Flying Men on the Moon--Greatest Fake News and Fraud Until the Current Chicanery

Although no illustrations accompanied the New York Sun stories of a civilization on the Moon, artists and publishers were quick to produce prints depicting the alleged flying humanoid residents and other wonders.

Almost a hundred years before Orson Welles soiled the knickers of radio listeners across the country with his broadcast of A War of the Worlds, a New York newspaper had many of its readers convinced that the world’s most famous astronomer observed a civilization on the Moon through a powerful telescope.

On August 25, 1835, the New York Sun published the first of six articles which claimed that noted British astronomer Sir John Herschel made the observations through a powerful new telescope “of a new design.”  The telescope was so powerful that the scientist could allegedly observe and identify a number of species of animals including types of bison, goats, and giant tailless beavers that walked erect on their hind legs.  Most miraculous of all were the winged humanoids, dubbed Vespertilio-homo who built civilizations with great temples on the shores of vast oceans.

All of this was made more credible by the claim that it was reprinted from The Edinburgh Courant who in turn referenced a report in The Edinburgh Journal of Science and accounts by Herschel’s traveling companion and amanuensis, Dr. Andrew Grant.  Herschel was real enough and his observations and naming of the moons of Saturn and Uranus had made him famous.  Dr. Grant, however, was entirely fictional.

                            Sir John Herschel and his fantastic apparatus before it allegedly ignited his observatory.

According to the stories, observations came to an end when the telescope was left open and pointing in the direction of the Sun causing the lenses of the telescope to act as “burning lenses” igniting a fire which burned down the observatory.

The Sun, a broadsheet aspiring to ascend to the first ranks of newspapers in New York’s highly competitive circulation wars, was just two years old when the Moon stories first ran.  They were intended to build circulation, and they certainly did.  Some claim that the paper tripled sales and that its numbers stayed strong enough after to push it to the front ranks.

In 1835 it did not even need screaming headlines to attract readers to the Sun's fantastic story on the front page of its August 25 edition.

The stories ran before science fiction established itself as a popular literary genre.  All though there had been fantastical tales of trips to the Moon by the real Cyrano de Bergerac and attributed to the Baron Von Munchausen, few Americans would have ever heard of them.  The inventions of Jules Verne, including his novel From the Earth to the Moon were decades in the future.  Edgar Allan Poe had published his story Hans Phaall—A Tale about a man who ascended to the Moon in a hot air balloon a few months earlier in the Southern Messenger, but it is unlikely to have made much of stir in the northern city.  A rival paper did reprint it in September in response to the success of the Sun series.

Readers had no cultural understanding of these fantastic stories about space.  They were regularly exposed to claims of scientific discoveries and the inventions that were a staple of the period.  Many were quite legitimate as major advances in many fields were being made regularly.  Others were patently false.  The latter category included was Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, Professor of Astronomy at Munich University who had claimed he had seen evidence of civilization on the Moon and The Rev. Thomas Dick a/k/a The Christian Philosopher who claimed that the whole Solar System was populated by humanoid beings including over 400 million supposedly residing on the Moon.  Even men as sophisticated as Ralph Waldo Emerson fell under the spell of Dick’s claims.

It was, after all, the dawn of the era of great hoaxes.  Phineas T. Barnum was just getting his career off the ground exhibiting an elderly Black woman as allegedly George Washington’s nurse.

                                                

                                                            The real astronomer was not amused.

Several weeks after the publication of the series, denials by Herschel were printed in other newspapers exposing the hoax.  But The Sun never retracted the story or issued an apology for running it.

The author of the series has never been positively identified, however most scholars of the period are fairly certain it was Cambridge educated Sun reporter Richard A. Locke.   He never admitted to being responsible.  Some other names have been floated as possible accomplices, or perhaps sources for Locke, but these have also turned out to be dead ends. 

Preacher, Prophet, Exile, Sainthood of Theodore Parker

                             

                                                   Rev. Theodore Parker in 1855.

Theodore Parker was born on August 24, 1810 in Lexington, Massachusetts.  His large family had deep roots in New England.  His grandfather was the Captain Parker who commanded the militia on Lexington Green in the opening skirmish of the American Revolution.

