Tulsa was a tough town.  I don’t need to see Tulsa again.  I wasn’t about to start living on Tulsa Time.  I was an hour ahead which couldn’t have been better.  I had to walk through Tulsa, hungry and thirsty.  I spied a place across this great expanse of grass between it and the freeway.  As I approached the place began to glitter.  Fancy, but I could see a coffee shop at the top of a long flight of stairs to the left.  I didn’t want to spend money so I thought I’d just get a glass of water.

Oh Dan, can you see

That great green tree

Where the water’s running free

Just waiting there for you and me.

Water…cool…clear…water.

     But between me and the water was this big cowboy in high heeled boots, a tuxedo and ten gallon hat.  Fancy goings on as I noticed ladies entering to the right in ball gowns escorted by tuxedos.  I came prepared or thought I did.  I was in my dress blues and my Uncle Sam told me I should never be ashamed of my uniform, it could pass for a tuxedo anywhere.  Anywhere but Tulsa.  That cowboy had never discussed the issue with my Uncle Sam.

     I was bold but the problem was he had the advantage being on the landing at the top of the stairs and I had to climb the stairs to get past him.  He had his fist doubled and these high heeled boots with those silver plates on the toes.  That was a mean looking business proposition.  I had a lot further to fall than he did.  Get my uniform messed up and things.  Then where would I be out of time and place?  Whew! Why does one have to face tough choices?

     I’m getting a drink of water, I said, trying to combine thoughness with masculine geniality a al the cowboy ethic.

     Not here you ain’t.  He said, making a move to kick me down the stairs.

     Hey buddy, this is a tuxedo I’m wearing.  I faltered.

     His reply was not one of which my Uncle Sam would approve.

     I left Tulsa still thirsty not liking cowboys any better than I liked cops.  NOW has its perils.

     A day or so later I was still in Central Time.  Tulsa was a tough place and the rest of Oklahoma was no California.  I was heading North now which kept me in the same time zone.  Then I made the mistake of crossing the Mississippi into East St. Louis.  After just a couple minutes I really liked Tulsa.  Wished I was back there.

     I don’t know what evil forces made me want to hitchhike across country, damn Jack Kerouac, but I was within a hair’s breadth of being sliced and diced on the streets of East St. Louis.  Whould have tossed me in the river as so much driftwood.  Three Black guys with switchblades in their hands kept inching toward me while I kept inching closer to the middle of the highway.

     That morning some guy got in his car for a pleasant drive to Louisville.  He decided ot go through East St. Louis for some mysterious but critical reason.  He arrived in East St. Louis just as these three knives were deciding to make their move.  This guy sized up the situation from a couple blocks away, slammed on his brakes throwing open the passenger door at the same time shouting ‘Get In’ for God’s sake get in, NOW.’ Novel experience for a hitchiker.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to rush because if I made a break for it those three knives might move faster than i could.  I hopped in casually casting a smiling glance over my shoulder.  The driver peeled out of there nearly separating a hand from the wrist on the door handle.  I was saved from that particular NOW and END but I was on the road to Louisville which was still a far cry from Eastern Standard which was the time zone I so ardently desired.

     It took me another day or so as I had a lot of North to make up but I did get into Eastern Standard.  Now my watch matched the time zone but there was a mismatch between the present and the past.  Rather there were two different presents and pasts going on at the same time.  Mine and theirs.  I don’t think Einstein is right but well, maybe, time wasn’t that relative but the uses they and I were making of past and present sure were.

     That’s where memory comes in which makes time and space so relative.  I had been absent for two years and what I had been experiencing was much different than what they had been experiencing.  They had actually been living on Eastern Standard Time while I was just pretending.  I knew I was out of time.  For me time had been rapidly changing but for them time had more or less stood still or, rather traveled in a straight line.  To me they were still living in the past.  Oh, they had aged a couple years but their trajectory was different and slower.  Relatively they had stood still while I had rocketed away.

     It was as though I had been a gamma cloud burped from some collapsed star in some galaxy a billion light years away.  As is known once set in motion an object will travel in a straight line at the same speed unless some other agent interferes with it.  It was as though I had been careening through space ripping apart the fabric of time and space or disregarding it completely as though it wasn’t there; at any rate completely unaffected by this fabric which apparently has no tensile strength, there was no gravity of any force that deflected my course in a curve while if space is curved I was traveling so fast I careened right off the curved track.

     Who knows how many black holes i passed over without being drawn into the vortex; who knows how many puny suns I swept across without having one atom deflected by the puny gravitational pull of the strongest sun; who knows how many planets I depopulated.  One billion light years and running, my speed and trajectory were the same as when I was emitted from that distant star.

     Now, as though by some miracle here I was back where I began but in two different time zones at one time.  Theirs and mine.  Obvious I must have passed through a worm hole or fallen into a memory hole.  We stared at each other blankly each unable to comprehend the other.  They thought I have become weird,or perhaps weirder, because they had stood still while I had been careening through time and space in timezones they would never know.

     I smiled and got on a bus, enough of the adventures of hitchhiking.  One the way back to Standard Pacific Time I abandoned Eastern Standard adjusting my watch as I passed through Central Standard and Mountain Standard.  I was not exactly living in the NOW but I was in the correct time zone.

     Minor but vital adjustment.

     So, when ERB caught up with himself in 1914-15 he was no longer living on Tulsa time.  He was trying to adjust his watch to his current time zone.

     But as he was careening through space and time, space and time was moving at an even more frantic pace so it was difficult for him to get his bearings.

     Science was changing his world at a rate faster than the mind could follow.  Events in the far off Detroit that he had known and loved as a young fellow were going to affect his life just a few years hence.  In 1914 Henry Ford had shocked the industrial, moral and social world by ‘unilaterally’ doubling the wage for unskilled labor.

     This was a violation of ‘natural law’ which is to say religious sensibilities.  At the time a natural law of labor was believed and incorporated into religion.  The law was that if only one man can do a job he can command his price.  Skilled labor can demand more than unskilled labor but when anyone can do the job as in unskilled labor they will have to take what is offered.  Thus Ford pitted science against serious religious beliefs.

     At about this time a Judge in a labor dispute asked the strikers if they didn’t know they were going against God’s will on earth.

     This was at the time when the Liberal Coalition was forming and there were strangers in the land, to use John Higham’s expression, who believed they truly represented God’s Will.  There is no greater enemy to God’s Will on earth than Science and the Scientific Consciousness.  If you recall the so-called Christian Scientists reject scientific medical cures preferring to depend on the Will of God.  Apparently it has never occurred to them that a case of a ruptured appendix means God’s Will is death while a simple operation means life.

     Nevertheless Ford upset the natural or religious order of things and had to be stopped.  Ford himself believed he had discovered a universal law in mass production so that he was actually a prophet of his own new religion.  Believing himself in the possession of the truth he acted accordingly seeking to apply his method to each and every problem.  Thus when the Great War began it was deemed possible to negotiate with the participants on a personal level to get them to cease hostilities.  Ford believed he could do it.  The Strangers In The Land who were living on Babylon Time saw their opportunity to pit their religion against Ford’s science and they took it.  The Man of Science was in their pocket.  They convinced Ford to take a horde of well meaning but naive people to Germany for a confab with the Kaiser.  Ford fell for it.  This was the famous Peace Ship episode that shredded Ford’s reputation two short years after he had made it.

     Ford always maintained that after the ship was at sea the Strangers revealed themselves telling him that only they could change the course of the war.  They began it and only they could end it.  When he returned home he found the Strangers in charge of the War Industries Board and they and the Wilson Administration were telling him how to run his business.  Babylon Time had met the Twentieth Century and found it could make the clock run.

     Ford with his universal panacea was not the kind of man to take this sort of thing lying down.  Ford Motor Co. had as much cash laying around as Bill Gates and Microsoft does today.  Ford put his money to use.  These are complex times so I am going to edit out all information that doesn’t pertain to my moral.

     Ford believed in his method.  By applying it properly he saw no reason he couldn’t solve the age old problem of the Jews here and now.  He thought reason would work, poor man, so he bought himself a library of Jewish studies, put his man Bill Cameron on the job to study the library and publish the results in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, that he bought to disseminate his reasonable solution to the problem.  He made the Dearborn Independent a national newspaper, perhaps the first of its kind.  He even had a distribution system handy.  He made all his Ford dealers distribute the papers, even out in Hollywood, California.

     The Independent made such a noise that the papers couldn’t be given the silent treatment.

