DOFFING THE WIG
I’m sure you’ve all seen, at one time or another, if only on television, that very common and ever-popular form of stand-up comedy and night club entertainment, the female impersonator. The performer comes out in drag and tells some jokes and sings a couple of songs, all in the dress, character, mannerisms and voice of a woman. Then, as he exits, he “doffs the wig”, to use the theatrical term, to reveal himself as a man and show the audience that what they had just seen and listened to was an impersonation. The applause that follows is more for the quality of the impersonation than for the talent displayed in the comedy routine or the singing, and the applause is in direct proportion to the degree to which the audience was fooled. Fooling the audience, showing up its credulity, is the real point of the act.
Our own Bill Chenoweth, as many of you here tonight may know, developed an act that he performed numerous times in front of some very distinguished audiences during the 50’s and 60’s, the height of the Cold War. He would pose as a visiting Russian dignitary, sometimes a professor, sometimes a journalist, sometimes something else, but always seated, as befits a visiting VIP, on the dais. He would speak in a very stiff, heavily accented English, interspersed with Russian, or what sounded like Russian, words and phrases, and never once, until the dinner, or luncheon or whatever it was, came to an end, and Bill’s true identity was revealed, did an audience tumble to the fact that he was a fake. On the contrary, during his “address”, people would stand up and try to shout him down, calling him a “dirty communist” and similar epithets. Many walked out, to show their disdain. Of course, at the end of the affair, after Bill’s real identity was revealed by the M.C., when the M.C. doffed Bill’s wig, so to speak, all was forgiven, and the audience applauded the act. Bill’s act became sufficiently famous that Life magazine carried a piece on it, and on one occasion the FBI even showed up and insisted on interrogating Bill before he took his place on the dais
Both of these performances are classic examples of hoax, and specifically the kind of hoax that is known as satiric hoax. Like other forms of satire such as parody and burlesque, a satiric hoax is intended to hold human folly, vice or pretension up to ridicule, to expose, and prick, vanity, pretension, or just plain stupidity. But unlike parody and burlesque, which target a single individual, the target of a hoax can be either a single individual, or, as in the case of the two examples I talked about, a whole audience. And while parody and burlesque make fun of the victim by ridiculing the things he has said or written, a hoax plays directly on the target’s vanity or gullibility, by creating some fiction, or imitating some real original, and passing it off as real. Deception, in other words, is at the heart of hoax. Because of this, hoax might be called “reality satire”. The target is satirized when he falls for the deceit, and exposes his own naiveté or gullibility. This is why the doffing of the wig, the tip-off that what was just seen or experienced wasn’t real, is crucial to a successful hoax: without it, the hoaxer would be denied the satisfaction of his effort, and the hoaxee or hoaxees would be left in doubt as to what they had just experienced, without the pleasure of either a good performance or a good fooling
Satiric hoaxes are intended to be good-hearted or mischievous. The kind of hoax I’ve just described is good fun for the perpetrator or perpetrators, and, as long as there are no real-world consequences, for the hoaxee or hoaxees as well. People may squirm if their amour propre is pricked too deeply, but they will at least pretend to enjoy the experience. But not all hoaxes are satirical. Hoax has a long history, and its historical roots are more malicious and duplicitous that mischievous. The word “hoax” derives from, and is probably a corruption of, “hocus”, an old English verb originally meaning to deceive or mislead someone for a criminal or other sinister purpose. Most commonly, hocus referred to the practice of stupefying a mark with alcohol or drugs in order to rob him. It was only in the 1800’s that the word began to be used in the more general, and more benign, sense of “to play a trick upon, to take in”. Dickens uses the word “hocus”, and uses it in its old-fashioned sense, in The Pickwick Papers, so the corruption of the form of the word, together with its more benign meaning, must have come into general use after 1836. The stage magician’s “hocus-pocus” derives from this later usage, as does, I suspect, the word “hokum”, the polite synonym for “bullshit”, though the OED, I have to say, doesn’t support me on this.
