Lust, Seduction, Incest, and Suicide in The First American Novel

The Power of Seduction: or, The Triumph of Nature, first edition with a sensational front piece. 

Note—It has been a tumultuous time here at this modest blog and in the country.  It may now be some relief for us to return to our more customary humdrum business such as looking in the nooks and crannies for interesting tidbits.  If you have been missing that, here it is.  But we will remain vigilant and ready to be of humble service to the Resistance as circumstances require.

When The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature was issued anonymously in Boston on January 21, 1789 the publisher, Isaiah Thomas & Company, promised that the book was, “Intended to represent the specious causes, and to Expose the fatal CONSEQUENCES, of SEDUCTION; To inspire the Female Mind With a Principle of Self Complacency, and to Promote the Economy of Human Life.”  And sure enough the book was salted with pious admonitions to virtue and all of its sinners met disastrous ends.

But perhaps the readers snatched up copies for another reason—the plot of what is considered the first American novel was “ripped from the headlines,” a Roman à clef on a still fresh and juicy scandal involving Perez Morton’s incestuous seduction of his sister-in-law Fanny Apthorp who became pregnant and committed suicide, while Morton escaped legal punishment. And, hey, who wouldn’t want to read about that?

 

Perez Morton, the real life weathy cad who ruined a woman, drove her to suicide, betrayed his wife, and walked away with no legal consequences. 

The author, William Hill Brown, happened to be Morton’s neighbor and knew all of the juicy details, of the case that was gossip fodder in Boston.  Brown was the son of a famous clock maker—the one who built the big clock for the steeple of the Old South Church.  He was born to the craftsman’s second marriage in 1765 and was always sickly.  He was encouraged to take up literature by his older step brother, the artist Mather Brown.  He would go on to have a romantic story, Harriot, or the Domestic Reconciliation published in the first issue of Massachusetts Magazine later in the year.  He would follow those up with a play based on the capture and execution of Major Andre in the Benedict Arnold West Point spy case, a series of verse fables, Penelope a comedy in West Indies style, essays, and a short second novel about incest and seduction, Ira and Isabella, all published posthumously.

Later in 1793 Brown went south to study law in a climate more suited to his health.   He died of consumption--tuberculosis--in Murfreesboro, North Carolina on September 2, 1793 at the age of 28.  His literary reputation did not long out live him.

Sarah Wentworth (Althorp) Morton, the agrieved wife and sister to the disgraced and doomed mistress. 

Of course not putting his name on that novel didn’t help.  Novels, which were coming into vogue in England, were considered trifles for bored housewives and probably dangerous to their morals.  The women of Boston were snatching up copies practically off the docks.  Preachers thundered condemnation of them as salacious, seductive, and sinful.  And of course most were, which was their appeal.

Gentlemen read lofty things—endless volumes of sermons from the leading divines, bare knuckle partisan newspapers, the classics in Greek and Latin, philosophy in French and German, and, of course, poetry both epic and lyrical.  They could not deign themselves to read such trash.  But if truth be told, late at night safely locked in their studies, I suspect many more than would admit it found themselves aroused and titillated by the popular tales of lust and just retribution.

It is natural then that throughout most of the 19th Century The Power of Sympathy was popularly supposed to be the work of a woman, as were so many of the English titles reaching America shores.  When Arthur Bayley, editor of The Bostonian, republished it in serial on its centennial, he attributed it to Sarah Wentworth Morton, a poetess and the wife of Perez Morton and sister of Frances Apthorp.

It did not take later scholars, however, too much digging to uncover the true author.

As for the novel as an art form, it took decades to shuck its reputation—and in the loftier precincts of the New England elite never quite did.  As many remember banning books in Boston—mostly novels—was still a big deal into the 1950’s. 

Slowly in the 19th Century British imports Austin, Dickens, Thackeray, et al raised the level of respectability among the middle classes—but still mostly women.  James Fennimore Cooper in America began popularizing more masculine novels as adventure stories, broadening the appeal.  Serious writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville began working in the form—Hawthorne bringing a new depth to the traditional tales of the wages of sin and Melville having a hard time making a living peddling adventure yarns with, you should pardon the expression, depth.

Harriette Beecher Stowe became the first American to have a run-away, must-read best seller with her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin that blended the novel’s traditional shocking themes with a searing abolitionist message.

