Jon Towlson, Author at Diabolique Magazine

In his autobiography, Moving Pictures, the playwright Budd Schulberg described film director Tod Browning during the filming of Freaks (1932): There was a certain gleam in the way Tod Browning went about making this picture that made us think of him as Count Dracula on Stage Ten. Those freaks were all over the set and it sent shivers through us to look at them. But he enjoyed it too much. The marathon dance was in vogue then and we went a few times to the Santa Monica pier to watch the young zombies drag themselves around the floor in a slow-motion dance macabre. Even more appalling than the victims on the dance floor were the regulars, affluent sadists in the front row seats every night, cheering on their favourites who kept fainting and occasionally throwing up from exhaustion. One of the most dedicated of the regulars was Tod Browning, who never missed a night and who got that same manic gleam in his eyes as when he was directing Freaks1. Quite apart from its hypocrisy (what was Schulberg’s own motivation in going to the dance marathon ‘a few times’?) Schulberg’s description plays to the popular opinion, held by many in Hollywood at the time, that Browning was something of a ghoul. To an extent, this view of him still persists today, as does another myth: that he was unable to adapt to the coming of sound in the 1930s. In this article I hope to dispel the latter and - at least - modify the former: while there is no doubt that Browning, as a director, was ‘morbid-minded’2, he was also, as his lesser known film, Fast Workers (1933) shows, a keen social commentator of the Depression era. It is true that by 1932 Browning had become an affluent man, leading him to proclaim at one point that he was ‘richer than the president’3, but Browning’s background as a working-class boy in Kentucky, his subsequent flight from a Baptist upbringing into the world of the circus, and his alcoholism that led to personal tragedy, made him, I believe, into an artist with a social conscience. Freaks, his masterpiece, can be read as an allegory of an underclass of the ‘unfit’ exploited by an upper class that claims genetic superiority. One of Browning’s most cherished projects – never to be realised - was an adaptation of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Horace McCoy’s hardboiled story about a dance marathon in the Depression. It might have surpassed Freaks as his signature film – if the studio brass had let him make it. But this caustic novel was too near the knuckle in Hollywood’s golden age. It was not to be filmed until 1968 (by Sydney Pollack), when revolution was in the air; but by then the distance of time had muted the story, made its appeal existential rather than political. This was also the decade that Freaks became rediscovered by a new generation of film-goers; its cast of real-life circus freaks seen as heroes by the counterculture audience. But the true significance of Freaks – and of Browning’s integrity as an artist challenging dominant ideologies of his time – can only be fully appreciated when considered in the context of the eugenics movement of the era and its impact on the consciousness of those it victimised: namely the lower classes, immigrants, minorities, and people with mental and physical disabilities. By 1932 – the year of Freaks – the movement had reached the peak of its popularity (if one can bear to use such a word in reference to eugenics). In New York that year was held the 3rd International Eugenics Conference, an event intended to legitimise the movement through the dissemination of research. One of the surviving exhibits from the conference presents a ‘freak show’ of patients from Letchworth Village, a mental facility in New York State. Amongst the patients on display are microcephalics – ‘pinheads’ – like Schlitze in Freaks. Indeed, it is almost impossible to look at the exhibit without thinking of Browning’s roster of physically unusual actors. But whereas the Letchworth Village freak show is callous in its presentation and description of the physically deformed (as ‘cretins’, ‘dwarfs’ and ‘mongols’)4, Browning’s film demands a ‘more engaged and potentially sensitive mode of viewing in the audience’5, challenging eugenics ideology and revealing its inherent fascism. The Eugenics Movement and Class Consciousness There can be little doubt that the Eugenics movement was part of the dominant ideology of the 1920s and 1930s. By 1921 thirty American states had adopted legislation calling for compulsory sterilisation of individuals classed as genetically unfit; in 1924 that legislation was made to include mental patients according to Virginia law. It is estimated that 60,000 people had been sterilised by the mid-1970s.6 The Eugenics Records Office (the movement’s mouthpiece and propaganda machine) found that the genetically unfit came from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds; solutions offered