He was scholarly and devout but lost both parents and his seven of his nine siblings by the time he was 27, mostly to that scourge of the era, consumption (tuberculosis.)  The losses confirmed his rejection of Calvinist orthodoxy.

As a youth he was unable to afford tuition at Harvard, so he read the entire curriculum on his own.  He dallied as a school master and toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer before he settled on becoming a minister.  After mastering Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, theology, church history, and biblical studies on his own, Harvard Divinity School admitted him even without an undergraduate degree in 1834.

After graduating, Parker married and was ordained by the small West Roxbury congregation.  The light duty of a small congregation allowed Parker time to study more on his own.  With his introduction to German historical Biblical criticism, his views began to evolve away from the generally accepted Unitarian theology.

                                    Young Parker while he still had hair.

First, he began to question the historical validity of miracles in the Old Testament.  That lead to questions about Christ’s miracles and a new view that Jesus was simply more divinely inspired than most men—although divine inspiration was open to all—and that his teachings were great not because they came from God, but because their authority was based on truth.  By the end of the decade his written speculations along these lines were beginning to cause ripples.

Parker naturally fell in with the emerging Transcendentalists.  He attended early meetings of the Club and was soon contributing to their seminal journal The Dial.  Like others in the group, he was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  After the scandal of Emerson’s Divinity School Address, which he heard in person, he was drawn into the controversy that arose after Unitarian traditionalist Andrews Norton launched his furious assault on Emerson’s infidelity.  He soon published his own defense of Transcendental liberalism in the guise of commentary by a “member in the pews”.  The pamphlet, The Previous Question, cemented Parkers reputation as a leading voice of a new movement.

                           

                                         Parker was drawn into the orbit of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists.

On May 19, 1841 Parker summed up his evolving views in an ordination sermon for Charles C. Shackford at the Hawes Place Church in South Boston, much as a generation earlier William Ellery Channing had launched Unitarianism as a distinct religious movement in the United States at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore. A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity is now considered a foundational document of the evolving Unitarian faith.  But at the time it caused a scandal. 

Most Boston area preachers believed Parker had abandoned Christianity altogether. He became the target an informal boycott of pulpit exchanges. While his Roxbury parish loyally stood by him, Parker went on the offensive with well attended lectures in Boson, which he collected and published as A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion in the spring of 1842. Soon the informal boycott of pulpit exchanges led to an 1843 attempt to force Parker to resign from the Boston Association of Congregational Ministers, whose members were all Unitarians.   He steadfastly refused to do so and accused his colleagues of trying to impose a creed.

Later in 1843 Parker and his wife briefly escaped the growing controversy by making a European tour, during which time he began to mull social inequality and the nature of Democracy.  When he returned, he began to infuse his sermons with topics of social reform as well as theological radicalism.  Whether the topic was temperance, the rights of workers, or the evils of slavery this new rabble rousing only increased hostility against him by his peers.

In 1844 John Sargeant, employed by the Beneficial Fraternity to preach at a missionary chapel for immigrants, exchanged pulpits with Parker and was reprimanded by the Ben Frat board.  He resigned in protest.  Less than a month later, in December, it was Parkers turn by rotation among all of the members to preach the weekly Thursday Lecture sponsored by the Ministerial association at First Church.  Parker delivered a blunt rebuke of Unitarian orthodoxy, The Relation of Jesus to His Age and the Ages.  The association transferred management of the lecture series to First Church so that Parker would never again be called to speak by rotation.

In January of 1845 James Freeman Clarke, one of the most esteemed Boston ministers and a theological opponent of Parker, decided that his fellows had gone too far in trying to impose conformity and invited Parker to exchange.  Fourteen of the leading families of The Church of the Redeemer resigned in protest, putting Clarke’s ministry in peril.  It would be the last time any Boston minister extended an invitation to exchange.

But Parker’s radicalism did have supporters in the pews in Boston.  They rented the Melodeon Theater to house weekly worship services in 1845.  The rest of the year he preached in the Theater on Sunday morning and in Roxbury that afternoon.  By December the group decided to form an independent congregation and call Parker.

Theodore Parker filled the seats of the Boston Music Hall, second venue for his 28th Congregational Society.

