The America of Tarzan and Buck vs Bell

TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

The declaration of the American frontier’s closure in 1890 profoundly impacted the American psyche, ushering in a search for new forms of exploration and identity, which became reflected in popular culture.

This shift saw the rise of pulp fiction, particularly the creation of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who channeled the American spirit of adventure and the idea of a “special people” into a new kind of hero, setting the template for the modern superhero.

However, this same belief in American exceptionalism also fostered a darker side, contributing to eugenic laws and discriminatory practices, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and forced sterilizations, which even inspired Nazi Germany.

Ultimately, the source explores how the frontier experience shaped America’s grand narrative, producing both celebrated heroes and profound stains on its history, continually challenging the nation to live up to its self-proclaimed ideals.

The Study of the American Frontier Line

In 1890, when the Census Bureau declared the frontier was closed, it created a giant shift in American mindset. On one hand, it fostered the creation of a superhero unlike anything that had come before it. And on the other hand, it resulted in a US law that the Nazis used as inspiration, America’s largest stain. 

What does the term popular culture mean and how is it created?

Defined, it is the prevalent and widely accepted ideas, trends, entertainment, social practices at activities and beliefs within a society and it comes from society itself. It doesn’t lead society influencing their decisions and actions like the wave in a wave pool does.

Popular culture is the reflection of what is happening which can only be seen when you step back and look at it.

The idea of studying our popular culture began in the 1960s with Virginia Tech professor Marshall Fishwick. In short, he defined popular culture as “the specific human activities that people make part of their lives.”

In the book he wrote on the topic, Fishwick breaks popular culture down into seven pillars.

1. The people
2. The shared traditions
3. Their heroes
4. The role of spirituality
5. The language
6. The imagery
7. and The myth or grand narrative it tells itself.

Of those we are going to focus on the people and the heroes. And we’re looking specifically at the most significant moment in US history.

That is the moment the US census declared the frontier was closed. US expansion was over and America was now finite.

In historical discussions, the American frontier is largely overlooked for its importance and impact on American culture.

Because what is America?

When did the colonists stop becoming colonists and start to become their own people?

Historically, the East Coast Colonies are the product of European expansion. Arriving on primitive lands to build homes and create farms and develop a post office and a local government was all done with labor and supplies from Europe.

The no taxation without representation moment wasn’t an American action. Those were British colonists realizing their government across the ocean wasn’t close enough to truly be effective.

Independence from the British merely gave the colonists more control. It gave them decision-making authority.

But did it make being an American burn inside their soul?

To become a flag-waving, deep-in-your-gut-feeling American, something needs to happen that resonates and gels everyone together as one.

Of course, there is the Revolutionary War, but for America, that was the frontier.

It was the line where civilization met the savage wilderness. There were no railroads at the frontier.

It required us to return to our most primitive state to advance. It required carving wood for canoes, building tools out of rocks, using sticks to till the soil, and it required hunting for days in all directions to find places to cross rivers and mountains that they knew others would follow.

Every step further west was a step away from European influence and a step into what was becoming America.

And unlike the East Coast, where European supplies still arrived, the frontier folk had to rely on each other for everything they needed.

Looking back, of course, we can see how brutal and unjust the moving frontier line was to the native populations.

For the American population, the stories of trade agreements, battles, killings, and deaths made the frontier something everyone experienced. And they all knew this experience was something the British, the French, and the Spanish never had to experience.

It was truly American.

Every step was American.

From an American culture standpoint, the people began to feel as if we were a special people who were able to overcome whatever was thrown at us, which meant we were building American bloodline of resilient, courageous, and adventure bound people.

The frontier had no western edge.

That was our identity.

There’s even a political speech that very much exemplifies this feeling.

Indiana Senator Albert Beverage in 1898 argued that the end of the frontier meant it was time to expand overseas. Expansion was the American way. He said:

“It is a glorious history our God has bestowed on his chosen people. A history whose keynote was struck by the Liberty Bell. A history heroic with faith in our mission and future. A history of statesmen who flung the boundaries of the Republic out into the unexplored lands and savage wilderness. A new who carried the flag across blazing deserts and through the ranks of hostile mountains.”