     The independent appealed to a very large number of people although Liberal historians have given the impression that the paper went unread.  The paper didn’t go unread.  Out in Hollywood a man named Edgar Rice Burroughs apparently read the paper assiduously.  As, why not, even if you don’t agree with the premise of a movie like The Passion Of The Christ that doesn’t mean you don’t go to see it.  I used to read The Christian Science Monitor and I’ve never been a Christian Scientist.  I used to read the Daily Worker and I’ve never been a Communist.  A lot of people did go see the Passion making it one of the most lucrative films in history and lots of people read the Dearborn Independent, even devoured it.

     Each week the paper issued a new article exposing the true nature of the ‘Jewish Problem.’  The articles were well researched, reasonable and accurate, but as they criticized a religion, no religion will stand any criticism if they can help it, they were necessarily labeled heretical, infidelic, bigoted, anti-Semitist.  In this case you can check anti-Semitist.  From this particular religion’s point of view they were anti-Semitic but from a reasonable scientific viewpoint they weren’t and aren’t.

     The Jewish reaction was strong and violent.  As a member of the Liberal Coalition they called in their allies who branded Ford an anti-Semite and ostracized him.  Then Ford was out there all alone.  A major campaign of vilification and defamation was conducted against him.  All the hypnopaedic media were called into play against Ford.  William Fox, the Fox part of the later Twentieth Century-Fox, used his Movietone News shorts to portray every Ford that was in an accident as at fault and unsafe.  Now that’s defamation with a capital D.  By 1925 it was clear that Ford could use some allies.

     Enter Edgar Rice Burroughs and Marcia Of The Doorstep.

     As we know Marcia was never published so ERB’s aid was hypothetical.  A reasonable question is what evidence do I have for ERB’s intent.  I offer Marcia Of The Doorstep as my evidence and certain articles from the Dearborn Independent.  As I’ve said before ERB in Marcia exhibits a seemingly involved knowledge of the theatre.  I  have been puzzled as to where he got it.

     I think I may have his source.  The original Ford articles were issued weekly beginning in 1920-21 later being collected into a series of four volumes entitled ‘The International Jew’.  What I am dealing with here is literature and history.  I have no concern in the nature of the Ford articles.  My only interest is what Ford and Burroughs understood and how they expressed it.  Leave it at that.  (It wasn’t left at that.  As of 10/27/08 this essay has been censored by being left out my catalog of essays and not mentioned under any of the tags;  Old habits are hard to break, I guess.)

     Like Burroughs believed, or as Burroughs understood Ford there are two types of Jews.  The ordinary Jew who goes about his business and the international Jews who is causing all the mischief.  Thus the title International Jew excludes the mass of ordinary Jews and refers only the the International trouble makers.  For Burroughs there was the ‘type’ of Max Heimer corresponding the the International Jews and the type of Judge Berlanger representing the ordinary of ‘Good Jew.’

     In Volume II of the Interntional Jew there is a series of four atrticles on the American Theatre.

     The books themselves have long since been stolen from the libraries and destroyed in an informal kind of censorship but due to the wonders of modern technology they’re available on the internet.  The relevant theatre chapters can be fund at the URLs below:

     http://www.jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij28.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij29.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij31.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij32.htm

     The first is entitled Jewish Control of the American Theatre of 1/121; the second: The Rise of the First Theatrical jewish Trust of 1/8/21; the third:  Jewish Aspect of the Movie Problem; and the fourth Jewish Supremacy In The Motion Picture World of 2/19/21.  I believe all the necessary theatrical information is contained in these four atircles.  All were written in 1921 giving ERB plenty of time to involve himself by 1924.

     As you may remember ERB was sent a copy of the Jewish Bill Of Rights in 1919 and it was demanded that he endorse them.  Thus there are an additional three articles from Vol. II that may be applicable.  They are found at:

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij34.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij35.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij36.htm

     While the last three do not reflect on Marcia to a great degree they will provide a better backgrund to ERB’s thinking on the issues as he must have studied them carefully.

     —————–

     It is very probable that ERB coded information into the novel to let Ford know this one was for him.  For instance Clara Sackett was probably named after Clara Ford.  Could be coincidental but the engineer of the Lady X was named Sorenson while Ford’s Chief Engineer was Charles Sorenson.  Given ERB’s obvious connection to the Dearborn independent which Ford would easily have recognized, if he would ever have read the book, I think the references are conclusive.

     While on this topic I would also like to point out that when the ban on Tarzan movies was broken in 1926 it was done by the arch ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph Kennedy who owned FBO Studios at the time.  FBO was a little later bought by David Sarnoff of RCA who formed RKO.  Radio-Keith-Orpheum thus editing Kennedy and FBO out of the picture.  Punishment?

     Also if you want a lively account of these proceedings check out Upton Sinclair’s self-published Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.  Sinclair’s is a nice first person I Was There type thing plus when William Fox was driven out of the movies, this is really exciting stuff, he went to Sinclair with his story.  so Sinclair not only lives through this from a distance but is told part of the story first hand.  I just love this stuff.

     I am not particularly concerned here with whether the Dearborn Independent articles are true and accurate, although I am sure they are, but my concern is that Burroughs read them, believed them and acted on them.  Bearing in mind his contact with the AJC he had no reason to disbelieve the articles.

     In the first article ‘Jewish Control Of The American Theatre’, after an introduction that relates Jewish activities in Russia to Jewish activities in the United States a general statement on the theatre is made:

     The Theatre has long been a part of the Jewish program for guidance of the public taste (hypnopaedic media) and influencing the public mind…it is the instant ally night by night, week by week of any idea which the ‘power behind the scenes’ wishes to put forth.  It is not by accident that in Russia, where they now have scarcely anything else, they still have the Theater, especially revived, stimulated and supported by Jewish-Bolshevists because they believe in the Theater just as they believe in the Press; it is one of the two great means of molding popular opinion.

     Cameron should have mentioned movies and song publishing and he would have had the major elements of hypnopaedic conditioning so brilliantly illustrated by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World.

     As we all know Burroughs was opposed to the Bolsheviks; he undoubtedly believed as did any knowledgeable observer that the Bolsheviks were predominantly Jewish.  We may believe that he endorses the premises of these article.

     Further down (a shortcoming of the internet is that there are no page numbers) the article says:

     Down to 1885 the American Theater was in the hands of Gentiles.  From 1885 dates the first invasion of Jewish influences.  It meant the parting of the ways, and the future historian of the American stage will describe that year with the word “Ichabod.”

     Second paragraph below:

        About the time that Jewish control appeared, Sheridan, Sothern, McCollough, Madame Junuschek, Mary Anderson, Frank Mayo, John T. Raymond began to pass off the stage.

———————

     All that remained after the Hebrew hand fell across the stage were a few artists who had recieved their training under the Gentile school- Julia Marlowe, Tyrone Power, R.D. McLean and a little later Richard Mansfield, Robert Martell.  Two of this group remain, and along with Maude Adams they constitute the last flashingsof an era that has gone- an era that apparently leaves no great exemplars to perpetuate it.

     There you have the premise of ERB in Marcia and enough history to flesh out the fiction.  The old school was gone.  ERB then names several players as here.  The last surviving exemplar of this tradition is Mark Sackett.  But even for Mark there are no plays worthy to perform in.  As a member of Abe Finkel’s troupe he condescends to perform in problem plays and the new sex comedy.

     The article continues:

     “Shakespeare spells ruin”: was the utterance of the Jewish manager.  “High brow stuff” is also a Jewish expression.  These two sayings, one appealing to the managerial end, the other to the public end of the Theater have formed the epitaph of the classic era.

     So there you have the complete story of Mark Sackett.

     He was the last of the breed, a fine old Gentile actor of the old school of pre-1885.  Corrupted by the Jewish influence on the theatre he accepts demeaning roles.

     When he comes in to money he tells Max Heimer that he is going to perform Shakespeare.  Max takes the position that ‘Shakespeare spells ruin’ arguing for a Ziegfeld Follies type show, a problem play or a sex comedy which he feels is a surer hope of success than the ‘high brow’ stuff.  Straight from the Dearborn Independent.

‘…the rage is for extravaganze and burlesque.’

     Now,

     In this manner was laid the foundation of the latter day Theatrical Trust.  The booking firm was that of Klaw and Erlanger, the former a young Jew from Kentucky who had studied law, but drifted into theatrical life as an agent; the latter a young Jew from Cleveland with little education but with experience as an advance agent.

     Thus Abe Finkel is probablly the Klaw of Klaw and Erlanger.  It may be coincidence but Judge B-erlanger is Erlanger prefaced with a B.  thus those two would reprsent Klaw and Erlanger.  Another version would be Finkel and Heimer in Hollywood also patterned after the Potash and Perlmutter movies of Samuel Goldwyn.

      The trust was resisted just as Mark Sackett resisted.