It was not until the second half of the 19th Century that the novel really took off as a popular and literary art form in America and not until the early 20th Century that it finally blew poetry out of the water to become the per-eminent literary form.

The handsome Penguin Classics edition paired The Power of Sympathy with another early American novel and morality tail.  Despite the double dose of scandal and ruination almost nobody read the novel in any of several contemporary editions.

The book that started it all, The Power of Sympathy, being out of copyright and therefor cheap, can be found today, if you look very hard, in paperback editions, including a Penguin Classic edition.  I never found any one who read it.  And neither have I.   

 

Cross-Eyed Editor Gave Birth to Modern Newspapers and Sensation Mongering

James Gordon Bennett, the cross-eyed publisher in 1851.

James Gordon Bennett, Sr., born this day in 1795 in Newmill, Banffshire, Scotland, was so cross-eyed that one acquaintance said, “when he looked at me with one eye, he looked out at the City Hall with the other.”  Yet he saw far enough to revolutionize American journalism in several ways for good and ill.

Bennet was born into a prosperous Catholic family which was devout enough to give him a good education in hopes that he would enter the priesthood.   He entered a seminary in Aberdeen at age 15 and remained there for four years.  But the restless lad was not cut out for the restraints of the cloth.  He undertook a series of rambles about Scotland while reading voraciously just about anything he could lay his hands on living on a modest income from his undoubtedly disappointed family.

In 1819 at age 23 he and a friend sailed for North America pretty much on a lark.  After arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia he found work as a school master, the occupation of a gentleman at loose ends.  He frugally saved enough of his meager earnings to pay for passage to Portland, Maine and the allure of a new start in the raw but promising United States.   After another few months as teacher in a rustic village, Bennett made another jump to Boston, in 1820 the proud Hub of the Universe.

Bennett became something of an itinerant chasing opportunity where he could find it in New England he became a book seller’s clerk and a proofreader for some of the publishers who sold their wares in his shop.  Then it was on to South Carolina where the Charleston Courier hired him to translate Spanish news articles from journals arriving in the busy port from Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America—his first newspaper work.  By 1823 he was in New York City where he first sold news stories and commentary to various papers—today we would call him a freelancer—before landing a spot as assistant editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, one of the oldest newspapers in the city.

His bitterness over his own experiences at seminary and years spent in New England and the South where anti-Catholicism was rife turned him away from his family’s faith.

New York was the right city at the right time for an ambitious young man.  Thanks to a commodious harbor and the opening of the Erie Canal the city was eclipsing Boston as the commercial, if not the cultural capital of the country and was poised to surpass Philadelphia as the financial hub, especially after the Second Bank of the United States was stripped of its Charter by Andrew Jackson in 1836.

That was just a year after Bennett finally raised enough money to open his own newspaper in 1835.  The New York Herald first hit the streets in May of that year.  Intent from the beginning on the widest possible circulation, Bennet aimed his paper squarely at the city’s shopkeepers, clerks, and skilled workingmen instead of at the business and political elites.  Like his contemporary Phineas T.  Barnum he employed excitement and diversion and flattered the by confirming of their biases. 

On one hand that meant lurid coverage of crime, scandal, fires, and disasters and on the other hand expressing restrained support for the burgeoning anti-Catholic Know Nothings.  Bennett would later explain that it was “not to instruct but to startle and amuse.”

Largely due to the lurid coverage in the New York Herald the murder of prostitute Helen Jewett fascinated the public for decades.  This illustration from a post-Civil War book on the case depicts the alleged killer, Richard P. Robinson slinking away from the scene after bludgeoning the woman in the head with a hatched and setting her bed on fire with an oil lamp.

The fledgling paper got just what it was looking for with the sensational story of the grisly murder of a young prostitute called Helen Jewett who was found hacked in the head by an ax in her bed in an upscale brothel.  Bennett first initiated the practice of assigning reporters to regularly check in at police stations, courts, and firehouses—beat reporting—that broke the case on the front page of the Herald and continued breathless coverage through the investigation and the trial of 19-year-old Richard P. Robinson, a young man from a respectable and prosperous family who had been one of Jewett’s regular customers.

