Positive Liberty

In an eye-opening post about the hidden history of comic books, Rob MacDougall writes the following of DC Comics co-founder Harry Donnenfeld and his sordid past:

The trucks that carried Donnenfeld’s “spicies” [sexually explicit pulp magazines] also distributed Margaret Sanger’s (then illegal) birth control, Al Smith’s campaign literature, and Frank Costello’s mob liquor. [Donnenfeld's] Eastern News handled Hugo Gernsback’s “scientifiction” stories and Bernarr MacFadden’s body-building magazines, each a parent to Superman and the superhero in their own way. I like that notion a lot — the alt-dot-culture of the 1920s and 1930s, a crucible of cheap magazines and disreputable ideas — and I wish I knew of more good writing on the area. If you haven’t noticed, I’m very fond of unexpected historical connections, especially when they reach into the weirder corners of Americana.

MacDougall might appreciate Robert Darnton’s The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, which describes a strikingly similar system in the French eighteenth century: Facing a censorship regime that was strict in theory but porous in fact, clandestine booksellers would stock Voltaire, blasphemous pornography, Jansenist tracts, and even pseudo-medical texts on birth and reproduction — the “health” magazines of their day — and would sell them throughout the kingdom.

A vendor who dealt in illegals — “philosophical books” was the term of art — often carried what seems to us a ridiculous assortment of highbrow and gutter literature. He also carried many works that are now mostly forgotten, like Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 or Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s remarkable Man the Machine.

Both were arguably precursors to modern science fiction: The former, for its time-travel plot device; the latter, for its philosophical materialism, a theme with which the genre has wrestled ever since. At times, La Mettrie sounded a lot like David Brin:

Could not the device which opens the Eustachian canal of the deaf, open that of apes? Might not a happy desire to imitate the master’s pronunciation, liberate the organs of speech in animals that imitate so many other signs with such skill and intelligence? Not only do I defy any one to name any really conclusive experiment which proves my view impossible and absurd; but such is the likeness of the structure and functions of the ape to ours that I have very little doubt that if this animal were properly trained he might at last be taught to pronounce, and consequently to know, a language. Then he would no longer be a wild man, nor a defective man, but he would be a perfect man, a little gentleman, with as much matter or muscle as we have, for thinking and profiting by his education.

MacDougall’s post set me thinking in other directions as well. Here he quotes Gerard Jones, author of Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book:

“History is written by the winners — sometimes,” Jones begins. “The history of the comic book has been written by those who got rooked and by those who sympathize with those who got rooked.” He’s too right. The standard histories of the genre are tragic tales of naïve creators — stand-ins for the comic fans that read these books — getting screwed over by venal money men. Men of Tomorrow doesn’t deny the flim-flammery that went on, but it reminds you that the first “businessmen” in this crazy who-woulda-thunk-it funny book “industry” were just dreamers and outcasts too, hustling for their piece of the American dream and holding on to Superman’s cape for dear life.

Aside from the old saw about history repeating itself (whether or not we learn from it — take your pick), the one thing that everyone thinks they know about history is that it’s written by the winners. Sadly, this claim seems not to correlate with actual historiography at all. Counterexamples abound.

J. G. A. Pocock, for instance, once noted somewhere in his voluminous works that while the history of ancient Rome was not written by the Carthaginians, it most certainly was written by the disgruntled patrician class. Having lost their power struggle with the emperors and the army, they retired to country villas and wrote bilious histories whose chief aim was to show how the emperors had made a botch of Rome: How much better Rome would have been if only we had been in power.

Why was Caligula mad? Don’t blame lead in the water; the real culprit may be sour grapes. (And no, I don’t endorse any of the historical writing at that EPA website. To give just a start, the so-called poudre de succession — inheritance powder — in early modern France, was not lead but arsenic.)

Lead, or arsenic, take your pick. And whether or not the emperors were so bad as the patricians claimed them to be (I am inclined to think that they may well have been; power does corrupt, after all) Pocock still has a point, and the losers very often do write the history. Any literate person with a little free time can do it, and, for better or worse, a good many of them do. Overwhelmingly, the losers are in that number, and often, their perspectives are among the most interesting.

Thus we have feminist histories of the ERA, pacifist histories of World War I, and histories of the French Revolution that range from Jacobin to royalist: Arguably, both of these factions “lost” the Revolution, as did many more that lay between them. Each with their own histories — and war wounds — to prove it. And, as the Roman patricians have amply proven, writing history is often the best revenge.