You can see in his speech the longing for a new frontier, which brings us back to Marshall Fishwick and his notion that part of our popular culture are the celebrated heroes and how they are a reflection of the culture itself.

Hero is actually a Greek term that referred to a courageous person or demigod. In fact, Hercules and Perseus are considered two of the original pop culture heroes. 

Hercules, the son of Jupiter, was a demigod, as was Perseus, the son of Zeus, and even Romulus and Remis, the sons of Mars. In 218 BC, it was the Carthaginian army general Hannibal who overcame impossible odds, taking an army of 30,000 soldiers, 15,000 cavalry, and 37 elephants across the Alps in one of the most celebrated military achievements in history.

That resilience, ingenuity, and drive made him a hero to his people, making his people see they were part of something so courageous.

That kind of action creates a great deal of community pride.

In the 1300s, it was Robin Hood who captured the popular imagination. Then he had only appeared in a poem by William Langland. But that wouldn’t stop him from growing in popularity.

It was the working class who felt oppressed by the upper echelon who found a hero and someone who would steal from the undeserved and give to the under-appreciated.

Then in the 1400s and 1500s, It was the explorers who helped to find a people. It was the Spanish, for instance, who got word that one of their own, Chris Columbo, had discovered a new world.

For the French, it was Joan D’Arc, who found hero status as a military strategist and then a saint. In the 1700s, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett helped define the Americans as explorers and made the ever changing frontier line a piece of their soul.

In the case of America, it was the written word that told the adventures of our hallowed frontiersmen, which actually brings us to the important people in our story.

The Rise of Pulp Fiction Magazines

We start with Frank Munsey. 

Frank Munsey was born in 1854, just before the start of the US Civil War, which didn’t impact his state of Maine like it did the others.

At 14, he got a job in a grocery store that also housed the post office. So, he got a chance to learn how to use the telegraph machine. A couple years later, he became the telegraph operator at a hotel. And then he moved on to working a Western Union in Augusta, Maine.

At the time, Augusta was one of the powerhouse cities for publishing, which excited Frank because he’d loved to read his entire life. During the Civil War years, there became an outbreak of dime store novels that the soldiers would read during their downtime. They were full of pirate, cowboy, and detective stories.

Frank got involved with the local publishing scene, but he had published dreams of his own.

Through contacts, he was able to raise money to move to New York City to begin his own publishing company. That’s when he got his magazine Argosy off the ground. At first, the growth of Argosy was slow, which was partly because the American news company had a monopoly on distribution and Frank wasn’t their top priority.

So, Frank decided to do the distribution on his own.

But in order to increase his chances, his magazine needed to be very inexpensive to get partners on board. So he started printing the magazine on his own. And to make it a better price for his readers and retailers, he started printing on a wood pulp paper that was less expensive.

And his magazine and others like it became known as Pulp Fiction.

Within 6 months, he was printing 200,000 copies. That was 1896. He was printing 300,000 copies by 1902 and half a million by 1907. Pulp magazines became the number one place for authors to get their stories read.

In fact, many of the most popular authors published their stories in pulp magazines, names you would definitely recognize. like Isaac Asimoff, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, CS Forester, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zane Gray, L. Ron Hubbard, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Ellery Queen, Upton Sinclair, and of course, H.G. Wells. 

The pulp magazines became an important player in the popular culture of America. When the frontier closed and America stopped exploring, the people found their love of adventure in pulp fiction. That’s where HG Wells introduced the idea of the time machine, another way to explore the world.

But one man’s stories would change the world forever.

And this gentleman originally didn’t even care about becoming an author.

He just needed to make a little extra money.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Author

His name was Edgar Rice Burroughs. 

Edgar was born in Chicago in 1875, just after the Great Chicago Fire and just before L. Frank Baum and Frank Lloyd Wright moved there.

The culture of Chicago at the time was resilience, having just overcome the Great Fire and Chicago was becoming an important epicenter of trade.

In 1890, it was announced that it would host the 1893 World’s Fair, which counteracted the announcement that the frontier was closed, for the people of the city of Chicago.

Chicago was the product and trade frontier.

Edgar thus grew up with that sense of adventure in his bones.