But hoax has never entirely lost its sinister connotations. Hoaxes more malicious than good-hearted, hoaxes with the out-and-out intention to do someone dirt, are, unfortunately, alive and well today. The mildest form of such a hoax is the practical joke. Practical jokes are generally cruel to one degree or another, but so long as no physical harm was done to the victim, and so long as he wasn’t too cruelly humiliated, this kind of hoax is generally excused as a prank. And certain other hoaxes, though far from good-hearted, can be excused because of their laudable purpose, as, for example, a sting operation conducted by a law enforcement agency for the purpose of catching a criminal, or a ruse de guerre to deceive an enemy in wartime. But non-satirical hoaxes are commonly the basis of out-and-out frauds, as con games and scams, and there’s no excusing these kinds of hoaxes—they’re just plain thievery.
Most malicious hoaxes, like the satiric hoaxes, are fairly quickly exposed. The wig is almost always doffed before very long. Perpetrators of a practical joke don’t usually want to leave their victim in any doubt as to what has happened to him. The police always announce to the press with great pride the successful results of a sting operation. The victims of con games and frauds are quick to come to the authorities with their complaint. And some hoaxes simply collapse because of their ineptness: I’m sure some of you will remember Clifford Irving’s failed attempt to sell a spurious biography of Howard Hughes a few years ago.
But what happens when the wig, for one reason or another, is never doffed, or is doffed too late, or with too little fanfare, to be noticed? An unexposed hoax is like the lobster traps of New England that have lost their buoy, or “pot”. Such lost traps are called “ghost traps”; they remain on the bottom, fishing on unattended for uncounted years. In the same manner, an unexposed hoax continues to fool the gullible for many years.
The most famous twentieth-century example of a “ghost hoax” is probably Piltdown Man. In 1912, two humanoid partial skulls and a jawbone were discovered near the village of Piltdown, in Sussex, England. They were declared by their discoverer, an amateur archeologist named Charles Dawson, to be the bones of a hitherto unknown species of prehistoric man, perhaps even the “missing link” that was so widely sought at the time. Experts at the British Museum, who bestowed the scientific name of Eoanthropus Dawsoni, or Dawson’s Dawn Man, on the bones, confirmed his attribution. More popularly, they became known as “Piltdown Man”. The labeling of these bones as belonging to a prehistoric man was bolstered by the discovery, a couple of years later and a few miles away, of another pair of similar bones, together with some small stones believed to be primitive tools. Here was “proof” that apes had evolved into humans in England, and in the years that followed, anthropologists, many of them very distinguished, studied the bones and tried to fit them into the developing evolutionary tree. But they never quite fit; they were anomalous in just about every scientist’s conception of the evolution of man. As time went on, more and more scholars simply dismissed these fossils, suspecting a fraud. And sure enough, in 1953, forty-one years later, the bones were re-examined using the more sophisticated tools that had become available, including radiocarbon dating, and they were found to be not only fairly modern, but also not even from a single species. The skull was from an early, but essentially modern, homo sapiens, and the jawbone was from an orangutan. On closer examination, a number of features of the bones were also seen to be anomalous, such as filing marks on the teeth intended to make them appear more man-like than ape-like. And so forth. Many years after he had ceased to be taken seriously, Piltdown man was officially declared to have been a hoax.
Why was this hoax so successful? Basically, the credentials of the finder and early examiners were good, the analytical tools of the day were inadequate, and (probably most important) the conclusion drawn from the fossils, that Homo Sapiens had made his first appearance in Britain, fit a theory that every Englishman wanted to believe. But who was the perpetrator, and why? No one, to this day, has been able to conclusively identify either the hoaxer or the intended hoaxee. It might have been Dawson himself, anxious for professional fame. It might have been a fellow archeologist, desiring only to play a practical joke on his friend. Others suspect Sir Arthur Woodward, the expert at the British Museum who first examined the bones and declared them genuine, and who had long espoused the chauvinistic idea that modern man had evolved in England and not on the European continent. But there’s also one Martin Hinman, who worked for Woodward and was known to be an inveterate practical joker; quite possibly, he was playing a joke on, or venting some disgruntlement on, his superior. Some people finger Arthur Conan Doyle as the prime suspect; Doyle lived nearby, and had recently written a book called The Lost World, in which one of the characters argues that a bone can be faked as easily as a photograph. Students of the Piltdown hoax have, over the years, identified no less than a dozen people in all, each with an ability to perpetrate such a hoax, and a plausible motive for doing so.