The lurid coverage broke old taboos in the press on sexual scandal which was either omitted from the news or only hinted at in language so oblique that it took a sophisticated reader to decode it.  Bennet was blunt about Jewett’s profession, place of employment, and Robinson’s patronage, although he came to depict Robinson as an innocent young man drawn to debauchery by a tainted woman.  In addition, Bennett’s article featuring the account of Rosina Townsend, Jewett’s madam who discovered body, which has been widely credited with being the first interview published in an American newspaper.  He claimed to have personally conducted the questioning.  Some historians believe it was creatively edited and some believe it was a hoax altogether.

While Bennett’s coverage defended Robinson, his competition at the New York Sun, a paper aimed at a more working class readership than the Herald played up the class resentment of the defendant as a wealthy kid who could buy his way out of killing a poor girl driven to degradation by cruel circumstances.  The two papers battled it out in what would become the first great urban circulation war.

In the end, Bennett won twice.  First, sales of the upstart Herald soared and the paper was soon the most widely read in the city.  Second, Robinson did beat the rap.  The judge disallowed critical testimony of most witnesses—other prostitutes—as inherently unreliable due to their loose morals.  It then took less than half an hour for the jury—all male and respectfully middle class—to acquit the young man.

Having found a formula for success, Bennett never looked back.  From waterfront murders to scandals among the elite, to riots, fires, and shipwrecks his faithful readers could count on something exciting every day.  In 1839 he upped the ante by becoming the first newspaper to publish illustrations on its front page—hastily produced wood cuts.

Bennett was the first to employ boys to hawk his papers on the streets revolutionizing circulation in New York and spreading to other cities across the country.  Jame Cafferty painted this picture of a "news butcher" selling the Herald in 1851.

He also built circulation by recruiting armies of street venders—news boys—to hawk the paper on street corners across the rapidly growing city.  Other papers quickly followed suite creating a fixture of city life that endured for a century.

On the business end, Bennett was equally innovative and aggressive.  Other publishers seemed to spend half their time chasing down and dunning in arrears advertisers and subscribers.  Bennet firmly demanded cash in advance from both.

By 1840 Bennett was a wealthy and successful man. He finally had time, at age 59 to take a wife, Henrietta Agnes Crean.  Together they would have three children including the apple of his eye and heir, James Gordon Bennett, Jr.

Ephemeral copies of the Herald from its early years are nearly impossible to find.  This tattered 1842 edition is one of the few that have survived.  Any copies that the paper may have kept in its own morgue were lost in a disastrous fire during which James Gordon Bennett, Jr. drunkenly tried to assume command of responding fire companies and had to be hosed away by the firemen to keep him out of the way.

Unlike most other New York papers, the Herald was not affiliated with either the Whigs or Democrats or any faction of either.  As noted Bennett was sympathetic to the Know Nothings and supported some of their local candidates but did not embrace the most extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric, perhaps because he was an immigrant himself.  He extended his coverage to national politics and personally conducted the first interview of a sitting president—Democrat Martin Van Buren.  The former New York State boss of the Albany Regency, one of the first political machines, Van Buren was shrewd enough to exploit the platform provided by New York City’s most influential paper.

Despite the journalistic coup the instinctively conservative Bennett made Whig William Henry Harrison his first national endorsement in 1840.  Thereafter he would swing between parties supporting James K. Polk in 1844, Zachary Taylor in1848, and Franklin Pierce in 1852, all winners.  He was particularly enthusiastic about Pierce, a Northern Democrat with Southern principles.  But Pierce descended into an alcoholic depressive stupor after he watched his beloved son being killed in a railroad accident on the way to Washington and then apparently reneged on an implied promise to appoint Bennett as American minister plenipotentiary to France.  He turned relentlessly against the hapless Pierce attacking him almost daily on the Herald front page and in scathing editorials.

In 1856 Bennett actually flirted with supporting John C. Frémont, the first Republican candidate probably because the dashing famed explorer, Mexican War hero, and self-proclaimed liberator of California made good copy.  But in the end he passed over New York State’s former President Millard Fillmore running on the American Party (Know Nothing) ticket and backed James Buchannan, Pierce’s Secretary of State and another Northern Democrat with Southern sympathies.