On January 4, 1846, Theodore Parker was installed as the minister of the 28th Congregational Society of Boston, a congregation created for the sole purpose of providing a platform for the maverick, outcast Unitarian and fiery abolitionist in the heart of the Hub of the Universe.  The distinguished Unitarian ministers of Boston were outraged.  Probably even more so when they learned that he broke with precedent and preached his own instillation sermon, The True Idea of a Christian Church—which could only be interpreted as an in-your-face challenge to their moral authority.

Although the core group of three hundred or so supporters who underwrote the new congregation was largely Unitarians, the new congregation was not considered a Unitarian Church, but a Free Church open to all and unbound by any dogma.   Soon upward of 1000 people were regularly attending Parker’s Sunday sermons and Wednesday evening lectures on social, political, and scientific issues.  When that venue became too crowded, services were moved to the Boston Music Hall and attendance doubled. 

Parker could be considered the first pastor of a mega church.  And like the leaders of modern mega churches, he used every medium at his disposal to spread his radical gospel.  Although banned from the Unitarian press, he published articles regularly in both Boston and national periodicals and edited his own journal, the Massachusetts Quarterly Review.  His sermons were collected and published in popular collections and he regularly churned out books on theological, moral, and reform issues.  When he was not speaking from his own pulpit, he lectured widely.  By the 1850’s he was one of the most famous men in America, adored by his followers and cordially hated by his enemies.

Parker on the lecture stump in New York City.  He was one of the most in demand speakers in the U.S.

If the local Unitarian worthies thought that Parker was trouble before, his prominent new pulpit only provided him with opportunities to go even further, particularly on social justice issues.  Parker espoused a new American industrial democracy which he proclaimed was “of all the people, by all the people, for all the people”—a phrase latter borrowed by Abraham Lincoln who read several collections of Parker’s sermons.  To this end he advocated numerous social reforms including free public education, penal reform, and support for the emerging Women’s Rights movement.  But his greatest attention was turned to the mortal flaw that kept industrial democracy form truly flourishing—slavery.

He had already denounced the Mexican War as an attempt to expand slavery and led Boston opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  He was a minister at large to the Black community for the Abolitionists and as chair of their Vigilance Committee arranged for support and abetted the escape of fugitives.  He personally harbored at least two in his own home.  In 1855 he was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for conspiracy to violate the Fugitive Slave Act.  Although his popular support in Boston led to the eventual dismissal of the charges, he was branded an enemy of the South and worked with a pistol on his desk to defend himself from constant threats on his life.

Parker was one of the secret 16 abolitionists who funded John Brown in Kansas and one of the very few to publicly defend him after the Harper's Ferry Raid.

Parker was now in league with the fieriest of abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison.  With the outbreak of guerilla warfare between pro-slavery and Free Soil partisans in Kansas, Parker raised money to buy weapons for the Free State militias, including arming a firebrand named John Brown.  When Brown came to Boston to plead for support for a plan to foment a slave rebellion he was one of the secret committee that helped finance and arm Brown’s failed Harper’s Ferry Raid in October 1859.  Parker was one of the few to publicly support Brown, penning John Brown's Expedition Reviewed a public letter defending Brown’s actions and the right of slaves to kill their masters.

By that time Parker was exhausted.  His always fragile health had began to deteriorate two years earlier.  The strain of his tireless abolitionist efforts and a packed schedule of preaching and lecturing took a toll.  The tuberculosis that had killed so many in his family was wracking his body.  He had to give up preaching in January 1859. 

He and his wife sought relief with a cruise to the Caribbean during which time he wrote a long autobiographical letter and final confession of faith to his former congregation which was published as Theodore Parker’s Experience as a Minister.

The old establishment was not prepared to forgive or forget.  Knowing Parker was critically ill and likely dying, the 1859 annual meeting of the Harvard Divinity School Alumni Association rejected a motion to extend personal sympathy for his suffering.  

Parker and his wife continued on their journey to Europe.  On May 10, 1860 Parker died in Florence, Italy.  He was buried in the Strangers Cemetery, the final resting place of stranded, exiled, or expatriate Protestants.  The Boston Ministerial Association declined to send condolences to the widow.

