Copyright by Fred Robert Nadis 2002
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Copyright by Fred Robert Nadis 2002 The Dissertation Committee for Fred Robert Nadis Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Wonder Shows: Science, Religion and Magic on the American Stage, 1845-2001 Committee: ________________________________ Jeffrey Meikle, Supervisor ________________________________ Linda Henderson ________________________________ Bruce Hunt ________________________________ Robert Abzug ________________________________ Janet Davis Wonder Shows: Science, Religion and Magic on the American Stage, 1845-2001 by Fred Robert Nadis, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2002 PREFACE One of my more powerful childhood memories concerns a visit to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Besides being impressed by the neo- classical building next to the lake and all the stone ladies holding up the roof on their heads, I recall a science demonstration that a young acne-afflicted woman in a smock offered in a small anteroom, possibly the gift shop. Among other tricks she placed a rose in a vial of liquid nitrogen, removed it, and struck it with a hammer—it then shattered as if made of stone or plaster. This unexpected and beautiful event evoked a sense of wonder in me. I was fascinated, both by the completely unexpected shattering of the rose, and that a young woman could control such strange cosmic forces. Her explanation of this and her many other demonstrations remain vague; but I now realize this was the first performance I had witnessed of what in this work I am calling a "wonder show." It did not make a scientist of me, as may have been the intention, but it did instill a proper sense of awe and appreciation for the possibilities technology and showmanship could provide. That homely demonstration, combining science and magic, fits the description of a wonder iv show that this work relies on. This combination of science and magic can evoke pleasure in the spectator, whose day-to-day perceptions are shattered and opened to new realms of possibility. As this work will show, such demonstrations can be powerful sales tools. Over the years, for example, similar choreographies have been used to promote the varied fortunes of General Motors and of fundamentalist Christianity. The well-scripted wonder show, then, is a strong concoction. Another childhood memory of mine also relates to this performance genre. At a junior high school gym assembly in the 1960s, a visiting lecturer projected on a tilted screen time-lapse films of flowers opening. The footage was black and white, grainy, shot from not particularly dramatic angles, yet enthralling. The repetition only increased our interest as viewers. The speaker told us that a fellow townsperson, an engineer, had pioneered this technique decades earlier. I still recall my near-deification of the mysterious inventor, once in our midst, who had thought up such a great technique. The films, though homely productions, offered a glimpse of a non-human perspective and the clear moral that all life was a miracle. Perhaps their tracing of organic growth served as an antidote to the rose I had seen years earlier shattered at the Science and Industry Museum. These linked memories also suggest that, as a child, I was not particularly provoked to wonder by gazing at an actual rose, but only one that came filtered through technology. My intention in reciting these childhood memories is to establish the purpose of the wonder show—to cause the spectator to see the world through new v eyes, perhaps like those of a child. Such an aesthetic experience has a religious dimension. Some authors have argued that the capacity for wonder and the desire to wonder, although universal, are particularly well-developed in America. Alexis de Tocqueville, the chronicler of the American scene during the Jacksonian era, commented, “The American lives in a land of wonders …everything around him is in constant movement, and every movement seems an advance.”1 A century later, another foreign observer, British literary critic Tony Tanner, also noting the American appetite for innovation, entitled his look at American fiction The Reign of Wonder (1965). Yet it is not my childhood memories of roses shattering and time-lapse views of flowers opening that solely have propelled this project. A more recent stimulus came when I heard a hypnotist interviewed on National Public Radio in 1999. He spoke of the psychotherapy he practiced with hypnosis and promoted the value of this technique, yet he seemed vaguely defensive. This interview suggested the uneasy terrain that hypnosis still inhabits. As a public, we view hypnosis as a blend of science, art, and the otherworldly, our conception filtered through the pulp imagination that once led, for example, to the beautifully-drawn panels of "Mandrake the Magician" cartoons, in which the dapper magician defeated thugs by creating paralyzing hypnotic illusions. 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 404. vi The hypnotized subject imitating a canary and the rose shattered from a hammer blow suggest two ends of the wonder show continuum. One terminus involves the wonders of the human mind, the other wonders of engineering and invention. Often these opposed celebrations are offered in compensatory balance. If displays of marvelous technology can threaten our sense of human uniqueness and destiny, displays of amazing mental powers can once again reassure us of our very uniqueness. Progress, again, can march on, unimpeded by debate as to what it precisely means or entails. The title of this work, Wonder Shows: Science, Religion, and Magic on the American Stage, 1845-2001, requires only slight explanation. I use the words "science" and "technology" interchangeably, as I am most interested in public attitudes towards that amalgam of forces—compounded of the labor of scientists, inventors, engineers, business people, consumers, intellectuals, policy-makers, and laborers—that have instigated "modernization," and so changed lives, social relations, landscapes, and modes of thought. Likewise, I use the words "religion" and "magic" interchangeably. 2 These I have categorized primarily as human enterprises antithetical to a mechanistic or materialistic worldview and its assumptions. The sort of "magic" that public performances of Spiritualism, telepathy, and hypnosis conjured, I will argue, had a religious component. Such 2 Jon Butler argued that interest in the occult and supernatural has long been a component of the American religious experience in, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1990). vii performances offered new marvels to an age stripped of the older order of miracles and bolstered arguments for the realities of a spiritual realm. The year 1845 is this work’s starting point because that is the date of the earliest documents I have inspected for this project: the letters that the traveling electrical demonstrator Charles Came sent home to his wife while performing in rural New York. 2001 is the closing date since it has a millennial ring and was the year I concluded my research after viewing the performances of several inventors of utopian devices, so ending my eavesdropping on the ongoing dialogue about technology, progress, and the human need for wonders that this project explores. It could be argued that on at least one level all historical works are veiled autobiographies. More than once, while viewing or envisioning apparatus that wonder showmen have used in the past, I imagined taking to the lecture circuit with similar antiquated wonder-making machinery. This may be a genetic flaw. My grandfather, long deceased, came of age in Chicago in the roaring twenties; he was a lawyer who had a passion for show business that led him to become a stage magician and hypnotist and serve terms as president of the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians. These personal associations transformed the process of researching and writing the second section of this book, which details the acts of such “mystic vaudevillians,” into what seemed family biography. viii My larger goal has been to trace out a new performance genre, while exploring the cultural fissures between science and religion, which might be termed "the Scopes problem," and between technology and our sense of human uniqueness, which could be termed "the John Henry syndrome." Often, the wonder showmen conjured up a middle ground where these opposing forces appeared to blend. On stage, the scientific showman could emphasize both the glories of the human intellect and its products, and suggest that a religious worldview, particularly the belief in the human soul, could be supported by the latest research of psychologists, parapsychologists or other men of science. These shows, then, served as a haven where contradictions were cancelled, opposites collapsed, and, as in a comedy, everyone could live happily ever after. Like a Las Vegas stage illusion act, a work of scholarship involves a great deal of collaborative effort. The scholarly laborer should take the label of “author” advisedly, as the final product required much in the way of off-stage arrangements and on-stage promptings. My thanks go to Jeffrey Meikle, my dissertation advisor in the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, who made extensive notes on the manuscript as it developed; thanks also to Bruce J. Hunt who brought me up to date on the history of science, and to my other dissertation committee ix members, Linda D. Henderson, Janet M. Davis, and Robert H. Abzug. At academic conferences, commentators Daniel McInerney, Jodi Dean, and Nancy Tomes offered useful criticisms of early versions of chapters. Anonymous readers at the Journal of Medical Humanities improved the hypnosis chapter considerably, and their extensive and helpful suggestions bolstered my opinion of the academic profession.