In this mocking cartoon from a rival publication, Bennett is shown as a Scotsman so stereotypically thrifty that he dresses in rags as he rebuff attempts to clothe him in the leather kepi and cloak of the pro-Lincoln Wide Awakes in 1860.

Thereafter Bennett became reliably Democrat and an increasingly powerful influence on the party.  In 1860 with the sand of the Union shifting under his feet he first endorsed Southern Democrat and incumbent Vice President John C. Breckinridge, then shifted to Senator John Bell of Tennessee, a Democrat running as a Constitutional Unionist.  He thus bypassed Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and Republican Abraham Lincoln.

In 1861 the Herald reported a circulation 84,000 copies and called itself “the most largely circulated journal in the world.”  That also made it perhaps the most influential U.S. newspaper despite competition from Horace Greely’s Republican leaning New York Tribune.

Despite Bennett's stinging criticism of his administration, Abraham Lincoln was a devoted daily reader of the Herald for its accurate and detailed reports of battles in all theaters of the war.

When war broke out, Bennett positioned himself as a loyal war Democrat and a harsh critic of Lincoln’s conduct of the war and later the Emancipation Proclamation, 14th Amendment, and his refusal to entertain Confederate peace feelers.   Despite regular and often scurrilous attacks in its pages, Lincoln was one of the paper’s most avid readers.  He had fresh copies rushed to the White House as soon as they arrived by train from New York.  He admired the paper’s coverage of the war.  Bennett had dispatched dozens of correspondents to accompany Union troops in all theaters of the war resulting in detailed accounts of major battles.  Lincoln often found them more reliable than the reports of his generals who tended to minimize their mistakes and exaggerate their accomplishments.

As the wartime election of 1864 drew closer Bennett was a major force in promoting former Union General in Chief George C. McClellan for the Democratic nomination.  McClellan, who Lincoln had dismissed for his timid reluctance to fully commit his Army of the Potomac against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, ran on a platform of offering generous terms to the Rebel states.  But as the election neared Lincoln, who was widely expected to face defeat, gained strength as the tide of war finally seemed to shift against the South.  Perhaps because his son was in the Navy commanding his own yacht in action off of Florida, Bennett ultimately decided to make no endorsement in the Herald in that election, although a discerning reader could not fail to notice a bias for McClellan.

After Lincoln was assassinated in April of 1865 and the war drew to a close, Bennett and the Herald pivoted shamelessly and became leaders in turning President into a martyr.  It was not just chasing popular opinion, although that was part of it.  Bennett turned to ardent support of Lincoln’s second Vice President, Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, former unseceded U.S. Senator, Union General, and loyal wartime Governor of Tennessee.  He supported Johnson’s policy of a generous and gentle reconstruction of the Southern states as a realization of Lincoln’s own postwar plans and as an alternative to the punitive policies of the Radical Republicans in Congress.  The paper stood by Johnson through his impeachment ordeal.

James Gordon Bennet, Jr. who took over his father's newspaper when he was 25 years old was to say the least a colorful character.

In 1866 Bennett retired at age 75 and turned the reins of the Herald over to his 25-year-old son, James Gordon Bennett, Jr.  The younger man had been raised mostly in France in the lap of luxury.  He was noted as a yachtsman, a dashing spendthrift, womanizer, debauched alcoholic.  But he continued to build circulation with a steady diet of sensationalism, not flinching at publishing accounts of his own scandals like drunkenly driving his carriage at high speed through the streets of Manhattan naked on several occasions, brawls over women, and being horse whipped by the brothers of his lovely fiancé socialite Caroline May when he drunkenly intruded into a May family dinner and proceeded to urinate on the furniture and into the fireplace.

The younger Bennett had a knack for circulation building gimmicks, most famously dispatching reporter Henry Morton Stanley to Africa to find the un-lost missionary Dr. David Livingstone in 1869.  If the news was unsatisfactorily dull, he was not averse to making it up like a famous 1871 hoax about wild animals escaping from the Brooklyn Zoo and terrorizing that city.  Latter, in 1881 he backed George W. De Long’s voyage to the North Pole on the USS Jeannette via the Bering Strait. The ill-fated expedition led to the deaths from starvation of DeLong and 19 of his crew, a tragedy that only increased the paper’s circulation.