(From The Rise Of The Theatrical Trust)

     The opposition offered by the artists was prolonged and dignified, Francis Wilson, Nat C. Goodman, James A. Herne, James O’Neill, (Eugene O’ Neill’s father) Richard Mansfield, Mrs. Fiske and James K. Hackett stood out for a time…

      Mark Sackett held out then in defiance of theatrical wisdom forming a Shakespearean company.  This might be seen as a form of the Little Theatre movement which Cameron says developed in reaction to the first Theatrical Trust.

     So the basis for the New York and theatrical end of Sackett’s career may be said to have been inspired by the two theatrical articles of Cameron in the Dearborn Independent.  ERB probably read them in newspaper form shortly after publication in 1921.  Because of the AJC approach to him as well as heightened anxiety over the immigrant question caused by loyalty concerns in the wake of the War Burroughs was especially receptive to Ford’s concerns.

     If the germ of the story was conceived in 1921 the concern over Ford’s struggle was becoming difficult by 1924 may have inspired Burroughs to come to his literary aid.  Thus we have this story of Marcia which when examined more closely is very involved in post-war Revolutionary and Jewish problems.

     While the novel was universally rejected for publication this was undoubtedly because of ADL censors closely watching the publishing industry.

     One can’t be certain but it is possible that Burroughs would have been finished in Hollywood but for Kennedy’s FBO Studios breaking the blacklist on Burroughs in 1926.  Jewish movies of Tarzan began again in 1927.  After 1932s MGM film which in itself may have been a parody to discredit the Big Bwana, the property became so lucrative especially in a Depression Era climate, that movies continued to be made saving Burroughs from complete ruin.

     The war on Ford continued.  Henry Ford is an interesting figure who, like Burroughs, would continue to be a Judaeo-Communist target into the thirties and forties, to the end of his life and beyond.

     Ford zipped into the NOW in the years around 1914 when his Model T transformed America.  But then he slipped back into Tulsa Time.  The Model T was so successful for him that he failed to keep up with developments in the industry.  The Model T remained essentially the same until 1925 when a better Chevrolet overtook the Ford as the best seller.

      Ford then did an extraordinary thing that baffled conventional minds.  He shut down production for over a year as he designed the new Model A.  For this model he revolutionized the industry by designing the V8.  The Model A was an instant success reviving Ford’s fortunes but the present and the future were now so commingled, things were changing so fast that the NOW was gone before you sat down to dinner.  Constant model changes were now necessary.  The world that Ford had created had gotten away from him.

     He realized that he had lost his battle with the Jewish establishment.  He capitulated in 1927 when Louis Marshall of the Jewish government demanded an ‘apology’ to call off hostilities.  Ford told him to write one out and he would sign it.  Marshall wrote an abject apology which Ford signed without edits or reading.  Marshall then had the ‘apology’ published, bound and sent to every library free of charge.  The apology is easier to find than the Dearborn independent articles.

     The fracas came to a humiliating end for Ford and the Scientific Consciousness.  ERB’s reaction isn’t known, however on December 10, 1929 (ERB Bio Timeline 1920-29) in a letter to his son Hulbert he made these observation on Religion and Science:

     A man can be highly religious, he can believe in God and in an omnipotent creator and still square his belief with advanced scientific discoveries, but he cannot have absolute faith in the teachings and belief of any church, of which I have knowledge, and also believe in the accepted scientific theories of the origin of the earth, of animal and vegetable life upon it, or the age of the human race…(Religious) enthusiasms and sincerity never ring true to me and I think there has been no great change in this all down the ages, insofar as fundamentals are concerned.  There is just as much intolerance and hyprocrisy as there ever was, and if any church were able to obtain  political power today I believe you would see all the tyranny and inustice and oppression which has marked the political ascendency of the church at all times.

         You can’t be any more clear sighted than that.  Here ERB has clearly and succinctly stated the religious problem of the twentieth century and beyond.  His is an objective analysis of facts; religion is a subjective projection of desires and wishes.  As he notes science and religion cannot be reconciled.  As he goes on to note in the conflict between the objective and subjective, the conscious and unconscious, the tyranny of the unconscious is an unavoidable fact.  The question of which religion he fears would impose all the tyranny, injustice and oppression was clearly the Liberal Coalition and more especially the Jewish element of its multi-cultural diversity.

     We now come back to Richard Slotkin and his charges against Burroughs as the ‘mastermind’ of My Lai.  that an objection was lodged against Burroughs because he was interested in Eugenics can be discarded.  People of all political persuasions were interested in Eugenics.  If any abuses of Eugenics were made, Burroughs didn’t make them.  Besides, it’s a matter of how you interpret Eugenics.  The half man, half beast of Stalin is obviously an objectionable use.

     On the score of whether Burroughs was an anti-Semitist, which is what Slotkin really means, from a subjective religious point of view that may be so but it is not a question for the religious to decide; they are not competent to do so.  Sigmund Freud himself said that religion is a neurosis.  (That means a departure from mental health.) If he is to be respected as a scientific genius why shouldn’t we respect his opinion?  If religion is a neurosis then it should be treated as a mental disease.

     On a Scienfitic basis then is it possible to call Burroughs an anti-Semitist?  Clearly not.  The man was a clear minded rational human being of great achievement and should be honored as such.

     Should his scientific opinions differ from those of a religious bent it is they who must take a back seat not Burroughs.

     Slotkin is clearly wrong in his interpretation of Burroughs.  Slotkin represents the unconscious rather than the conscious.

     For the foregoing reasons then I think that Marcia Of The Doorstep and 1924 was the pivot of ERB’s career.  After 1924 it was no longer possible for him to live on Tulsa Time.  He came under attack from the Liberal Coalition which was as formidable for him as it was for Henry Ford.

     His novels after Marcia reflect this attack.  Those novels are perhaps his greatest.  Certainly one of the high points where he meets his enemies head on is Tarzan The Invincible that he was forced to publish under his own imprint.  The title says it all.

     I may be sentimental but I like Marcia Of The Doorstep.  I only wish he had had the patience to flesh out the ending.

     ERB wrote well in any time zone there was from Babylon Time to Tulsa Time to the NOW.

You know that I’ve been through it

But I just can’t go back to it.

There is no living on Tulsa Time.

 

NOW is the time.

 

End of Review

    

    

A Review Part II: The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep By Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

A Review

The Low Brow And The High Brow

An In Depth Study Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’

The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doortstep

by

R.E. Prindle

Part II

Background Of The Second Decade- Personal

 

     Erwin Porges’ ground breaking biography Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Invented Tarzan is the basic source for the course of ERB’s life.  John Taliaferro’s Tarzan Forever is heavily indebted to Porges adding little new.  Robert Fenton’s excellent The Big Swinger is a brilliant extrapolation of Burroughs’ life taken from the evidence of the Tarzan series.

     Porges, the first to pore though the unorganized Tarzana archives, is limited by the inadequacies of his method and his deference for his subject.  His is an ideal Burroughs rather than a flesh and blood one.  Matt Cohen’s Brother Men: The Correspondene Of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston has provided much fresh material concerning ERB’s character.

     Bearing in mind always that Weston’s evaluation of Burroughs in his August 1934 letter in reply to Charles Rosenberg, whoever he was, about ERB’s divorce is one man’s opinion nevertheless his statements can be corroborated by ERB’s behavior over this decade as well as throughout his life.  My intent is not to diminish ERB in any way.  Nothing can take away the fact that Burroughs created Tarezan, but like anyone else he was subjected to glacial pressures that distorted and metamorphosed his character.

     During the Second Decade as he experienced a realization of who he was, or who he had always thought he should be, or in other words as he evolved back from a pauper to a prince, he was subjected to excruciatingly difficult changes.

     A key to his character in this period is his relationship to his marriage.  It seems clear that he probably would never have married, stringing Emma along until she entered spinsterhood while never marrying her.  He seemingly married her to keep her away from Frank Martin.  As he later said of Tarzan, the ape man should never have married.

     Rosenberg in his letter to Weston (p.234, Brother Men) said that ‘…Ed says he has always wanted to get rid of Emma….’  The evidence seems to indicate this.  After ERB lost Emma’s confidence in Idaho, gambling away the couple’s only financial resources, his marriage must have become extremely abhorrent to him.  I’m sure that after the humiliations of Salt Lake City this marriage had ended for him in his mind.  That it was his own fault changes nothing.  He may simply have transferred his self-loathing to Emma.

     That Emma loved and stood by Burroughs is evident.  that he was unable to regain her confidence is clear from his writing.  The final Tarzan novels of the decade in one of which, Tarzan The Untamed, Burroughs burns Jane into a charred mess identifiable only by her jewelry show a developing breach.  Probably the jewelry was that which ERB hocked as the first decade of the century turned.  Now, this is a fairly violent reaction.

