Paul Ernst (1899-1985)-Part One

Aka Chris Brand, Frederick Carr, George Alden Edson, George Edson, Ernest Jason Fredericks, Emerson Graves, Kenneth Robeson, Paul Frederick Stern
Author
Born November 7, 1899, Akron, Ohio
Died September 21, 1985, Pinellas County (possibly in Largo), Florida

When I first looked at Paul Ernst a few years ago, information on his life was pretty well missing. That has changed, but Wikipedia still has his birth and death dates wrong. His biography on that website is otherwise spare. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is better, but it has a link to the biography of another man (German actor Paul Ernst [1866-1933]) on the Internet Movie Database. It also has a link to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which has Ernst's place of birth wrong. (His place of death on that same website may or may not be right.) I guess the thing to do is to start with primary sources.

First, according to Summit County, Ohio, birth records, Paul Frederick Ernst was born on November 7, 1899, in Akron, Ohio, to Louis C. and Nellie A. (Ticknor) Ernst. They had married on August 22, 1897, in Portage County, Ohio, and Paul was their firstborn and only child. Louis Ernst worked as a railroad postal clerk. His parents were immigrants from Germany.

By 1910, Louis Ernst was gone. His widow Nellie, then working as a dressmaker in her own home, was in Chicago with ten-year-old Paul. She remarried on October 14, 1915, in Cook County, Illinois. Her new husband was George B. Kerr. He was nearly thirty years her senior. Paul Ernst served in the U.S. Navy from June 7, 1918, to March 19, 1919. In the U.S. census of 1920, he, his mother, and his stepfather were living in Chicago, where Kerr managed a brass foundry. Paul Ernst, giving his age as twenty-two, was unemployed at the time. (Ernst may actually have been counted twice in that census, both times in Chicago.)

The next record I have for Paul Ernst is for a trip he made with his mother to Europe and back. On December 19, 1928, the two arrived in New York City from Naples. They gave their address as 540 Brampton Place in Chicago. That place seems to be no longer in existence.

I have not found Ernst in the 1930 census, but in 1940, he was living in Buckingham Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and working as a freelance writer. He was also married. His wife was named Martha, and the two let the enumerator of the census know that they had lived in the same place in 1935. She was the former Martha Jones, who had lived in Chicago with her parents. In 1930, she was single. That narrows down the marriage date for Paul Ernst and Martha Jones to the period 1930-1935. Ernst was in New Hope in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1942 when he filled out his draft card. At five feet, ten inches tall, he was a slight 140 pounds.

That's where the public records leave off until the death of Martha (Jones) Ernst on May 5, 1974, in Pinellas County, Florida. She was seventy-five years old at her death. (She was born on December 26, 1898.) Paul Ernst remarried after his wife's death. His second wife, Rae Ernst of Largo, Florida, died on May 1, 1989, at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Florida, at the age of ninety. (May was a bad month for the wives of Paul Ernst.) "A native of Finland," reads her obituary, "she moved to the [Tampa] area in 1953. She was a retired executive for AT&T. She was past president of Telephone Pioneer[s] of America." (1, 1a)

In between those two deaths, Paul Ernst himself died. That unhappy event took place on September 21, 1985, when he was eighty-five years old. At the time of his death, Ernst lived at 202 Crestwood Lane, Largo, Florida. According to his obituary, he had arrived in the area twenty years before from Pennsylvania. "He was a U.S. Navy veteran," it read. "He was a member of the Pelican Golf Club, Belleair." (2)

I guess it's no wonder that the facts in the life of Paul Ernst are so hard to come by. His parents died before he reached mid life. He didn't have any brothers or sisters. He also didn't have any children as far as I can tell. His first wife died before him. And, finally, his second wife, whom he had married late in life, had been married before and had only a daughter, in other words another family apart from him. In any case, Wikipedia is wrong, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database is right but has an errant link, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has his dates right but at least one of the places wrong. Here's hoping that corrections are on the way. Oh, and by the way, today would have been his 119th birthday, so Happy Birthday, Paul Ernst!

Next: The Writing Career of Paul Ernst

Notes

(1) Tampa Tribune, May 3, 1989, p. 110.

(1a) Rae R. Ernst was also known as Rae M. Keller and Rae R. Lindquist.

(2) Tampa Tribune, September 24, 1985, p. 20. According to public records, Ernst died in Pinellas County. I assume he died either at home or at a local hospital.