As much as Parker was despised by the old guard, he was already lionized by a whole younger generation of ministers who would go on to lead Unitarianism in the later 19th Century.  His theology broadly trumped a more conventional Christianity and he was held to be the model of prophetic ministry.

A rare, late picture of a bearded Parker illustrates a profile in a popular magazine shortly before illness forced his retirement.

In the modern Unitarian Universalist Association, with its heavy emphasis on social justice, he has become an even more canonical figure. 

Earlier in the 21st Century, a minority movement emerged that wished to tone down “political” action and emphasize congregational autonomy and enriched spiritual content, criticized Parker for his disruptive, un-collegial behavior, his willingness to defy the law and endorse violence, and surprisingly for one of Unitarianism’s deepest theological pioneers, for a lack of spirituality. 

                            

                                        Parker's grave in the Stranger's Cemetery in Florence, Italy.

Those biting gnats did no serious damage to the reputation of the man who inspired Martin Luther King with his words, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Edgar Lee Masters was an Illinois Poet with a Restless Soul

                             

                                                   Edgar Lee Masters as a young man.

Edgar Lee Masters was the author of one of the greatest single volumes of American poetry ever—The Spoon River Anthology.  That book in which the denizens of a small 19th Century Illinois village graveyard tell their stories, is still a shock and an eye opener for anyone who bought into the Disney version of small town life as a kind of perfect idyll.

Masters was born on August 23, 1868 in Kansas where his father briefly established a law practice.  When that failed the family moved back to his grandparent's farm near Petersburg in Menard County, Illinois.  In 1880 the family moved again to nearby Lewistown where the boy attended high school and showed an interest in both writing and following his father’s shaky footsteps in the law.  He had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News—a Democratic challenger to the dominance and hegemony in the state of the Republican Chicago Tribune.

Masters' modest boyhood home in Petersburg has been preserved.

In the late 1880’s he attended Knox Academy, the prep school for Knox College but was forced to drop out when his family could no longer support him.  After that he read law at his father’s office.  His dad was the village Freethinker and thus something of an outcast.  The practice revolved around the margins of local life, petty civil cases for those who could not afford the lawyers who hobnobbed with the judges and bankers--criminal cases, divorces, anything that exposed the underside of the community.  It was an eye-opening experience.

After passing the Bar, young Masters hot footed it out of town to Chicago in 1893 where he hoped to advance both his legal and writing careers. He went into practice with Kickham Scanlan and began to publish poetry under the name Dexter Wallace.

In 1898 he married the daughter of a prominent lawyer and began a family that grew to three children including a daughter Marsha who grew up to be a poet and a son Hilary who became a novelist.  But the union grew stormy due to Master’s extramarital affairs.

                               

                                                Masters--the lawyer/poet on the cusp of fame.

In 1903 Masters went into partnership with Clarence Darrow, already noted as a top labor and defense attorney.  They were united in their Democratic politics, instinctive radicalism, Freethought, and admiration for the labor Democrat hero, Governor John Peter Altgeld.  As a junior partner in the firm, Masters handled mostly routine criminal and civil cases for the poor, often pro bono.

Despite an amicable beginning, the partnership foundered in 1908 and formally broke up in 1911 due to a business dispute with Darrow and a messy, scandalous marriage.    Despite the bitter personal falling out, he remained an admirer of Darrow.

Masters published two little noted volumes of poetry under pen names in 1898 and 1910.

During his hiatus from the active practice of law as his partnership with Darrow disintegrated, he began work on writing and polishing poems inspired by his hometown.  In 1914 he began to publish these in Reedy’s Mirror out of St. Louis under another nom de plume, Webster Ford.  A year later the poems were collected and issued as The Spoon River Anthology with the assistance and encouragement of Harriet Monroe of Poetry Magazine to instant critical and popular acclaim.

 

                                 

                                           The first edition of Spoon River Anthology. 

Suddenly the obscure lawyer was famous.  He gradually wound down the practice of law to concentrate on a literary career.  Although he was embittered in old age that none of his subsequent work got the attention of that classic, he produced prolifically and with great skill.  In all there were 19 more volumes of verse including a sequel, The New Spoon River, 12 plays, 6 novels, and 7 biographies.  Among the subjects of his biographies were fellow Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman to each of whom he owed a debt of gratitude.

