Books: HODAG!

The University Press of Chicago is offering a taste of historian Joshua Blu Buhs's (real name, swear to God) new book about Bigfoot, everybody's favorite Fortean missing link. The online marketing includes a neat little interview with the author.

The book excerpt not only discusses the origins of the Bigfoot story, but it also briefly recounts the story of the fearsome hodag – which should always be said with near ecstatic excitement: HODAG! – "The Rhino of America's North Woods." Pictured below.

From Blu Buhs's new book:

Lumberjacks, hunters, trappers, and other working-class men had long told stories of such prodigies. For decades, seasoned veterans had funned greenhorns with tales of sidehill dodgers and mosquitoes so big that they sucked cows dry and by having them fetch the equally legendary left-handed wrench. Or they sent them to hunt snipes. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Eugene Shepard, a Wisconsin lumberjack, raconteur, and prankster, announced that he had caught a hodag, the rhino of America’s north woods. Shepard photographed a group of friends killing the beast with picks and axes. The picture was made into a postcard; hundreds of thousands were sold; tourists flocked to Rhinelander, Wisconsin; reportedly, the Smithsonian even expressed interest. Seeing is believing. But the hodag was just a woodcarving. It was all a humbug. American history is rife with such practical jokes, stories of giant turtles and panthers, jackalopes and sea serpents, agropelters and snow wassetts—an entire bestiary of legendary animals. The tradition continued long after the frontier closed. In 1950, for example, the men’s adventure magazine Saga introduced a feature called “Sowing the Wild Hoax” and encouraged the blue-collar men reading it to send in examples of “particularly fiendish” and “unusually funny” practical jokes.

Stuff: If you live in the Austin area and kicked-in your zombie survival plan, you can come up from your basement now.

Some wags hacked into two roadside electronic billboards meant to warn Austin motorist about road conditions and changed the message to read "ZOMBIES IN AREA! RUN" and "CAUTION! ZOMBIES! AHEAD!"

Local news station KXAN was Johnny-on-the-spot with hard-hitting coverage as this slow-news-day-special exploded across the greater metropolitan Austin area.

Stuff: The hoax was the real hoax.

Michael Socolow, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, takes a hard look at the most famous Halloween hoax of the media age and takes the opportunity to poke some holes in the reputation of Orson Welles' legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

From Socolow's "The Hyped Panic Over War of the Worlds":

The "War of the Worlds" broadcast remains enshrined in collective memory as a vivid illustration of the madness of crowds and the deeply invasive nature of broadcasting. The program seemingly proved that radio could, in the memorable words of Marshall McLuhan, turn "psyche and society into a single echo chamber." The audience's reaction clearly illustrated the perils of modernity. At the time, it cemented a growing suspicion that skillful artists — or incendiary demagogues — could use communications technology to capture the consciousness of the nation. It remains the prime example used by media critics, journalists, and professors to prove the power of the media.

Yet the media are not as powerful as most think, and the real story behind "The War of the Worlds" is a bit more complex. The panic was neither as widespread nor as serious as many have believed at the time or since.

Nobody died of fright or was killed in the panic, nor could any suicides be traced to the broadcast. Hospital emergency-room visits did not spike, nor, surprisingly, did calls to the police outside of a select few jurisdictions. The streets were never flooded with a terrified citizenry. Ben Gross, the radio columnist of the New York Daily News, later remembered a "lack of turmoil in front of CBS" that contrasted notably with the crowded, chaotic scene inside the building. Telephone lines in New York City and a few other cities were jammed, as the primitive infrastructure of the era couldn't handle the load, but it appears that almost all the panic that evening was as ephemeral as the nationwide broadcast itself, and not nearly as widespread. That iconic image of the farmer with a gun, ready to shoot the aliens? It was staged for Life magazine. [Famed photo featured below - CRwM]

So where did the enduring legend of nationwide panic comes from?

First, says Socolow, the scope of the panic was hyped and expanded by the media and Welles, both of which knew a good story when they saw it.

The news media loved the story, and Welles loved the news media. The panic became a global story literally overnight. Even the Nazis could not resist commenting, noting the credulity of the American public. Americans certainly appeared gullible, but they were not alone. The news media, handed a sensational story of national scope, reported every detail (including fictional ones) about Welles, the program, and the reaction.

Welles's greatest performance that evening wasn't in the studio; it was in a hallway, at the improvised news conference, when he feigned a stunned, apologetic demeanor. In reality, as Paul Heyer notes in The Medium and the Magician, Welles carefully concealed his satisfaction with the hysteria while expressing concern over the rumors of deaths attributed to the program. The threats of investigation coming from the Federal Communications Commission bothered Welles, too, but they were primarily CBS's problem.

Second, Socolow points to loss or supression of the only significant statistical effort to gauge just how widespread the panic really was. The night of the broadcast – actually the night before Halloween – CBS executive Frank Stanton and sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld created a quick statistical survey methodology and, without running it past Stanton's bosses, conducted the only timely, national survey. The results of this survey are a mystery. If the data still exists, CBS keeps it under lock and key.

Instead of the survey, the data that forms the backbone of the "everybody panic!" myth comes from social psychologist Hadley Cantril and his 1940 book The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Instead of conducting a national survey, Cantril based his study on 135 inteveiws.

Admitting that his interviews did not comprise an accurate sample of either the national population or the radio audience that evening, Cantril nevertheless filled his short volume with narratives of terror and fear. The interview subjects — all from New Jersey "for reasons of finance and supervision" — were found by the "personal inquiry and initiative of the interviewers" hired by Cantril. They were a self-reporting, self-selected cohort. Cantril did attempt to interview people identified in newspapers as frightened, but that effort proved almost entirely futile.