Why didn’t the perpetrator ever step forward and doff his own wig? What’s the point of a hoax, if not for the hoaxer to enjoy the discomfiture of the hoaxee? Did he get cold feet, after realizing that he’d done too good a job, and his hoax had gotten out of hand? Did he become ashamed of what he’d done? Did he die before he could speak up? We’ll never know.
And then there’s the Shroud of Turin, the relic owned by the heirs of an early-Renaissance family that many people venerate to this day as the burial cloth of Jesus. The overwhelming majority of scientific opinion, based on radiocarbon dating and other sophisticated tests performed in the last ten years or so, is that the cloth was woven out of linen threads that date from sometime in the 15th century. Furthermore, microscopic pollen particles embedded in the threads were identified as having their origin in southern France. So the shroud is a hoax, pure and simple. But who was the perpetrator, and whom was he trying to fool, and for what purpose? And why was it never contemporaneously exposed: a hoax that elaborate can’t have been an easy secret to keep. We don’t know the answer to any of these questions; all we know is that someone, or some group, went to an extraordinary amount of time and trouble to weave a cloth that was a good imitation of early shrouds, and then, by means still not understood, scorch or etch the image of a human body into the very fibers of the cloth. Because the provenance of the hoax remains unanswered, the veneration of the shroud as a true relic continues pretty much unabated, despite the arguments of science.
No great harm was ever done by either of these hoaxes. Scholarly study of the descent of man wasn’t seriously derailed by Piltdown Man, and, in the case of the Shroud of Turin, to the extent that some believers may have had their faith bolstered by this supposed relic, it might even be said to have been a beneficial hoax. But some ghost hoaxes, unexposed in their time, have done considerable damage, and continue to do so even after being belatedly exposed. Let me describe just two such hoaxes, both in the 20th century, that have done, and are continuing to do even today, actual, and considerable, real-world harm. They have also developed a curious relation to each other.
In 1967, at the height of both the Cold War and the protests against the Vietnam War, a book appeared on the New York Times non-fiction best-seller list called Report From Iron Mountain, by one Leonard Lewin. The book was, or at least purported to be, the leaked report of a think tank retained by the Pentagon to study various Cold War options for the U.S. In a perfect mixture of bureaucratic and academic language, the book dispassionately discussed a number of horrifying options for the United States, with the probable economic and social consequences of each. The picture it presented was that of a heartless and totalitarian government considering, from the sole standpoint of its own perpetuation, options of war and peace, large-scale life and death, contrived threats, and other matters worthy of Ghengis Khan, Attila the Hun, Stalin, Mao and Hitler all rolled into one. It was an extension (exaggeration?) of Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, which had appeared in 1960, and the new book appeared to confirm all the worst suspicions of the anti-Vietnam war and anti-Pentagon protestors.
The book was an out-and-out hoax, perpetrated primarily by E. L. Doctorow, at the time Editor-in-Chief of Dial press, the publisher of the book. He recruited Leonard Lewin, a well-known writer and editor, to write the book. A number of other publishing luminaries aided and abetted the hoax, among them Richard Lingeman, Executive Editor of The Nation, who helped shape the book, and John Kenneth Galbraith, who wrote, under an assumed name, a admiring review of the book when it was published. Many genuine reviewers were completely taken in, and wrote reviews expressing dismay at our government’s perfidiousness, and gratitude that it had been finally exposed. A few reviewers were quicker to recognize the book for the hoax it was, and their reviews took the form of admiration for such a perfect parody, and praised it as the greatest satire on Kahn since Dr. Strangelove. The question of whether the book was real or a fake became something of a controversy, and many people felt their worst suspicions about our government had been confirmed. President Johnson himself was uncertain whether or not his predecessor, President Kennedy, might have commissioned the study, and wanted the book suppressed. Henry Kissinger, who had written his own book on strategies of deterrence in 1957, rejected the notion that the book could be real, but took it sufficiently seriously, and personally, to attack it as “sheer idiocy”. The controversy over the book died down in a few months, and by the time the hoax was officially revealed, the wig officially doffed, in 1972 by Lewin himself on a television talk show, his confession was anti-climactic. But the seeds of suspicion about the good faith of our government had been sown, and, I personally think, prepared a fertile ground for the revelations of Richard Nixon’s manipulations, and contributed greatly to the undercurrent of suspicion that pervades our view of our government to this day.