     ERB states that he walked out on Emma several times over the years.  In Fenton’s extrapolation of Burroughs’ life from his Tarzan novels this period was undoubtedly one of those times.  There seems to have been a reconciliation attempt between Tarzan and Jane between Tarzan The Untamed and Tarzan The Terrible.  Then between Tarzan And The Golden Lion and Tarzan And The Ant Men ERB’s attempt to regain Emma’s confidence seems to have failed as Jane chooses the clown Tarzan- Esteban Miranda-, one of my favorite characters- over the heroic Tarzan -ERB – in Tarzan And The Ant Men.

     This undoubtedly began ERB’s search for a Flapper wife which took form in the person of Florence Gilbert beginning in 1927.

b.

     Weston says of ERB in his disappointment and rage over ERB’s divorce of Emma that ‘…the fact that Ed always has been unusual, erratic and perhaps queer, has been his great charm and attraction for me…’ (p.223, Brother Men)   There’s a remote possibility that ‘queer’ may mean homosexual but I suppose he means ‘odd’ or imcomprehensible in his actions.  The evidence for this aspect of ERB’s character is overwhelming while being well evidenced by his strange, spectacular and wonderful antics during the second decade.  When Weston says of him that ‘…there is no woman on earth that would have lived with him, and put up with him, except Emma…’ there is plenty of reason to accept Weston’s opinion.

     Part of ERB’s glacial overburden came from his father, George T. who died on February 13, 1913.  Burroughs always professed great love for his father, celebrating his birthday every year of his life, although one wonders why.

     Apparently George T. broadcast to the world that he thought ERB was ‘no good.’  His opinion could have been no secret to Burroughs.  Weston who says that he always maintained cordial relations with George T., still thought him a difficult man, always dropping  in to visit him on trips through Chicago said that George T. complained to him, ERB’s best friend, that his son was no good. While without disagreeing with George T. up to that point, Weston said that he thought there was plenty of good in ERB but that he just hadn’t shown it yet.  Kind of a back handed compliment, reminds me of Clarence Darrow’s defense of Big Bill Haywood:  Yeah, he did it, but who wouldn’t?’

     Such an opinion held by one’s father is sure to have a scarring effect on one’s character.  How exactly the effect of this scarring worked itself out during this decade isn’t clear to me.  Perhaps Burroughs’ mid year flight to California shortly after his father’s death was ERB’s attempt to escape his father’s influence.  Perhaps his 1916 flight was the same while his move to California in 1919 was the culmination of his distancing himself from his father.  That is mere conjecture at this point.

     Now, what appears erratic from outside follows an inner logic in the subject’s mind unifying his actions.  What’s important to the subject is not what obsevers think should be important.

c.

     The scholars of the Burroughs Bulletin, ERBzine and ERBList have also added much with additional niggardly releases of material by Danton Burroughs at the Tarzana archives.  One of the more valuable additions to our knowledge has been Bill Hillman’s monumental compilation of the books in ERB’s library.

     Let’s take a look at the library.  It was important to ERB; a key to his identity.  Books do furnish a mind, as has been said, so in that light in examining his library we examine the furnishing  of his mind.  The shelves formed an important backdrop to his office with his desk squarely in front of the shelves.  ERB is seated proudly at the desk with his books behind him.

     How much of the library survived and how much was lost isn’t known at this time.  Hillman lists over a thousand titles.  Not that many, really.  The library seems to be a working library.  There are no the long rows of matching sets by standard authors.  The evidence is that Burroughs actually read each and every one of these books.  They found their way into the pages of his books in one fictionalized form or another.  Oddly authors who we know influenced him greatly like London, Wells, Haggard and Doyle are not represented.

     Most of the works of these authors were released before 1911 when Burroughs was short of the ready.  Unless those books were lost he never filled in his favorites of those years.  That strikes me as a little odd.

     It is generally assumed that he picked up his Martian information from Lowell, yet in Skelton Men Of Jupiter he says:  ‘…I believed with Flammarion that Mars was habitable and inhabited; then a newer and more reputable school of scientists convinced me it was neither….’  The statement shows that Camille Flammarion’s nineteenth century book was the basis for Burroughs’ vision of Mars while Lowell was not.  Further having committed himself to Flammarion’s vision he was compelled to stick to it after he had been convinced otherwise.  When that understanding was obtained by him we don’t know but at sometime he realized that the early Martian stories were based on a false premiss.

     Thus, his Mars became a true fiction when his restless, searching mind was compelled by judicious reasoning of new material to alter his opinion.  That he could change his mind so late in life is an important fact.  It means that behind his fantasy was a knowledge of solid current fact.  The results of his pen came from a superior mind.  It was not the maundering of an illiterate but amusing boob.

     Organizing the books of his library into a coherent pattern is difficult.  I haven’t and I Imagine few if any have read all his list.  Based on my preliminary examination certain patterns can be found.  He appeared to follow the Chicago novel by whomever, Edna Ferber’s So Big is a case in point.  Seemingly unrelated titles can be grouped aorund certain Burroughs’ titles as infuences.

     In 1924 when Marcia Of The Doorstep was written ERB had already formed his intention of leaving, or getting rid, of Emma.  He began a fascination with Flappers that would result in his liaison with Florence.

     After the move to Hollywood in 1919 a number of sex and Flapper potboilers find their way into his library.  The tenor of literature changed greatly after the War showing a sexual explicitness that was not there prior to the Big Event.  To be sure the graphic descriptions of the sex act current in contemporary literature was not permissible but the yearning to do so was certainly there.  Language was retrained but ‘damn’ began to replace ‘d–n’ and a daring goddamn became less a rarity.

     Perhaps the vanguard of the change came in 1919 when an event of great literary and cultural import took place.  Bernarr Macfadden whose health and fitness regimes had very likely  influenced Burroughs during the first couple decades decided to publish a magazine called “True Story.”  The magazine was the forerunner of the Romance pulp genre while certainly being in the van of what would become the Romance genre of current literature.

     The advance was definitely low brow, not to say vulgar, indicating the direction of subsequent societal development including the lifting of pornographic censorship.  Pornography followed from “True Store” as night follows day.

     The magazine coincided with the emergence of the Flapper as the feminine ideal of the twenties.  In literature this was abetted by the emergence in literary fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  His Beautiful And Damned is a key volume in Burroughs’ library forming an essential part of Marcia.  To my taste Fitzgerald is little more than a high quality pulp writer like Burroughs.  I can’t see the fuss about him.  He riminds me of Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend and vice versa.  In fact, I think Jackson mined the Beautiful And  Damned.  Plagiarize would be too strong a word.

     “True Story” caught on like a flash.  By 1923 the magazine was selling 300,000 copies an issue; by 1926, 2,000,000.  Low brow was on the way in.  Vulgarity wouldn’t be too strong a word.  Macfadden had added titles such as “True Romances” and “Dream World” to his stable.  His magazine sales pushed him far ahead of the previous leader, Hearst Publications, and other publishers.  Pulpdom had arrived in a big way.

     Where Macfadden rushed in others were sure to follow.  The sex thriller, the stories of willful and wayward women, which weren’t possible before, became a staple of the twenties in both books and movies.

     ERB’s own The Girl From Hollywood  published in magazine form in 1922, book form in 1923, might be considered his attempt at entering the genre.  Perhaps if he had thrown in a few Flapper references and changed the appearance and character of his female leads he mgiht have created a seamless transition from the nineteenth century to the twenties.  A few Flapper terms might have boomed his ales much as when Carl Perkins subsititued ‘Go, cat, go’ for go, man, go’ in his Blue Suede Shoes and made sonversts of all us fifties types.

     Certainly ERB’s library shows a decided interest in the genre from 1920 to 1930.  Whether the interest was purely professional, an attempt to keep up with times, or personal in the sense of his unhappiness in his marriage may be open to question.  I would have to reread his production of these years with the New Woman in mind to seek a balance.

     Still, during the period that led up to his affair with Forence ERB seems to have been an avid reader of Flapper and New Woman novels.

     He had a number of novels by Elinor Glyn who was the model of the early sex romance.  He had a copy of E.M. Hull’s The Sheik, that shortly became the movie starring Rudolph Valentine with its passionate sex scenes.  A ‘Sheik’ became the male synonym for Elinor Glyn’s ‘It’ girl.

     Of course, the influence of Warner Fabian’s Flaming youth of 1923, both book and movie, on ERB is quite obvious.

      Just prior to this relationship with Florence he read a number of novels by Beatrice Burton with such sexy titles as The Flapper wife-The Story Of A Jazz Bride, Footloose, Her Man, Love Bound  and Easy published from 1925 to 1930.