Bennett Jr sent reporter Henry Morton Stanley to Africa to search for the supposedly lost English missionary and physician Dr. David Livingston.  Dispatches from Stanley were breathlessly awaited by readers.  This is an illustration from the best selling book that Stanley wrote based on his newspaper filings.

The senior Bennett died in Manhattan on June 1, 1872 at age 76 just five months before his rival Horace Greeley also succumbed to illness in November.  He left his son a huge fortune.

After the scandal over his boorish behavior at his fiancé’s house, Bennett Jr., who preferred to be called simply Gordon, relocated to Paris where he lived most of the rest of his life when he was not aboard one of his increasingly fantastic yachts or other mansions in London, Newport Rhode Island, and elsewhere.  He attempted to micromanage the Herald by telegraph but found himself increasingly out of touch with New York. 

Meanwhile new competitors were arising to compete in sensationalism including Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and then William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.  After peaking in circulation in the mid 1880’s the paper began a long, slow decline. 

Meanwhile in Paris Bennett launched English language Paris Herald and then a London edition.  Both papers fielded numerous codependents throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world and fed international news to the parent paper in New York.  In time the Paris Herald became a respected paper and even a rival of the Times of London as an international voice.

Bennet Jr. died on May 14, 1918, in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Alpes-Maritimes, France. 

In 1924 the New York Herald was acquired by its smaller rival the New York Tribune, to form the New York Herald Tribune.  The Paris edition became the International Herald Tribune.  In its new guise the New York paper shed its sensationalist image and positioned itself to compete with the New York Time as a sober and respectable mainstream newspaper. 

Despite its reputation and innovative journalism, the New York paper lagged behind the Times and was mortally wounded by a disastrous 114-day newspaper strike and ushered in four years of strife with labor unions, particularly the International Typographical Union. Faced with mounting losses then owner John Hay Whitney shut the paper down on August 15, 1966.

The New York Times and Washington Post jointly acquired the Paris edition which is now published as the New York Times International Edition.

The Bell Ringers, an elaborate animated bronze clock that once adorned the 1894 Herald Building now sits in Herald Square as a monument to  James Gordon Bennett Sr. and Jr.  It also plays a snatch of George M. Cohan's Give My Regards to Broadway, the line that goes, "remember me to Herald Square."

James Gordon Bennett and his son are both commemorated in a monument on Herald Square in New York—an animated bronze clock featuring the Roman goddess of wisdom Minerva and two muscular hammer wielding bell ringers by sculptor Jean Antonin Carles.  It first adorned the Herald Building that once stood directly to the north of the square on West 35th Street in 1894.

 

The Cup Cake Downfall of Dr. Koch, the Consumption Bug, and Popular Culture

                        Dr. Robert Koch at work in his laboratory.

Consumption, as it was then widely known, was a pervasive and enduring near world-wide epidemic that had no identifiable beginning or foreseeable end.  It brought slow, sure death to millions.  Most pervasive among the urban poor crowded together in fetid slums and the lowest levels of the rural peasantry whose large, multi-generational families often lived together in crowded hovels.

But consumption was no respecter of class privilege.  Those who read biographies of notables from the 17th to early 20th Centuries as well as literature from the same period are struck by the frequent references to the White Plague and its devastating effects.  Take, for instance, just the highly educated and largely affluent literary elite of Boston and the New England Renaissance.  Ralph Waldo Emerson saw a beloved brother, his child bride Ellen Louisa, and other friends and relatives succumb to the disease.  Theodore Parker was just one of several other leading figures of the Transcendentalist movement who died of it.  It was suspected to run in families—we would call it hereditary today—largely because devoted family members would tenderly nurse stricken kin giving them the long, close exposure we now know is necessary to transmit the disease.

In the 1938 weeper Three Comrades Margaret Sullivan dies beautifully, with self-sacrificing heroism of consumption in a mountain sanitarium leaving behind her grieving husband Robert Taylor, and his surviving World War I comrade Franchot Tone who also worshiped her.  Tragic death by consumption was a frequent theme of novels, plays, and film for generations.

The very memory of the disease haunted people even after it was on its way to being controlled.  Every movie goer knew that a cough in the first reel was certain foreshadowing of a tragic death bed scene in the last.