were immigration restrictions, racial segregation, marriage restriction and as stated, sterilisation.7 It should come as no surprise that the ERO’s research methodology was subsequently revealed as highly flawed. As Garland E. Allen of Washington University has commented on the movement: It placed the cause of human social problems (such as pauperism, feeble-mindedness, alcoholism, rebelliousness, nomadism, criminality and prostitution) in the defective germ plasm of individuals and ethnic groups, and not in the structure of society itself. Eugenics used the cover of science to blame the victims for their own problems.8 Eugenics as a pseudo-science originated as a response to the spectre of rampant population growth in the United States in the early 20th century. Pasteurisation, improved sanitation, antiseptics, vaccination and mechanisation in food farming and processing which increased the supply of food – all helped dramatically to decrease infant and childhood mortality, resulting in a growth in family size, especially among the urban poor.9 This coincided with a declining birth-rate among the wealthy and a period of labour unrest following the rapid growth of American industry and the development of mechanisation. Those in power felt that the working class was not only organising against them but also out-reproducing them.10 President Roosevelt is said to have complained that the American middle class was committing ‘racial suicide’ by not having enough children.11 The eugenicists and their wealthy supporters shared a mutual antipathy for political radicalism and class struggle, and they were alarmed by the increasing strength of militant labour unions and the rise of socialism in the United States. Migrants from southern Europe, especially Italians, brought with them a tradition of organised labour and were seen as trouble-makers.12 Eugenicists purported to have data showing that the problem was in their genes, leading to the Immigration Act of 1924 halting what until then had been the greatest era of U.S immigration. This was sanctioned by another president, Coolidge, who famously commented “America must remain American”.13 The definition of ‘American’, according to the eugenicists of the era, is rather predictable: they envisaged a society that perpetuated white male middle class and upper-class power.14 The Eugenics movement, considered in terms of hegemony, served to convince all that the white middle and upper classes were genetically superior to the rest of society who were stratified by varying degrees of genetic inferiority: whites were more intelligent than blacks, native-born Americans more intelligent than immigrants, northern Europeans more intelligent than southern Europeans and so on - a social order based on breeding. Furthermore, by blaming social ills (criminality, delinquency, deviancy) on heredity, eugenicists were able to justify the elimination of certain undesirable individuals from society; until 1942 thirteen states had laws specifically permitting sterilisation of criminals.15 If the number of criminals and ‘imbeciles’ could be reduced through sterilisation, the eugenicists argued, it would save the state millions of dollars a year. The words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., himself a student of eugenics, underline the fascism of such legal rulings: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.’16 Underlying the argument for the sterilisation of criminals and the ‘feeble-minded’ was the desire to save tax dollars. By the 1920s, large-scale public welfare programmes were replacing local charity in caring for the poor and the handicapped. Eugenicists considered these people a burden to society and were quick to calculate the costs of maintaining the ‘socially inadequate’ in public institutions.17 Eugenics, therefore, promised to attack social problems at their roots - whilst at the same time-saving money for the American taxpayer. Eugenics and Popular Culture Eugenic propaganda was heavily promoted in popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s; there is little doubt that Tod Browning would have been aware of the movement – and almost certainly would have found its values anathema. The Eugenics Record Office propagandised eugenics through the Church, the education system and the mass media - using film to indoctrinate audiences with a eugenic way of thinking in much the same way as did the Third Reich in Germany. One of the earliest eugenics films in America was The Black Stork (1917) - released shortly after Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) – advocating the euthanasia of ‘defective’ babies. And as late as 1934 a film such as Tomorrow’s Children could assert involuntary sterilisation as legal and morally acceptable (although popular support for the eugenics cause had by then started to wane following its appropriation by the Nazis).18 As an avid film-goer at the time of The Black Stork...