His 1931 bio Lincoln the Man was a highly controversial self-proclaimed de-mythologizing of the Prairie President.  In part it was a direct refutation of fellow Illinois poet Carl Sandburg’s lyrical and lionizing biographies.  His jealousy of Sandburg was well known, but he seems to have been most influenced by loyalty to the Democratic Party of the 19th Century which was already vanishing outside the Deep South.  He pictured Lincoln as a Whig tool of the banks and railroads from the beginning in service to concentrated wealth against the common man.  He was pictured as tyrant who rushed the country into an unwanted war to the applause of Eastern elites.  The book was a popular success in the South, but it virtually destroyed his own reputation with the liberal literary establishment, many previously admiring critics turning against his whole body of work.

Masters's feud with rival poet Sandburg of the reputation of Abraham Lincoln attracted national attention.  Sandburg triumphed and Masters's reputation was sullied.

Masters quit the practice of law entirely by 1920 and moved to New York to concentrate on writing.  He finally divorced his first wife in 1923 years after abandoning the family.   In 1926 he married Ellen Coyne with whom he had another son, Hardin.

Although Masters won plaudits and honors including the Mark Twain Silver Medal in 1936, the Poetry Society of America medal in 1941, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1942, and the Shelly Memorial Award in 1944, he never matched the fame and glory of his contemporary Carl Sandberg and often felt snubbed by the Eastern and academic poetry elite.  He was not experimental enough to be ranked with the Imagists and modernists.  

Masters' grave marker at the Petersburg cemetery that inspired the Spoon River Anthology.

He died March 5, 1950, in a convalescent home near Philadelphia and was buried back home in Petersburg in the cemetery that inspired his greatest book.

Here are samples of Masters’ work.  First from The Spoon River Anthology:

Jim Brown was the trainer of a famous trotting horse, Dom Pedro.

Jim Brown

While I was handling Dom Pedro

I got at the thing that divides the race between men who are

For singing “Turkey in the straw” or “There is a fountain filled with blood”—

(Like Rile Potter used to sing it over at Concord);

For cards, or for Rev. Peet’s lecture on the holy land;

For skipping the light fantastic, or passing the plate;

For Pinafore, or a Sunday school cantata;

For men, or for money;

For the people or against them.

This was it:

Rev. Peet and the Social Purity Club,

Headed by Ben Pantier’s wife,

Went to the Village trustees,

And asked them to make me take Dom Pedro

From the barn of Wash McNeely, there at the edge of town,

To a barn outside of the corporation,

On the ground that it corrupted public morals.

Well, Ben Pantier and Fiddler Jones saved the day—

They thought it a slam on colts.

 

—Edgar Lee Masters 

Masters was not so down on Lincoln in those days as reflected in one of the most famous pieces from the collection.  Ann Rutledge’s grave, not far from the poet’s, is now marked with this poem.

 

Ann Rutledge

 

Out of me unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music;

“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

And the beneficient face of a nation

Shining with justice and truth.

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

 

—Edgar Lee Masters

 

And finally, from a later collection a glimpse of the restless soul, the Freethinker taunted by a spiritual yearning he barely understood.

Inexorable Deities 

 

Deities!

Inexorable revealers,

Give me strength to endure

The gifts of the Muses,

Daughters of Memory.

When the sky is blue as Minerva’s eyes

Let me stand unshaken;

When the sea sings to the rising sun

Let me be unafraid;

When the meadow lark falls like a meteor

Through the light of afternoon,

An unloosened fountain of rapture,

Keep my heart from spilling

Its vital power;

When at the dawn

The dim souls of crocuses hear the calls

Of waking birds,

Give me to live but master the loveliness.

Keep my eyes unharmed from splendors

Unveiled by you,

And my ears at peace

Filled no less with the music

Of Passion and Pain, growth and change.

But O ye sacred and terrible powers,

Reckless of my mortality,

Strengthen me to behold a face,

To know the spirit of a beloved one

Yet to endure, yet to dare!

 

—Edgar Lee Masters