Consumption was commonly assumed to rise spontaneously, be caused by miasmas or foul air—and thus to be treatable by exposure to clean, fresh air in sanitariums away from the city—or, as noted, be hereditary.

On March 24, 1884 Dr. Robert Heinrich Herman Koch, Germany’s most distinguished physician and the Father of Microbiology published a paper sweeping away all of those suppositions and rendering them mere superstitions and as outdated in medicine as bleeding.  Consumption, or as he called it tuberculosis, was caused by a bacterium which he had isolated and named Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Dr. Koch, of course, could not offer a cure for the dread disease, but by proving that it was a communicable infectious disease he laid the groundwork for eventual effective public health preventative measures and eventually treatment.  Infection rates began to decline in Europe and North America after World War I.  But it wasn’t until the development of the antibiotic streptomycin in 1948 that an effective treatment of the active illness was achieved.  That was followed by other effective antibiotics.

The development of a Tubercular skin test led to the discovery that many more people carry the infection in a latent, but communicable form.  Only 10-15% of those with latent infection get the active disease, generally when the immune system has been weakened by other illness, injury, and infection, or due to chronic malnutrition. 

By the turn of the 21st Century rates of active tuberculosis infections in the advanced industrialized nations had plummeted to near zero.  Most new reported cases involved immigrants and visitors.  Even high rates of infection in the Third World were coming down, albeit slowly.  Then in 2007 international rates began a sharp increase, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia.   Increases are blamed on the rapid development of anti-biotic resistant strains, tuberculosis as a secondary infection in those with HIV/AIDS, over whelmed and underfunded public health services in desperately poor and often politically unstable countries.  Drug resistance has even caused rates to begin to creep up in Europe and the U.S.

Internationally there were in 2012 8.6 million active chronic cases were, 8.8 million new cases diagnosed, and 1.20–1.45 million deaths, most of these occurring in developing countries.  Of these about 350 thousand occurred in those also infected with HIV.  That means that tuberculosis today is far more deadly than the widely reported panic infections of recent years until the Coronaviris struck down 2.7 million over the last 18 months.

Deadly Tuberculosis bacteria first isolated and identified by Dr, Kosh using the techniques and protocols that he invented and which are still the standard for microbiological research.

But back to Dr. Koch.  His breakthrough discovery, for which he was honored with the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1905, was the result of years of work in microbiology and the development of his famous Four Postulates—four conditions, all of which must be met, that prove any disease is directly caused by an identifiable microbe.

Robert Koch was born in Clausthal, Hanover, Germany to a middle class family on December 11, 1843.  A very bright child, he reportedly taught himself to read from his parent’s books and magazines before he entered school in 1848.  At gymnasium—the equivalent of high school but with higher academic standards than in America—he excelled in math and science.  Koch entered the University of Göttingen at age 19 where he studied natural science for two years before switching to medicine.

Even as an undergraduate Koch’s proclivity for research and laboratory work drew notice.  He was asked to assist Jacob Henle, a noted anatomist who had published a pioneering theory of contagion in 1840, to participate in his research project on uterine nerve structure.  The next year he was conducting independent research into succinic acid secretion at the Physiological Institute culminating in his lauded dissertation. Koch graduated medical school in January 1866 with the highest honors and a bright future ahead of him.

In the summer of 1867 Koch married Emma Adolfine Josephine Fraatz and they had a daughter, Gertrude, the following year.  In 1870 he was called away from his established medical practice and family to serve as a surgeon in the Franco-Prussian War.

Dr. Koch examining a sheep for anthrax.

After the war Koch turned his attention to research in various plagues which he was convinced were communicable diseases.  His first break through came with anthrax, the deadly disease that annually did major economic damage by infecting herds of cattle and other domestic ruminants.  He identified the cause, the bacteria Bacillus anthracis.  He also discovered that spores of the bacteria could remain dormant for long periods of time and become activated under optimal circumstances.  Koch used microscopy, including dyeing his samples for examination on a slide, and identifying agar as an ideal culture medium in which to grow specimens for examination.  These became the standard techniques for microbiological research to follow.

Even more important was his development of the Four Postulates based on his experience with anthrax.  The postulates are

1)      The organism must always be present, in every case of the disease.

2)      The organism must be isolated from a host containing the disease and grown in a pure culture.