     I would like to concentrate on Burton’s novels for a couple reasons; not least because of the number of her novels in ERB’s library but that when Burroughs sought publication for his low brow Tarzan in 1913-14 he was coldly rebuffed even after the success of his newspaper serializations.  The disdain of the entire publishing industry was undoubtedly because Burroughs was the pioneer of a new form of literature.  In its way the publication of Tarzan was the prototype on which Macfadden could base “True Story.”  Not that he might not have done it anyway but the trail was already trampled down for him.  In 1914 Burroughs violated all the canons of ‘polite’ or high brow literature.

     A.L. Burt accepted Tarzan Of The Apes for mass market publication reluctantly and only after guarantees for indemnification against loss.  Now at the time of Beatrice Burton’s low brow Romance genre novels, which were previously serialized in newspapers, Grosset and Dunlap sought out Burton’s stories publishing them in cheap editions without having been first published as full priced books much like Gold Seal in the fifties would publish paperback ‘originals’ which had never been in hard cover.  Writers like Burton benefited from the pioneering efforts of Burroughs.  G& D wasn’t going to be left behind again.  Apparently by the mid-twenties profits were more important than cultural correctness.

     As ERB had several Burton volumes in his library it might not hurt to give a thumbnail of who she was.  needless to say I had never read or even heard of her before getting interested in Burroughs and his Flapper fixation.  One must also believe that Elinor Glyn volumes in ERB’s library dating as early as 1902 were purchased in the twenites as I can’t believe ERB was reading this soft sort of thing as a young man.  Turns out that our Man’s acumen was as usual sharp.  Not that Burton’s novels are literary masterpieces but she has a following amongst those interested in the Romance genre.  The novels have a crude literary vigor which are extremely focused and to the point.  This is no frills story telling.  The woman could pop them out at the rate or two or three a year too.

     Her books are apparently sought after; fine firsts with dust jackets go for a hundred dollars or more.  While that isn’t particularly high it is more than the casual reader wants to pay.  Might be a good investment though.  The copies I bought ran from fifteen to twenty dollars, which is high for what is usually filed in the nostalgia section.  Love Bound was forty dollars.  I bought the last but it was more than I wanted to pay just for research purposes.

     There is little biographical information about Burton available.  I have been able to piece together that she was born in 1894.  No death date has been recorded as of postings to the internet so she must have been alive at the last posting which woud have made her a hundred at least.

     She is also known as Beatrice Burton Morgan.  She was an actress who signed a contract with David Belasco in 1909 which would have made her fifteen or sixteen.  Her stage name may have been Beatrice Morgan.  The New York Public Library has several contracts c. 1919 in her papers.

     One conjectures that her stage and film career was going nowhere.  In The Flapper Wife she disparages Ziegfeld as Ginfeld the producer of the famous follies.

     Casting about for alternatives in the arts she very likely noticed the opening in sex novels created by Macfadden and the Roaring Twenties.  The Flapper Wife seems to have been her first novel in 1925.  The book may possibly have been in response to Warner Fabian/Samuel Hopkins Adams’ Flaming Youth.

     As the motto for his book he had “those who know, don’t tell, those who tell, don’t know.’  The motto refers to the true state of mind of women.  Burton seems to have taken up the challenge- knows all and tells all.  Flapper Wife was an immediate popular success when taken from the newspapers by G&D.  Critics don’t sign checks so while their opinion is noted it is irrelevant.

     Burton apparently hit it big as the movies came afer her, Flapper Wife was made into a movie in 1925 entitled His Jazz Bride.  Burton now had a place in Hollywood.  Burroughs undoubtedly also saw the movie.  What success Burton’s later life held awaits further research.  As there is no record of her death on the internet it is safe to assume that when her copyrights were renewed in the fifties it was by herself.

     There are a number of titles in the library having to do with the Flapper.  The library, then gives a sense of direction to ERB’s mental changes.  There are, of course, the Indian and Western volumes that prepared his way for novels in those genres.  As always his off the top of his head style is backed by sound scholarship.

     The uses of the various travel volumes, African and Southeast Asian titles are self-evident.  I have already reviewed certain titles as they applied to Burroughs’ work; this essay involves more titles and I hope to relate other titles in the future.  So the library can be a guide to Burroughs’ inner changes as he develops and matures over the years.

     The amont of material available to interpret ERB’s life has expanded greatly since Porges’ groundbreaking biography.  Much more work remains to be done.

     The second decade is especially important for ERB’s mental changes as his first couple dozen stories were written beginnng in 1911.  Moreso than most writers, and perhaps more obviously Burroughs work was autobiographical in method.  As he put it in 1931′s Tarzan, The Invincible, he ‘highly fictionalized’ his details.  For instance, the Great War exercised him greatly.  From 1914 to the end of the War five published novels incorporate war details into the narrative:  Mad King II, Beyond Thirty, Land That Time Forgot, Tarzan The Untamed, and Tarzan The Terrible as well as unpublished works like The Little Door.  Yet I don’t think the extent that the War troubled him is recognized.  The man was a serious political writer.

     Thus between the known facts and his stories a fairly coherent life of Burroughs can be written.  My essays here on the ERBzine can be arranged in chronological order to give a rough idea of what my finished biography will be like.

     Burroughs was a complex man with a couple fixed ideas.  One was his desire to be a successful businessman.  This fixed obsession almost ruined him.  He was essentially a self-obsessed artist and as such had no business skills although he squandered untold amounts of time and energy which might better have been applied to his art than in attempts to be a business success.

     In many ways he was trying to justify his failure to be a business success by the time he was thirty rather than making the change to his new status as an artist.

     As a successful artist he was presented with challenges that had nothing to do with his former life.  These were all new challenges for which he had no experience to guide him while he was too impetuous to nsit down and thnk them out properly.  Not all that many in his situation do.  Between magazine sales, book publishing and the movies he really should have had a business manager as an intermdiary.  Perhaps Emma might have been able to function in that capacity much as H.G. Well’s wife jane did for him.  At any rate book and movie negotiations diverted time and energy from his true purpose of writing.

     His attempt to single handedly  run a five hundred plus acre farm and ranch while writing after leaving Chicago ended in a dismal failure.  Even his later investments in an airplane engine and airport ended in a complete disaster.  Thank god he didn’t get caught up in stock speculations of the twenties.  As a businessman he was doomed to failure; he never became successful.  It if hadn’t been for the movie adaptations of Tarzan he would have died flat broke.

     Still his need was such that he apparently thought of his writing as a business even going so far as to rent office space and, at least in 1918, according to a letter to Weston, keeping hours from 9:00 to 5:30.  Strikes me as strange.  Damned if I would.

     At the end of the decade he informed Weston that he intended to move to Los Angeles, abandon writing and, if he was serious, go into the commercial raising of swine.  The incredulousness of Weston’s reply as he answered ERB’s questions on hog feed comes through the correspondence.

     Think about it.  Can one take such flakiness on ERB’s part seriously?  Did he really think his income as a novice pig raiser would equal his success as a writer with an intellectual property like Tarzan?  Weston certainly took him seriously and I think we must also.  There was the element of the airhead about him.

     A second major problem was his attitude toward his marriage and his relationship with Emma.

     He appears to have been dissatisfied with both at the beginning and decade and ready to leave both at the end.  According to the key letter of Weston ERB was an extremely difficult husbnad with whom Emma had to be patient.  As Weston put it, no other woman would have put up with his antics.  Unfortunately he doesn’t give details of those antics but the indications are that Emma was a long suffering wife.

     ERB’s resentment of her apparently became an abiding hatred.  Danton Burroughs released information about ERB’s third great romance with a woman named Dorothy Dahlberg during the war years of WWII through Robert Barrett the BB staff writer in issue #64.

     After having been estranged from her husband for about a decade Emma died on 11-05-44, probably of a broken heart.  ERB returned to Los Angeles from Hawaii to dispose of her effects.  Arriving on 11/19/44 after visiting his daughter he met with Ralph Rothmund in Tarzana where he proceeded to get soused, apparently in celebration of Emma’s death.

     To quote Barrett, p. 25, Burroughs Bulletin #64.

     After Ed met with Ralph Rothmund, he opened a case of Scotch and took out a bottle after which he drove to Emma’s home in Bel-Air- where he and Jack “sampled” the Scotch a couple times.”  From Bel-Air Jack drove Ed to the Oldknows, some friends also in Bel-Air, where they continued to sample the Scotch.  After this visit Ed and Jack returned to Emma’s home at 10452 Bellagio Road, where Jack brought out a nearly full bottle of bourbon.  Jack asked the maids to postpone dinner for 30 minutes, while they waited for Joan and Joan II.  This evidently irritated the two maids as they both quit  and walked out on them!  Ed reported in his diary that after the two maids walked out, ‘we had a lovely dinner and a grand time.”