Updated on February 2, 2022.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Doctor Satan on the Cover of Weird Tales

I wrote the previous series on superheroes, supervillains, supermen, and super-words in order to get here today. My hypothesis was that these words and concepts originated in the 1890s, give or take a decade. The evidence seems to bear out my hypothesizing. I didn't realize how strong would be the connection between super-ness and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, though. Even so, we as Americans more or less took these words and concepts away from European high culture and its distant and abstruse philosophizing and adapted them to our popular culture, in the process making them safer and more immediate, democratizing them, deflating them, and reducing the danger they represented to humanity. (1) There were echoes of words and concepts from Nietzsche--of supermen and super-words--in the popular press and in popular culture as late as the pulp fiction era, but as the twentieth century progressed, the superhero, as the successor to the hero in popular, folkloric, conventional, and sentimental literature, became more positive than negative, a force for the preservation of civilization and society rather than for their destruction, or for his striding over them in Nietzschean fashion. The superhero or superman came first, and in becoming positive, he had to have something against him, an antagonist, a foil, a counterweight. That's how, I think, we came to have the supervillain.

In my search for various super-words, I found a first occurrence of supervillain in the 1910s, significantly, I think, in drama (or melodrama) and in the cinema, in other words, in pop-cultural forms rather than in high culture or belles lettres. Tarzan and John Carter, two of the earliest superheroes, first appeared in 1912. The following year, one of the earliest supervillains, the insidious Fu Manchu, showed his face for the first time. (2) Tarzan and John Carter were and are regular and recurring characters. In that way, they have one of the qualities we associate with superheroes. But neither has a regular and recurring supervillain to oppose him. Likewise, Fu Manchu does not have a superhero against him. Instead there is Sir Denis Nayland Smith, a kind of Sherlock Holmes to Fu Manchu's Moriarty. Perhaps that was the model for the Doctor Satan stories that appeared in Weird Tales, beginning in August 1935.

In 1984, Robert Weinberg collected the Doctor Satan stories in a softbound booklet called, appropriately enough, Dr. Satan. In his introduction, Mr. Weinberg explained the origin of the series as a response to the popularity of the weird horror or terror titles of the early 1930s. These magazines were in competition with Weird Tales. If the editor, Farnsworth Wright, was going to keep up, he would have to feature stories of weird detectives in his magazine, or so he must have thought. "The Death Cry," by Arthur Reeves, printed in the May 1935 issue of Weird Tales, was the first entry in the magazine's journal of weird detective tales. The Doctor Satan series, by the prolific Paul Ernst, followed over the next year or so.

Whether he was ever referred to as a supervillain or not, Doctor Satan fits the bill. He has superpowers (his are supernatural) and regularly wears the same costume, at least on the cover of Weird Tales, making him instantly recognizable to children and fans. His foil is Ascott (or Ascot) Keane, a detective who may or may not be super. (He's definitely no Batman.) The two fought it out, as heroes and villains do, for eight stories spread out over a year's worth of issues. Still, the conventions of the superhero genre were not well established in the early to mid 1930s. There may have been superheroes at the time but not always supervillains to match them. Conversely, there may have been supervillains, like Doctor Satan, but no superheroes in possession of equal and opposing superpowers with whom they might contend.

Doctor Satan was on the cover of two issues of Weird Tales, in his debut in August 1935 and in his penultimate appearance in May 1936. In the meantime, the author, Paul Ernst, had his byline on the cover of the magazine several times. Unfortunately for him and his supervillainous character, the Conan stories, by Robert E. Howard, were running at the same time. Conan won the cover contest by a score of three to two in the year he and Doctor Satan shared space in Weird Tales. Conan the superhero is still remembered today. Doctor Satan the supervillain is, on the other hand, almost forgotten.

The Doctor Satan Stories in Weird Tales
"Doctor Satan" (Aug. 1935)
"The Man Who Chained the Lightning" (Sept. 1935)
"Hollywood Horror" (Oct. 1935)
"The Consuming Flame" (Nov. 1935)
"Horror Insured" (Jan. 1936)
"Beyond Death's Gateway" (Mar. 1936)
"The Devil's Double" (May 1936)
"Mask of Death" (Sept. 1936)

Notes

(1) Here is Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Vintage, 1991): "I will argue that high culture made itself obsolete through modernism's neurotic nihilism and that popular culture is the great heir of the western past." (p. 31)

(2) There were supervillains before Fu Manchu, of course. One example is the Invisible Man from the novel of the same name by H.G. Wells, first published in 1897.