If that had been the end of it, Iron Mountain would have passed into history as a salutary caution about the dangers of an over-reaching government. But it didn’t end there. The hoax took root, and flowered into a noxious weed. The doffing of the wig had come too late for it to be news; the furor over the book that erupted when it first appeared had long since died down, and the whole thing just wasn’t news any more. Lewin’s confession didn’t make anything much better than page 38 or so in most newspapers, if it even got that much attention. A number of those who had swallowed the hoax whole, and believed that the document was genuine, either never became aware that they had been hoaxed, or preferred to ignore it. Their belief in Iron Mountain continued unabated. And their belief didn’t die with them: today, nearly forty years later, a whole generation after the book’s appearance, a new audience, the militia groups of the far right, have picked up Report From Iron Mountain and have enshrined it in their literature, along with The Turner Diaries and The New World Order. Although the book itself is long out of print, bootleg copies, photocopied from the original, are available from such sources as the Noontide Press, a publishing house devoted to white-supremacist literature, and the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review. To these organizations, Iron Mountain is no hoax, it’s one of their bibles. Mr. Doctorow and his associates in this hoax may not have intended that it go this far, or do this much harm, but the lesson here is that a hoax can take on a life of its own, and do real harm in the real world.
And this brings me to the greatest of the great twentieth-century hoaxes. This one was conceived with a vicious purpose from the start, and has grown to become far more than a noxious weed. It has become what I can only call a cancer on our time. Despite massive attempts to stamp it out, it has metastasized from its original site in Russia to invade the whole of the Western world, and is beginning to infect the Eastern. I refer, as some of you may have already guessed, to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a document that purports to be the minutes of a conference of Jewish leaders held in the 1890’s, at which they discussed, and laid out in detail, their plans for a Jewish takeover of the world. It later became clear that the document was made up by Czar Nicholas II’s secret police in 1897 to strengthen the Czar’s political position by showing him to be a protector of the Russian people against the Bolshevik revolutionaries, widely thought to be Jews, who were said to want to depose him and all other monarchs, and replace them with a Jewish World Government. The Okhrana, as the Russian Secret Police was called then, found their inspiration for the document in a French pamphlet written in 1864 by a German writer named Goedsche. This pamphlet was directed against Napoleon III, and had noting to do with Jews: the Okhrana made up that part of it out of whole cloth. They also embroidered the tale with the idea that the Jews had special, occult powers that could help them in their machinations. But whole cloth or not, the document did its work, both in 1897 when it was first published, then again in 1903, when it served the Czar as an excuse for the infamous anti-Semitic pogroms that he started in that year. In 1905, it was published as a book that was distributed throughout Europe, and it was a bombshell everywhere. Anti-Semitic feeling, and mistrust of Jews in particular, is a thread that that has run through Western culture for centuries, but the idea that the Jews had not only set their sights on world domination, but might have an actual plan and an organization in place to accomplish it, was new and frightening. The majority of its readers received the book unquestioningly, because it seemed to confirm all their worst suspicions about the Jews. The idea of an active and conspiratorial World Zionist movement became an article of faith throughout Europe and America. In France, in 1895, Dreyfus was convicted of treason and sent to Devil’s Island largely because of the fact that he was a Jew. In England, in 1908, the British Foreign Office, learning that several of the leaders of the Young Turks’ uprising against the Ottoman Sultan that year were Turkish Jews, jumped to the conclusion that the uprising was a manifestation of the Protocols, and lent their support, unavailingly, to the Sultan, with the result that, a few years later, Turkey in 1914 entered World War I on the side of Germany and Austria. The existence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world is also the central plot-moving device of that classic, immensely popular, 1915 World War I spy novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps.
The Protocols were revealed as a forgery as early as 1920, and numerous analyses of the origins of the book have appeared ever since. But none of these were of any avail. Too many people around the world wanted a justification for their anti-Semitism. Henry Ford, in an interview that appeared in The New York World in 1921, cited the Protocols as one of the most important revelations of modern times, and announced that he had personally financed a large printing of the book for American readers. The Protocols, and the need to ruthlessly oppose the plot they purport to reveal, forms a central part of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, written in the late nineteen-twenties, and were incorporated into official Nazi policy after he came to power in 1933. It’s an interesting question whether the Protocols were a source of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, or whether, like the Czar, he simply latched onto them as a convenient basis for a unifying national policy.