     That sort of strikes me as dancing on the grave of Emma which indicates a deep hatred for her on the part of ERB.  We are all familiar with the storyof ERB’s pouring the liquor in the swimming pool humiliating Emma in front of guests which she stood so Weston must have known what he was talking about.

     There is a certain hypocrisy in Burroughs now getting blotto in celebration of Emma’s death.  Between the two of them in the space of a couple hours ERB and his son, John Coleman, finished a fifth of Scotch and went ripping through a bottle of bourbon.  I don’t know how rough and tough you are but that would put me under the pool table.

     In this inebriated and hostile state they apparently had words with what I assume to have been Emma’s long time maids.  Maids don’t walk out because you ask them to hold dinner for a few minutes.  Being a maid is a job; they don’t respond that way to reasonable requests.  So in his drunken state ERB must have been offensive about Emma or the maids causing their reaction.

     Thus sitting totally soused  in the ‘alcoholic’ Emma’s home they ‘had a lovely dinner and a grand time.’  The woman was both good to him and good for him but it isn’t incumbent on any man to see his best interests.  There was a crtain dignity lacking in ERB’s behavior at this good woman’s death, not to mention the hypocrisy of getting thoroughly jazzed.

d.

      The decade also witnesses the unfolding of ERB’s psyche from the repressed state of 1910 to an expanded and partially liberated state at the end of the decade when he fled Chicago.  Pyschologically ERB was always a dependent personality.  He let his editors both magazine and book bully him and take advantage of his good will.  He also needed a strong role model which is one reason his literary role models are so obvious.

     From 1911 to 1916 he seemed to lean on Jack London as his role model.  The problem with London is that we can’t be sure which of his books ERB read as he had none of his books in his library.  It seems certain that he read London’s early Gold Rush books.  ERB’s hobo information is probably based on London’s The Road and then he may possibly have read The Abyssmal Brute which is concerned with the results of the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries fight and a preliminary to The Valley Of The Moon. 

     It is difficult to understand how Burroughs could have read much during this decade what with his writing schedule and hectic  life style.  Yet we know for a fact that between 1913-15 he found time to read Edward Gibbon’s massive The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire.

     At the same time additions to his library from this decade are rather sparse, the bulk of the library seems to have been purchased from 1920 on.  Still, if one assumes that he read all the books of London including 1913′s Valley Of The Moon, then it is possible that his cross=country drive of 1916 may have been partially inspired by Billy and Saxon Roberts’ walking tour of Northern California and Southern Oregon in that book as well as on ERB’s hobo fixation.  Certainly London must have been his main influence along with H.H. Knibbs and Robert W. Service.  He may have wished to emulate London by owning a large ranch.

     I suspect he meant to call on London in Sonoma during his 1916 stay in California but London died in the fall of that year which prevented the possible meeting.  With the loss of London Burroughs had to find another role model which he did in Booth Tarkington.  He does have a large number of Tarkington’s novels in his library, most of which were purchased in this decade.  Tarkington was also closely associated with Harry Leon Wilson who also influenced ERB with a couple two or three novels in his library, not least of which is Wison’s Hollywood novel, Merton Of The Movies.  Just as a point of interest Harry Leon Wilson was also a friend of Jack London.

     ERB’s writing in the last years of the decade seems to be heavily influenced by Tarkington as in Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid, The Efficiency Expert and The Girl From Hollywood.

     Burroughs was an avid reader and exceptionally well informed with a penetrating mind so that his ‘highly fictionalized’ writing which seems so casual and off hand is actually accurate beneath his fantastic use of his material.  While he used speculations of Camille Flammarion and possibly Lowell on the nature of Mars he was so mentally agile that when better information appeared which made his previous speculations untenable he had no difficulty in adjusting to the new reality.  Not everyone can do that.

     I have already mentioned his attention to the ongoing friction between the US and Japan that appeared in the Samurai of Byrne’s Pacific island.  In this connection Abner Perry of the Pellucidar series is probably named after Commodore Matthew Perry who opened Japan in 1853.  After all Abner Perry does build the fleet that opened the Lural Az.  Admiral Peary who reached the North Pole about this time is another possible influence.  The identical pronunciation of both names would have serendipitous for Burroughs.

     As no man writes in a vacuum, the political and social developments of his time had a profound influence on both himself and his writing.

     The effects of unlimited and unrestricted immigration which had been decried by a small but vocal minority for some time came to fruition in the Second Decade as the Great War showed how fragile the assumed Americanization and loyalty of the immigrants was.  The restriction of immigration from 1920 to 1924 must have been gratifying to Burroughs.

     I have already indicated the profound reaction that Burroughs, London and White America in general had to the success of the Black Jack Johnson in the pursuit of the heavyweight crown.  The clouded restoration of the crown through Jess Willard did little to alleviate the gloom.  Combined with the sinking of the Ttitanic and the course of the suicidal Great War White confidence was irrevocably shaken.

     Burroughs shared with London the apprehension that the old stock was losiing its place of preeminence to the immigrants.  This fear woud find its place in Burroughs writing where he could from time to time make a nasty comment.  His characterization of the Irish is consistently negative while his dislike of the Germans first conceived when he saw them as a young man marching through the streets of Chicago under the Red flag was intense.  Their participation in the Haymarket Riot combined with the horrendous reports of German atrocities during the War reinforced his dislike almost to the point of fanaticism.  While the post-war German reaction in his writing was too belated he had been given cause for misinterpretation.

     Always politically conservative he was a devoted admirer of Teddy Roosevelt while equally detesting Woodrow Wilson who was President eight of the ten years of the Second Decade.  When the Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917 polarizing public opinion into the Right and Left ERB was definitely on the Right.

     By the end of the decade the world he had known from 1875 to 1920 had completely disappeared buried by a world of scientific and technological advances as well and social and political changes that would have been unimaginable in his earlier life.  The changes in sexual attitudes caused by among others Krafft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger would have been astounding.

     The horse had been displaced by the auto.  Planes were overhead.  The movies already ruled over the stage, vaudeville and burlesque.  Cities had displaced the country.  The Jazz Age which was the antithesis of the manners and customs of 1875-1920 realized the new sexual mores so that the Flapper and Red Hot Mama displaced the demure Gibson Girl as the model of the New Woman.

     When ERB moved from Chicago to LA in 1919 he, like Alice, virtually stepped through the looking glass into a world he never made and never imagined.  A Stranger In A Strange Land not different in many ways from the Mars of his imagination.

Go to Part III- Background Of The Second Decade Social And Political

 

 

Part 9 Tarzan And The Lion Man: A Review

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man

No. 9 of 10 parts

by

R.E. Prindle

First published on the ezine, ERBzine

Conclusions And Prospectus

 

     A careful reading of the output of the ’30s reveals a developing antagonism, war if you will, between the Communists, the Jews and ERB.  The attempt to shut down non-Communist writers appears to have been extended to ERB, forcing him into self-publishing in 1930 with Tarzan The Invincible being the first title.  this was followed by its sequel Tarzan Triumphant.

     The two titles would seem to indicate he met that challenge successfully.

     Then in a seemingly unrelated event MGM released the movie version of Trader Horn in 1931.  Trader Horn seems to have led MGM to sign Burroughs on for his Tarzan character shortly after the movie’s release.  MGM would then go on to film six Tarzan features over a ten or eleven year period from 1932 to 1942.  All the movies were profitable yet after the release of Tarzan’s New York Adventure MGM sold a stellar property to the Sol Lesser Company even allowing Johnny Weissmuller and Sheffield to go with the sale.  O’ Sullivan chose to abandon the series.

     The entire MGM series used Trader Horn footage transferring it to the Tarzan series as Tarzan’s home base.  Over the years they incorporated scenes relying on Tarzan And The Leopard Men and Tarzan And The Lion Man.  It would appear they sudied the series closely.  Compare this description of Lady Barbara Collis’s flight in Tarzan Triumphant with the scene used twice in MGM movies of the plane approaching the Escarpment.  Triumphant, p. 10:

…and when there loomed suddenly close to the tip of her left wing a granite escarpment that was lost immediately above and below her in the all eveloping vapor…

     There can be little doubt that the intent was to defame the character of Tarzan with the release of Tarzan, The Ape Man, first of the series.  Ten years later in Tarzan’s New York Adventure he is still the ignorant lout he was as the feral boy of the first film after having been the ‘mate’ of the seemingly well bred, well read, intelligent Jane played by Maureen O’ Sullivan.  After ‘finding’ a son in 1939, three years later, ‘Boy’, as he was generically named, speaks intelligently and is able to write a note telling his mother he will be gone for a day.  At the same time Tarzan is still going around speaking pidgin English like ‘Tarzan kill’ or ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’  There’s a guy who isn’t even listening to Jane talk to him.  I personally find this amazing.  The question then is why didn’t MGM develop the character in a more intelligent manner.