He ventured to Massachusetts to attend Philips Academy and then to Michigan Military Academy where he graduated. He then enlisted as a private in the Seventh US Cavalry and asked to be sent to the most difficult location in hopes of becoming a military superstar.

They were delighted to send him to Fort Grant in Arizona where he was tasked with keeping the Apache Indians off their native land, that the government had just taken from them.

After his time in the military was over, that sense of adventure continued as he moved around the country working different jobs like being a cowboy out in Idaho. He was once a railroad policeman, a gold miner, an accountant, and even a salesman for a new invention called the pencil sharpener.

Nevertheless, nothing took. He couldn’t find his groove in any of those jobs and truly struggled for money.

His free time was spent reading pulp magazines, scoffing at the stories he thought he could probably write better. Thus, one day he decided he would write a story and submit it.

He didn’t know how, but he knew he’d figure it out. When that happened, he submitted half a story with a note that if the editor liked it, he’d finish it and submit the rest.

It was called Under the Moons of Mars and was a direct reflection of the culture that America had built in him. He’d read some HG Wells and was intrigued by the exploration of space.

His military stint, and political messages he’d seen made him think, “We had the right and obligation to help and manage the the uncivilized world.”

He put them together and created the story about a character named John Carter who was a Civil War vet. Just as HG Wells had transported people to another time, John Carter was ambushed in the dead of night and mysteriously transported instantly to Mars, where he witnessed primitive tribes battling.

John Carter would be the one to bring the piece.

And when it was published, it was an instant hit in the pulp magazine All Story. For Edgar, the $400 check was the most he’d ever made, and he knew he had more stories in him. He could do it again.

He got to work immediately on the next book, capitalizing on the success of the first story. This too would be another lost world, untouched by civilization and the man who would arrive to bring order.

But this time, the frontier wouldn’t be Mars.

It would be more believable yet exotic. It would be published the same year, October of 1912, as Tarzan the Ape Man by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan would change the world forever.

Tarzan Masters the Pulp Magazines

Tarzan was a mega hit.

He resonated because the popular culture feeling at the time was just that Americans were a special people who were destined to provide guidance and control to the uncivilized.

If you recall Indiana Senator Beverage, “the Americans are the chosen people who carry the flag across the savage wilderness.” But at his heart, Edgar Rice Burroughs did not write a political novel.

He wrote an adventure story he thought the readers of pulp fiction would like.

He wrote what was in his heart. The popular culture of America came out on the page. But that isn’t necessarily why Tarzan changed the world. Tarzan wasn’t a normal hero like Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood.

He wasn’t like any hero prior to him. Being raised by apes gave him super strength, in-human super strength.

Sherlock Holmes didn’t have in-human smarts, just regular logic and deduction.

Without knowing it, Edgar had created the template of the modern superhero. Tarzan was an outsider raised by others. He had super strength, a strong moral compass, and a defender of the innocent.

Is that the description of Tarzan?

Or is that the description of Superman, Spider-Man, or even Batman?

Edgar Rice Burroughs did something else that had never done before.

He incorporated himself Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. and sold licenses to the name and likeness of Tarzan.

He was even advised against oversaturating the market for fear the audience would tire of Tarzan. But Edgar Burroughs didn’t listen and the opposite happened. The people couldn’t wait for more.

Soon the country was inundated with Tarzan. Gum, lunchboxes, radio, cereals, comics, and other merchandise.

And it wouldn’t be long before Tarzan was on the big screen.

And the actor who most famously played Tarzan was a superhero himself.

Johnny Weissmuller had been born in 1904 in Austria, Hungary. But within a year of his birth, his family immigrated to Chicago.

At the age of nine, Johnny contracted polio and his doctor recommended he take up swimming as a physical activity to overcome polio. And he actually excelled at swimming, joining the swim team in school. At 17, he entered the amateur athletic union races and won them all. And he set two world records.

He became so good at swimming, he went to the 1924 and 1928 Olympics, winning five gold medals and setting a world record that would stand for 17 years.

And then four years later, when they were looking for a star to play Tarzan, they just needed one look at Johnny Wise Mueller. He would go on to be in 12 Tarzan movies and would be America’s first sex symbol, starring in Hollywood’s first major film franchise.