3)      Samples of the organism taken from pure culture must cause the same disease when inoculated into a healthy, susceptible animal in the laboratory.

4)      The organism must be isolated from the inoculated animal and must be identified as the same original organism first isolated from the originally diseased host.

Even using more advanced equipment and techniques than Koch had available, modern epidemiologists employ these same criteria and methods.

Dr. Koch about the time he gained fame for his breakthrough identification of the anthrax pathogen, 

The isolation of Bacillus anthracis was the first time in history a specific microbe had been identified as the cause of a disease and thus gave strong support to the still controversial germ theory and was a nail in the coffin of outdated ideas like spontaneous generation.

Koch was widely acclaimed for his discovery and it led to his appointment as a professor of medicine and an administrator at Berlin University.

He next turned his attention to a disease that regularly erupted, especially in semi-tropical and tropical regions in devastating epidemics—Cholera.  Koch collected samples and did field research during epidemics in Egypt and India.  He isolated and identified Vibrio cholera.  It turned out that in 1854 Italian anatomist Fillipo Pacini had isolated the same bug but had not widely published his findings nor definitively identified it as the cause of Cholera.

On the strength of these achievements Koch was recruited as an advisor to the Imperial Department of Health in the newly consolidated German Empire.  It was during this time that he performed his research on tuberculosis and published his result in 1882.  It was the apex of a brilliant career.  Not only would he be awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery but also the Prussian Order of Merit in 1906.  In 1908 with support of a gift of 500,000 gold Marks from American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie the Robert Koch Medal and Award was established to be awarded annually to the scientist who does the most to advance research and discovery in microbiology.  The criteria of the judges is said to be, “What would Robert Koch be working on if he was alive today?”

Dr. Koch created a scandal when he divorced his wife of 25 years to marry his much younger mistress, actress Emma Hedwig Freiberg.

In 1893 he ended his 25 year marriage to Emma after becoming involved with a beautiful and much younger actress, Hedwig Freiberg who he had been seeing as early as 1889.  Indeed his scandalous involvement with her may have led to a not entirely voluntary retirement from Berlin University in 1890.  Koch married Hedwig after his divorce.

Had it not been for the scandal Koch might have been as celebrated in America as his contemporary, the Frenchman Louis Pasteur. Certainly their accomplishments and advancement of modern medicine were at least comparable.  But the deep Puritanical strain of Americans would never allow that level of adoration for an open and unapologetic adulterer.

In the 1930 film classic The Blue Angel, nightclub singer Lola Lola--Marlena Dietrich--was the cause of the downfall and ruin of a distinguished professor--Emile Jannings--said to be modeled on Dr, Koch.

Their story is said to have inspired the 1930 German film Der blaue Engel—shot simultaneously in an English version, The Blue Angel—and released by Paramount in the U.S.  The movie featured the fall of a distinguished professor played by Emile Jannings when he becomes infatuated by night club singer Marlene Dietrich in the memorable role that made her an international star.  The movie was based on Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat published in 1905 when Koch’s scandal was still in people’s minds. 

Ironically Jannings would go on to portray Koch is a German 1939 bio-pic.  The Nazi-era film was a propaganda piece celebrating the achievements of good Aryan science.

Luckily Koch’s fall was not as complete or lethal as the professor in the book and movie.  He accepted his major awards with Hedwig at his side.  She remained there until he died on May 22, 1910 as the health spa of Baden-Baden of a heart attack at 66 years of age.  He had been in declining health for years.

Special Guest Blog—The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astor

Note—You can count on your fingers all of the time Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout has hosted a guest blogger over the years. But when my friend, Woodstock writer and researcher Kathleen Spaltro published her new biography of screen legend and writer Mary Astor, I had to ask her for a contribution.  Astor was one of the most interesting actresses of Hollywood’s Golden age with a career that spanned being the 17 year old love interest of John Barrymore on and off screen, through the women’s pictures and film noirs of the 30’s and 40’s, to memorable mother roles in films like Meet Me In Saint Louis  and Little Women.  But she was also a complicated woman with a tempestuous path who considered herself first and foremost a writer.  Let Kathleen tell you about it.

Mary Astor was an astonishingly beautiful teenager when she was cast opposite the handsome but much older John Barrymore in 1924's Beau Brummel.  She became his off screen lover and secret fiancé. 