     Also, the question arises as to why the character wasn’t made a profit center for MGM as Charlie Chan was for Twentieth Century Fox.  As Burroughs notes in ‘Writer’s Markets And Methods’ in 1938 in reference to the Chan movies, the public was hungry for the serialization of popular characters during the thirties.  There were nearly fifty Charlie Chan films made, some years at a clip of four.  The astonishingly strong and continuing appeal of Tarzan would certainly have justified the attept to produce two or more a year.  Certainly an annual film.  After assuming the license from MGM beginning in 1943 Lesser released a film a year in a very profitable manner.  So, as he found plenty of ideas the argument that MGM exhausted the story potential of the character doesn’t hold up.  Something else was going on.

     That something else was the role of Burroughs as an anti-Communist and in Jewish eyes, an anti-Semite.

     It is important to have an idea of the Jewish role in history as they are invariably in antagonism to the citizens of their host country.  One need look no further for an explanation than the Old Testament story of Cain and Abel.  The story encapsulates the Jewish attitude toward the other peoples of the world.

         The story involves God or in other words, a higher authority, Abel who becomes the the higher authority’s favorite and Cain who is rejected by the higher authority.  Abel presents his offering to God or the higher authority and Cain his.  Abel’s offering is an exploitation of the natural increase of the flocks.  In other words cattle do all the labor while Abel harvests them.  Cain labors in the fields offering the produce of his labor which is rejected as unworthy.

     Once the higher authority chooses the offering of Abel he makes him his favorite.  Abel then lords it over Cain who quite naturally resents this.  Cain then invites Abel into the field where he kills him.  Eh voila!  The origins of Semitism and anti-Semitism.  The problem of anti-Semitism is solved.

     Now, the Jews will compulsively repeat the story of Cain and Abel after the Freudian manner endlessly over the millennia as the story is encoded in their brains.

     Now for the application.  In 1995, BenZion Netanyahu published his mammoth volume titled, The Origins Of The Inquisition In Fifteenth Century Spain.  BenZion is the father of Benyimin the former Prime Minister of Israel.  Mr. Netanyahu’s large sized, eleven hundred pages, book investagates the problem in excruciating and verbose detail.  Mr. Netanyahu chats on interminably in an attempt to deny the obvious.  It’s as though he believes that if he talks long enough the truth will go away.

     Mr. Netanyahu notes that in every instance over the last twenty-five hundred years the Jews have at first been warmly received by the host nation only to have this affection turn to such a hatred over a period of time that the Jews are either killed or thrown out.  He examines the problem in fifteenth century Spain.  His conclusion is that the cattle, or anti-Semites as he styles them, are at fault while his Jews are as blameless as Abel.  Thus he avoids answering the question of why this is the invariable result of Jewish cohabitation in a society.

     For Jewish historians there are two versions of Jewish history.  One is the annals of the Jews and the other is the history of anti-Semites.  This is how the Jews organize their story.  Any thing critical of Judaism automatically falls into the category of the History of anti-Semitism.  One of the most persistent objections to Judaism over the last twenty-five hundred years is that the Jews see the non-Jews or Cainites as cattle meant to contribute to Jewish welfare.  Even though the idea is clearly contained in the story of Cain and Abel the Jews have always considered the charge what they call an anti-Semitic slur.  However Mr. Netanyahu describes the system perfectly in his overlong essay.  This isn’t history. This is one long whine.

     Skipping a repetitious millennium or two let us skip along with Mr. Netanyahu to fifteenth century Spain.

     Our author erroneously established the origins of anti-Semitism in the Hellenic and Roman periods of the Middle East.  He chose to completely ignore the blueprint of Semitism and anit-Semitism as presented in the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.  For him he has the inexplicable paradox of every people warmly receiving the Jews into their midst while after a period of time universally and brutally rejecting them.  He appears to be genuinely so obtuse as to be unable to understand this.

     The history of the Jews in Spain goes back at least to the Roman transportation to Spain after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD.

     While the usual tradition of the Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz and others, is to portray the Spain before the expulsion as an idyllic sojourn in ‘The Land Of The Three Religions,’ Mr. Netanyahu presents a picture of cultural conflict under the Visigothic kings down to the expulsion.

     Of course the Moslems occupied Spain from c. 700AD until they were completely expelled in +1492.  The Reconquest began almost immediately, while by c. +1100  when Mr. Netanyahu reaches the beginning of his central story was successful over most of Spain.  Following the scenario of Cain and Abel the Jews were able to insinuate themselves into the role of middlemen between the kings of the various kingdoms, or higher authorities, and the indigenous Spaniards, or cattle who Mr. Netanyahu disparages as Christians as though the conflict were of a religious nature rather than a cultural one.  Spain was a multi-cultural society that functioned as all multi-cultural societies must until one culture establishes itself as the Top Dog.

     We have the classic situation of the Abelites farming their Cainites as  a human herd of cattle.  The cattle produce the wealth, the middlemen reap the harvest.  Thus the kings appointed the Jews tax collectors and tax farmers.

     There is no more vicious or unopular job than that of tax collector.  Even today when governmental functions are institutionalized and no longer personal the resistance is still strong.  The Jews had the advantage of segregating themselves as a distinct culture so that they escaped the opprobrium they would have felt if they had been native tax farmers living amongst their brethren.

     In the nature of tax farming per se there is no reason to believe that the Jews were any more honest or gentle than any other tax farmers.  Exploiting their human cattle as tax farmers the Jews then dug deeper by acting as loan sharks after having expropriated the wealth of the Spaniards as taxes.  Interest or usury as it was called was forbidden the faithful by the Catholic Church so miraculously, almost, the loan sharks had the field to themselves, not ever a shard of competition.  And they took advantage of it.  So for roughly two or three hundred years the Jews exploited their human kine unmercifully.  Mr. Netanyahu acknowledges this although with a different characterization.

     As Abel exploited his position as favorite of God with Cain who, becoming exasperated, killed Abel so in 1391 driven past their endurance the Spanish cattle rose up, as Mr. Netanyahu puts it, to virtually exterminate the Jewish population.  As exaggeration no doubt.  Mr. Netanyahu virtually equates the uprising with the Stalin-Hitler period in Central and Eastern Europe.

     In the interests of brevity we will now skip another four hundred years or so to the post-Revolutionary period of 1913 to the present.  The story was the same in every society the Jews infiltrated; one of expulsion or slaughter during this intervening period.  There is no aberration in history over the period from 1913 to 1945; it is all a continuation of the Abel and Cain story; Semitism and its inevitable reaction.  Underline the word inevitable.  The United States will not be immune to this reaction.

     From 1300 to the French Revolution Jews had been expelled from every Western European country while being placed under civil disabilities in Central and Eastern Europe.  The French Revolution reestablished opportunities for them.  They quickly reestablished their role as middlemen.

     By the time of the Revolution State functions had been depersonalized and institutionalized.  The law of fiat by the king had been replaced by the ‘Rule of Law.’  Thus, while individual rulers who remained goyim were still important, they functioned under the higher authority of the ‘Law.’  The term Majesty indicates the concept of The Law had replaced the Royal authority.

     Thus to regain their position of middlemen Jews had to subvert the Law.  This has been all but completely accomplished in our own time.  In the interim between 1913 and 1953, actually, the Jews fully exasperated their Central and Eastern European host States, thus during the Stalin-Hitler period from 1928 to 1953 Nazis and Communists took the psychological solution of inviting Abel out into the field and killing him.  Both Stalin and Hitler began to systematically exterminate the Jews.  This should surprise no one familiar with the Cain and Abel story and history.

     Stalin was assassinated on the eve of the execution of the order to round up Eastern European Jews for transportation to the gulags in the far North.  Not only a virtual but an actual death sentence.  Thus the Jews in Europe would have been all but destroyed.

     I hope this is suffiecient background for us to now return to the story of Burroughs, Tarzan, MGM and the Judaeo-Communists of Hollywood.

     it is an accepted fact today that the various national CPs were all 50 to 60% Jewish.  Insofar as Jewish Cultural ends coincided with Communist goals, which were not entirely synonymous, all Jews may be said to be Communist sympathizers.  After the establishment of Israel in 1948 a rift occurred between the two cultural factions that resulted in a rejection of the Jews by the Communists.

     We know that ERB became suspect as an anti-Semite after 1919 and I suspect a confirmed one in AJC/ADL eyes, at least by 1924′s Marcia Of  The Doorstep, reinforced by Tarzan Triumphant a few years later.  :Little is known of ERB’s attitude toward the Jews before 1919.  He must have been aware of the Jewish presence in Chicago.