Such reliance on qualitative measures, while using an unrepresentative sample, only begins to hint at Cantril's methodological problems. Cantril's estimates of how many people actually heard the broadcast, and how many were frightened, are wildly imprecise. Because CBS's Mercury Theatre on the Air lacked sponsorship, the C.E. Hooper Company, the commercial ratings service used at the time, did not rate Welles's program. The American Institute of Public Opinion national survey (taken six weeks after the program, following an avalanche of publicity) found 12 percent of respondents claiming they had heard the broadcast. That represents an audience of almost 12 million Americans — a number that is certainly far too high. Slightly less than four million Americans had tuned into Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air the week before "The War of the Worlds."

From such disparate approximations Cantril offered the "conservative estimate" that six million Americans heard the broadcast. The public-opinion institute's survey found that 28 percent of the listeners believed the broadcast contained real news bulletins, and of that 28 percent about 70 percent were "frightened or disturbed." These numbers undercut several of Cantril's assertions about the scope of the panic; they reveal that about three out of four listeners knew the program was fiction. So Cantril did what many social scientists faced with disagreeable data do: He spun the numbers. The low numbers, he wrote, represent the "very minimum of the total number actually frightened" because "many persons were probably too ashamed of their gullibility to confess it in a cursory interview." He candidly admitted that "there is the possibility that some people heard so much about the broadcast that they reported actually hearing it."

In other words, Cantril concluded that many respondents probably lied.

Stanton and Lazarsfeld sound mocked Cantril's methods and conclusions, but the myth of the broadcast's power was becoming criticism proof.

At the end of the article, Socolow suggests that the enduring appeal of the myth has to do with a certain sense of intellectual superiority, bred of some widely-held but poorly supported academic and lay stereotypes:

That is the ultimate irony behind "The War of the Worlds." The discovery that the media are not all-powerful, that they cannot dominate our political consciousness or even our consumer behavior as much as we suppose, was an important one. It may seem like a counterintuitive discovery (especially considering its provenance), but ask yourself this: If we really know how to control people through the media, then why isn't every advertising campaign a success? Why do advertisements sometimes backfire? If persuasive technique can be scientifically devised, then why do political campaigns pursue different strategies? Why does the candidate with the most media access sometimes lose?

The answer is that humans are not automatons. We might scare easily, we might, at different times and in different places, be susceptible to persuasion, but our behavior remains structured by a complex and dynamic series of interacting factors.

Later media theory, and empirical research, would complicate and refine those earliest findings. But the basic problem of audience reception remains stubbornly resistant, and as long as the mass media exist, we'll have empirical studies with dueling conclusions concerning effects. Many people, including scholars, will continue to believe something they intuitively suspect: that the media manipulate the great mass of the nation, transforming rational individuals into emotional mobs. But notice how those who believe this never include themselves in the mob. We are, as the Columbia University sociologist W. Phillips Davison once pointed out, very susceptible to the notion that others are more persuadable than ourselves.

Would you have fallen for Welles's broadcast? If not, why do you assume so many other people did?

Event: "But then maybe a spiritless age deserves a spiritless death. It is not for me to judge."

In 16th century, musicians dedicated to the performance funerary violin joined together to form what would become the oldest surviving artistic guild in England: the Guild of Funerary Violinists. Funerary violin music grew out of the Protestant Reformation. With the end of concept of Intercession, the idea that only priests could petition God on behalf of the souls of the departed, violin musicians filled the spiritual vacuum that death of priestly ritual left behind. The original funerary violinists would begin playing at funerals as early as the late 1586, with a well-reported performance at the funeral of famed poet Sir Philip Sidney. Granted official status under a warrant from Queen Elizabeth I, the Guild of Funerary Violinists spread the unique genre of funerary violin through England. By the 17th century, the art form was common throughout the Continent, especially in Protestant countries. Funerary violin truly becames its own genre when Friedrich Heidebrecht produced the first funerary violin suite in 1670. Funerary violin reached it peak during the Romantic Era, only to fade from memory in the modern era. The death of funerary violin was the product of specific political and religious purges as well as broad cultural trends. The Vatican-led Funerary Purges of the mid-19th Century were an enormous blow to the Guild. Furthermore, modern attitudes regarding death made the intensely meditative and melancholy art form seem morbid. Finally, the modal and tradition bound form, which rigorously eschewed virtuoso performances, failed to appeal to experimental and aggressive modernists. By the end of World War I, funerary violin was practically extinct.

In September of this year, the UK-based publisher Duckworth released a curious tome titled An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin. In the book, author Rohan Kriwaczek, the current acting President of the Guild of Funerary Violinists, lays out the history of this most obscure and unjustly forgotten genre of classical music as well as provides biographical sketches of the most important and notable funerary violinists. Kriwaczek's book is at once a lament for the neglected art form he loves and a thoroughly researched introduction for the music scholar and the lay reader. It is difficult to think of a better place to start exploring this fancinating subject.

In fact, there's only one flaw with book – it is completely made up.

Shortly after its publication, scholars, musicians, and historical experts all told the New York Times that there wasn't a shred of evidence to support any of Kriwaczek's claims. As far as they know, there was never a Guild of Funerary Violinists, no special genre of funerary violin music, and no massive effort to destroy the form. It is, they decided, a massive hoax.

Or is it?

This Halloween, Rohan Kriwaczek, author and acting President of the Guild of Funerary Violinists, will be performing funerary violin music live at McNally Robinson Bookseller's in SoHo. The performance starts at 6 PM. Either you'll get to see one of the last remaining practitioners of a forgotten art doing his thing or you'll get to be in on one of the most charming literary hoaxes in recent memory. That's what we call a win-win situation.