The Idea We Are Special

But there is a darker side to these cultural beliefs that Americans were a special people who were specially designed to overcome adversity at every turn.

With that cultural belief also came the idea that some people were inferior or expendable.

In 1912, the same year Tarzan was published, The United States government created the US Public Health Service. Originally, it was John Adams who kicked off public health by creating The Aid for the Relief of the Sick and Disabled Airmen, which triggered the creation of hospitals near waterways.

One of the roles of this US public health service was disease prevention.

Well, in 1932, it began a study on the campus of Tuskegee Institute looking into what happens when syphilis went untreated in the negro male. As the documentation reads, there were 600 black men in the study, 399 of which had syphilis, but were not told.

While there was no cure or medicine available at the time, penicillin cured syphilis in 1947.

But for the participants of this US public health study. They weren’t told if they had syphilis or not and were never offered penicillin.

Between the time the study started and the time penicillin was available, dozens of men had died. Wives, children, and untold others had been infected. But even with that knowledge, no penicellin was administered. It is clear here some part of the government determined that some lives were worth experimenting or discarding for the greater good, the health of this special society.

But the Tuskegee study wasn’t the only example.

The industrialization of the US was moving more and more people to the urban areas, which was creating problems of congestion and crime and increasing the fear of the middle class.

Despite being a nation of immigrants, The fear was that this new generation of immigrants that were arriving to work in the factories meant we were creating a generation who weren’t allegiant to American values.

They never felt the pride of the frontier.

So in 1924, the government passed the Immigration Act to make sure the mix of Americans by percentage didn’t change. This quota allowed 2 % of each nationality’s population to come in.

That meant if there were a thousand British people currently living in the United States, 2% of a thousand is 20. So that meant only 20 new British immigrants were allowed.

But if there were only 100 Jamaicans in the US, we’d only allow two.

This cultural belief that Americans were special also meant we had to prevent anything from upsetting the balance or the imbalance we already had.

And yet there was one more case in 1927 that took the law too far.

While the opinion existed that the disabled had feeble minds, the US government actually passed a law attempting to prevent future feeble minds.

In 1925, the state of Virginia passed a law that it was the state’s right to sterilize mentally troubled patients at institutions to make sure they didn’t have mentally troubled offspring.

After being raped and getting pregnant in an institution for the mentally challenged, a young woman named Claire Buck was notified that she would soon be sterilized. Well, she and her family took the institution to court, citing the law as unlawful. But amazingly, the state court upheld the law, indicating it was okay for the state to do this.

That is when the case went to the Supreme Court where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was serving.

And in an 8:1 judgment, the Supreme Court also upheld the Virginia law.

They agreed this is okay. But the decision itself wasn’t the most surprising part. That was left to the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote the court’s majority opinion. Oliver Wendell Holmes stated,

“It was in the best interest of the state to work towards a pure gene pool. and that the state’s interest in this case outweighed the interest of the individual’s bodily integrity.”

But in a shocking side note, Holmes wrote that.

“it seemed like Miss Clare Buck, her mentally ill mother and daughter, were all promiscuous and feeble-minded and shouldn’t be allowed to breed further. Three generations of imbeciles were enough.”

That is actually part of US history.

And furthermore, the law has never been overturned.

But what’s worse, if anything could be, after World War II, when the Nazis were put on trial for their war crimes against humanity, they used the American Buck versus Bell court case as the reason they decided to sterilize the Jewish in their country.

America has never had a stronger stain and no amount of Tarzan success could possibly counteract it.

Marshall Fishwick, the original researcher of popular culture, would say Tarzan became part of the grand narrative of our culture. In an essence, a myth.

He answered the question, if we didn’t have the Titanic, electricity, factories, and cars. If we were stripped of everything, who would we become?

Disney made that the framework of their Tarzan movie, making Tarzan loyal and a fierce defender of the weak.

The most amazing part of this story is almost everything discussed happened less than a hundred years ago. Less than a hundred years ago, we were barring by law certain groups from coming here. We were sterilizing the weak, we were putting Japanese Americans into camps.

How do we actually become the special people we thought we were moving forward?