     Gus Russo in his volume Supermob describes their arrival in Chicago in this manner. p. 4:

     This community…was centered around the intersection of Halsted and Maxwell Streets, where the population was 90% Jewish.  Over the next twenty years (after 1871) an estimated fifty-five thousand Eastern European Jewish immigrants crowded into this tiny locus.  So dense had this ghetto become that one social scientist determined that if the rest of the city were similarly clotted, Chicago would boast, instead of two million residents, over thirty-two million people, half the population of the entire country.

     We know that ERB was familiar with the area because Billy Byrne, the Mucker, came from the area, so ERB must have observed the Jewish community in this habitat.  With further arrivals that brought the Jewish population of Chicago to 350,000 the area of Lawndale was colonized.

     Hollywood in the thirties was rapidly changing.  (When wasn’t Los Angeles rapidly changing?)  Beginning in the thirties a remendous influx of revolutionary and conspiratorial Jews arrived from Germany, especially after 1933.  At the same time the Outfit began to annex California as its own crime colony.  As part of this organized crime influx came the generation of Jews from Lawndale in Chicago as the so-called financial wizards of the Chicago Outfit.  Thus the whole charater of LA Burroughs knew from the teens and twenties changed much for the worse.  It will be remembered that ERB was a neighbor of the Sicilian mobster Johnny Roselli in the late thirties while gangsters became prominent in his work beginning with Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick of Tarzan Triumphant and the assassins of The Swords Of Mars.

     As far as I know ERB was too discreet to discuss his opinions of Jews other than what can be gleaned fromt the novels.  It does seem clear that he knows who he was dealing with.

     We know he was an anti-Communist which was enough to have him shut down as an author, while it is probable that the Jews considered him an anti-Semite which is another reason for him to be brought into line.  The means of doing this was to control him economically while subverting his character of Tarzan.  It was a fairly easy matter to break him financially, but the strength of the appeal of Tarzan was such and the means applied so covert, that when MGM gave up after Tarzan’s New York Adventure the ape man had been too strong for them.

     So, when the string of six MGM Tarzans began in 1932 the intent was to diminish Tarzan to a laughing stock, but the character was too much for them while the movies became extremely profitable.  Even then the Studio abandoned the lucrative series in 1942.  This is inexplicable unless something is going on behind the scenes.

     For the next essay I am going to concentrate on the last of the MGM movies, Tarzan’s New York Adventure primarily because it seems to be directly related to the situation around Tarzan And The Lion Man.  It is highly improbable that Lion Man was not read by those involved with this project at MGM.   They must therefore have reacted to it.  The novel very likely has concealed messages that escape us but which they would have picked up.  The movies also have concealed messages which were directed at Burroughs.  If I am right Tarzan’s New York Adventure is a lecture tha was directed at the old Lion Man, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Go to part 10 of 10 Tarzan’s Excellent New York Adventure

 

Part 8 Tarzan And The Lion Man: A Review

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man

Part 8 of 10 parts

by

R.E. Prindle

First published on the ezine, ERBzine

More Stars Than There Are In Heaven

 

     The last two chapters are titled ‘Goodby Africa; and ‘Hello, Hollywood.’  Burroughs thus complements Ring L1 with Ring R1 completing the circle.  If one reads the book with this structure in mind rather than the linear one leading to a climax at the end the story will make more sense and be much more pleasurable.

     ERB had had a rocky road in Hollywood since his arrival in 1919.  The purchase of the spectacular Otis estate immediately called attention to him, an attention that he would have to fulfill.  ERB obviously failed to live up to the expectations he had created while souring the relationship further by writing the muckraking Girl From Hollywood in 1922.  In Lion Man he once agains ridicules Hollywood and actually the movie colony, as well it should have been.  The first and last chapters are direct attacks.  Comments of this sort are always resented and seldom forgiven.  MGM was not in a forgiving mood.

     Burroughs opens the chapter with a description of Tarzan.  p. 180:

     A year had passed.

     A tall, bronzed man alighted from the Chief (Santa Fe RR passenger train called The Chief) in the railroad station of Los Angeles.  The easy majestic grace of his carriage; his tread, at once silent and bold; his flowing muscles; the dignity of his mien; all suggested the leonine, as though he were, indeed a personification of Numa, the lion.

     Yes indeed, the Lion Man had hit Tinseltown, flowing muscles, whatever flowing muscles may be, and all.  Hollywood had come to Africa and now Africa had come to Hollywood with a silent but bold tread, whatever that is.  MGM would make merry over the Lion Man.

     Just by coincidence Tarzan arrives at the same time as Balza, The Golden Girl, who had already found fame and stardom in the movie capitol is returning.  She now has green hair and has learned to say Mahvelous, in true Hollywood fashion.  After all she had a human brain.  All Hollywood stars said Mahvelous at the time which was a source of some amusement and derision.  ‘That’s mahvelous, darling.’

     The Freeman Lang Burroughs mentions was a real person, the Hollywood greeter.   ERB had obviously listened to or seen several such spectacles- a nice snapshot of a bygone era.

     With the trace of a smile Tarzan continues to downtown Hollywood and the Roosevelt Hotel.  Named after TR obviously.  The Roosevelt was real and so far as I know is still in use, although I haven’t been to Hollywood for twenty years or so now, so I can’t say for sure.  The Hotel was frequented by the movie crowd while having a somewhat seedy reputation according to my sources.

     While checking in, one of the local sharpers watches him sign his name- John Clayton of London.  ERB has been around, he knows what’s happening.  When Tarzan comes down from his room the sharper accosts him in the lobby with a ‘Say, aren’t you John Clayton from London?’

     The sharper claims to have met Tarzan in London, although he doesn’t specify the major island of Africa or the lesser island England.  Obviously he could never have met John Clayton on the lesser Island.  He attaches himself to Tarzan as a guide.

     He guides Tarzan to the then famous Brown Derby, an actual restaurant.  Hollywood and LA are much different today than they were in the thirties,forties and fifties.  All the garish wonder and splendor is gone.  The Brown Derby was actually shaped like a brown Derby hat.  I saw it before they tore it down but I never ate there; I did eat at the one over in Beverly Hills but it wasn’t the same.  Burroughs makes some very unflattering remarks about the movie folk eating lunch there, which probably didn’t help him socially during the rest of the decade.

     ERB then offers another slice of Hollywood life portraying the premier of Balza’s new film at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which I am sure everyone is familiar with.  Freeman Lang again officiates at the mike.  I’m sure everyone has seen such a depiction in either newsreels or movies.  The Day Of The Locust would be a good example.

     After the movies Reece, the sharper, suggests that he, a friend, and Tarzan attend a party.  He fails to mention that they’ll be crashing it as they have no invitations, indeed, don’t even know the hosts. 

     Here ERB is giving an excellent portrayal of a Hollywood type who persists today, although much rougher now that cocaine and other drugs have been introduced.  Formerly merely audacious and crooked, now they are vicious and criminal, using drugs as an entree.

     Tarzan is not aware of what’s going on as Reece brushes past the doorman.  While Tarzan makes himself amenable in small talk Reece and friend set about to rob the hostess of her jewels.

     Tarzan is appraised by some studio types as a suitable condidate to play a jungle god.  One of the men may be meant to represent Louis B. Mayer although if so, ERB is too cautious to mention his real name.

     We also learn that Rhonda has been married to Orman and is now in the South Seas making another movie.  If La and Rhonda did represent ERB’s Anima figure, then he has abandoned her which means that as Tarzan is now one undivided person he has no Anima and no woman.  Strange situation.

     About this time the screams of the hostess announce that Reece and his friend are doing violence to the lady.  Tarzan rescues her then jumps through a window into a conveniently placed tree as the cops arrive.

     Surprisingly he runs into Reece the next day.  Asked why he isn’t in jail Reece casually says that his friend has a contact who fixed it.  He feels no remorse or shame secure in the knowledge that nearly any crime can be fixed.

     The party and the fixing are realistic portrayals of Hollywood.  ERB must have attended such parties, while as a man about town he was familiar with the various Hollywood types.

     BO Studios call asking him to come in for an audition.  ERB does some flim flam about an adagio dancer playing the Lion Man, gives Tarzan a minor role because he isn’t the type to play the Lion Man, then Tarzan muffs his chance by killing a trained lion.  Rather weak from my point of view.  Tarzan then turns his back on Hollywood asking for directions back to Africa.

     So the novel Tarzan And The Lion Man ends ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’  The duel with MGM has already begun.

Go To Part 9:  Conclusions and Prospectus