And the Protocols haven’t been laid to rest yet, even now, six years into the 21st Century. The New World Order, that I spoke of a few minutes ago, is essentially a present-day retelling of the Protocols to suit the right wing militias of this country. The “Tri-Lateral Committee” that The New World Order talks about, with its “black helicopters”, is nothing more than a present-day version of the Jewish Conspiracy, now joined by the Rockefeller family backed by the wealth of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and, for some, the UN as well. And where do the doctrines of the Protocols most recently turn up? In the charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, whose objective of establishing an Islamic Palestinian state includes the elimination of the Israeli state. The Hamas Charter incorporates much of the original language of the Protocols, and even brings them up to date by extending the claimed membership in the World Conspiracy to include the U.S. Rotary and Lions Clubs. If any of you here tonight are, or ever were, members of these organizations, please leave the room.
So the Protocols live. And what further damage might this most insidious of hoaxes yet do? God only knows, but a hoax this durable isn’t going to go away soon. Might a shared belief in the existence of a World Zionist conspiracy give rise to an alliance between the white supremacist militia groups in the U.S. and the Islamic Jihad terrorist groups in the Middle East, to make common cause against the U.S. government? I’m probably seeing Indians under the bed, or bogeymen in the closet, but if I were the Director of Homeland Security, I think I would feel it irresponsible to totally ignore such a possibility.
So in terms of lasting harm, the Protocols are far and away the most vicious of the hoaxes we’ve looked at. But there’s another aspect of this particular hoax that also makes it important, and that is the fact that the perpetrator was not an individual or group of individuals intent on humiliating a colleague or making a protest of some sort, but a government manipulating a nation to gain support for itself. The anti-Semitic focus of the Protocols was not the main purpose of this hoax. The main purpose was the Czar’s need to show himself as Russia’s protector; he picked on the Jews only as the handiest, and most readily believable, target. So what we have here is an example of hoax in its most dangerous form: a tool for a cynical government to further policies that might otherwise be rejected by the people. And a hoax perpetrated for this purpose begins to impact history, not just people. George Orwell carried this aspect of hoax to its ultimate dimension in 1984.
Have the American people ever been the victim of a hoax? I don’t know. I would like to think not. But I have to say that the Tonkin Gulf episode concocted by President Johnson and his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in late 1966 comes pretty close. The exact nature of the dust-up in the Tonkin Gulf will probably never be known, but from the evidence that later came to light, in the so-called Pentagon Papers leaked to the press by Richard Ellsworth in the course of the Watergate investigations, it probably wasn’t much more of an affair than the Japanese “attack” on the U.S.S. Panay in 1937. But it sufficed for President Johnson’s purposes: it was made into the springboard for the build-up of direct U.S. intervention in the Vietnam Civil War. And the documents on which the CIA based its conclusion that Iraq was purchasing large quantities of “yellowcake” in Niger: it now seems almost certain that they were fabricated by certain Iraqis, or ex-Iraqis, who had ingratiated themselves into the confidence of the Administration and who wanted the existing Iraqui regime overthrown for their own benefit. There may be some question as to whether the CIA was entirely a victim in that hoax; like the nightclub patron watching the female impersonator, it might have been a perfectly willing hoaxee. But that doesn’t change anything. A hoax is a hoax, and the point is not whether either the Vietnam or the Iraq adventures were right or wrong, good or bad. The point is that our involvement in both of them appears to have been fostered by hoax, and that’s not the way we should be led into war. Complicity on the part of a President in such a hoax would be a truly high crime—an impeachable offense of the first order.
So that’s hoax. They’re very common—I’ve only talked about some of the more famous, or infamous, examples. But have I made the case that they’re not funny? They may be so in trivial contexts such as night-club or television entertainment, but watch out when they crop up in real-world situations, especially when they take on a vitality all their own. I guess the moral of tonight’s talk, if it needs one, goes beyond the simple “Don’t believe everything you read”. Demand proof. Whether you’re in a nightclub or a voting booth, always, always, tug at the wig to see if it comes off.
Thank you all, very much.