Many lies have been told about Mary Astor. She never abandoned her parents to poverty. Her face was their fortune rather than her own. Nor did she rate on a private scorecard the sexual prowess of Hollywood leading men.

But two more dangerous and persistent lies have distorted the understanding of her life. One lie defines Astor as the survivor of sex scandals and suicide attempts who ended up living on charity in a retirement home for film folk. There is much more to her story than that miserable scenario. In fact, with grit and determination, she rebounded from middle-aged decline to invest her energies in a new career as an excellent memoirist and novelist.

The other most important lie—indeed, the great lie—robbed her of her core identity as Lucile Langhanke and imposed on her a movie stardom that she never wanted. This book tells how “Mary Astor” recovered who she really was and really wanted to be.

“Falsehood flies,” Jonathan Swift noted, “and the Truth comes limping after it.” However halting its pace, the truth about this gifted and highly intelligent person is much more interesting than any of the lies.

In her most iconic role Astor played the conniving temptress Ruth Wonderly/Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon opposite Humphry Bogart.

The details of her life story substantiate how Lucile Langhanke accepted and survived her forced rebirth as “Mary Astor” but then rejected this imposed identity and resurrected her former self as “Rusty.” Even though silenced and driven underground, her true self remained intact. She knew all along that she was “Lucile/Rusty,” not “Mary,” and she was never confused about that. This sharpness of perception reveals her high intelligence but also a hidden core of strength.

She discovered and drew upon that strength in later life when she reclaimed her identity as “Rusty.” Earlier, her many self-destructive behaviors, although unhealthy and unwise, displayed the will to resist the imposition of a false and unwanted self. This resistance was in itself healthy and strong although manifested by weak and unhealthy choices.

Her upbringing, as well as her becoming, at others’ insistence, a commodity, created what she bitterly called “the product called Mary Astor.” The betrayal of her “true self” is at the core of both her personal troubles and her ambivalent relationship with stardom. The imposition upon her of her identity and her acting vocation was her tragedy. For others, like Cary Grant, creating a “false self” was a deliberate and welcome escape from a troubled past. The identity “Mary Astor” instead trapped her in a gilded cage of unhappiness and self-loathing. Some of her self-destructiveness came out of having to disavow who she really was to placate others. Eventually, she rescued herself from this predicament and became the person whom others needed to placate.

A commonly believed but false public image remembers Mary Astor mostly as the sexually voracious actress at the center of a notorious sex scandal.  However, diary entries forged by an enemy and released to the press were the actual source of this persistent mischaracterization. My biography sets the episode in its place, recounts the story accurately and thoroughly, but seeks to leave it in its place—justly, as a non-defining episode in Astor’s life.  Instead of fulfilling salacious and deeply sexist expectations, I deliberately change the narrative. Instead of yet again focusing on a libel, I present Astor as a highly intelligent, creative, and gifted person who overcame longstanding abuse and exploitation and turned away from self-destruction.   Grasping a new self-concept in later life, she then pursued a career that reflected her true self.  This biography thus undermines readers’ probable expectations. 

Astor's frank memoir My Story published in 1959 was just the beginning of her career as a writer which included a second memoir focused on her film career and several well-regarded novels.

Out of respect for Mary Astor’s reclamation of her true self and of her desired vocation as a writer, I discuss her movie stardom and film career in the larger context of her entire life.  A writer by both nature and fate who had worked as an actress, rather than an actress whose late-life hobby was writing, Astor left her papers to an university archive but preserved in that archive nothing of her film career that did not relate to her primary interest, writing memoirs and novels.  Hence, while I depict her acting career in films, radio, television, and the theatre in great detail, I highlight only her best movie roles before I describe her achievements as an author as well.

Writing to her agent about her first memoir, Astor shared her hope that My Story would prove to be “an honest document of a woman who happened to be an actress.” This account in full of Astor’s life tries to portray a woman who happened to be an actress.

Adapted from the Author’s Foreword to The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astor by Kathleen Spaltro © Copyright 2021.  All Rights Reserved. 

The book is available on Amazon.com in Kindle, hardback, and paperback editions.  It will come out as an audiobook as well.  McHenry County readers can pick a copy up at Between the Lynes, the great independent bookstore on Woodstock Square.