Weird Tales, August 1935. Cover story: "Doctor Satan" by Paul Ernst. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

Weird Tales, May 1936. Cover story: "The Devil's Double" by Paul Ernst. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

These covers also appear in my entry "Devils and Demons on the Cover of Weird Tales," from October 24, 2016, here.

Text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Secret Origins of the Superhero-Part Five

Every superhero has his secret identity. With Superman, it's Clark Kent. (Or is the other way around?) (1) Superheroes also have their unique costumes, secret hideaways, props, trappings, and supporting characters, including their love interests. Many of these conventions of the superhero genre come from other genres, some of which are as old as time. It's impossible now to uncover the origins of many of them, but secret identity is a specific phrase that lends itself to a search. I've done that, and I have an early occurrence of the phrase secret identity, again from the 1890s.

1890-The Earliest Use of Secret Identity

The earliest use I have found of secret identity is actually from a piece of serialized fiction called King or Knave?, written by Robert Edward Francillon (1841-1919) and published in various newspapers in the 1890s, perhaps beginning with the Manchester Weekly Times and Examiner of Manchester, England. The quote below is from the installment of January 11, 1890, page 10. In Francillon's story, a doctor and a young woman named Cynthia have met on a train. They begin discussing some people they know in common. Then their conversation takes a turn:

A dreadful pang shot through the doctor's heart. Could anybody else have discovered the secret identity and be trading on it? He made his last remark to see how it was taken. If she did know the secret, it was incredible that she should have played with it before a stranger--unless, indeed, she were playing some very deep game [. . .].

There were more secret identities in newspapers from 1890 to about 1940 or so, but it was only after Superman came along that the phrase became a part of common currency, including in professional wrestling. (Professional wrestlers, along with rock stars, might be the closest thing we have in real life to costumed superheroes.)

1912-The Earliest Use of Supervillain

Last to arrive on the scene was supervillain. The earliest use I have found of that term is from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 10, 1912, page 7. The article, "Guardsmen Are to Repeat War Drama Triumph," is a review of a stage play called Held by the Enemy. "War dramas," wrote the reviewer, "require two things--a heroine of emotional type and a super-villain." (What about a hero?) In this instance, Mrs. Horace Applegate played the former. Major Dick Gruner, playing Surgeon-General Fielding, filled the latter role, making him perhaps the first supervillain so named in our popular culture. I have another use from about the same time, from the Vicksburg Herald for April 13, 1915, page 5. This, too, was a review, for a "five part photodrama" called Money. From the first paragraph:

"A Million Dollars for a Banquet"--that is the amount of money spent [. . .] by the super-villain of the story, John D. Maximillian, otherwise known as Croesus, who has made himself the Money-Power of the World.

So it looks like Maximillian as a supervillain possesses the superpower of money--he is "the Money-Power of the World."

It's interesting that the supervillain came to popular culture (i.e., pulp fiction and comic books) from popular culture (i.e., melodrama and cinema). In other words, the super- prefix seems to have attached itself to the supervillain not because of his association with the Nietzschian Superman but because of the general usage of that prefix during the first decade or two of the twentieth century. (2) American movies, as a more or less conventional, middle-class, heavily sentimentalized, even moralistic medium, had superheroes and needed counterbalancing supervillains as their foils. In short, the supervillain seems to have been an invention strictly of American popular culture. 

In summary, the words superhero, superheroine, superman, superwoman, superpower, secret identity, and supervillain were all in use well before the 1930s. (3) It only took science fiction and fantasy, and then, ultimately, comic books, to turn these words into what we understand them to mean today. And that happened in the 1930s, mostly because of Superman.

* * *

Postscript: In writing this series, I have thought about Slan, by A.E. van Vogt (1946), and other science fiction stories. The idea of the superior man is vast and deep in genre fiction; a simple blog just isn't big enough for the exploration. Instead I'll say that, although the concept of the Superman--and super-ness--seems to have come from Nietzsche, it found its natural home only in America, in the land of tall tales, hype, and boosterism. When it arrived here, we did with it what we do best: we a) commercialized it, and b) turned it into popular culture. Super-ness went from being a serious and abstruse philosophical concept to one taken up by ordinary men and women, mostly in the popular press. You could say that the concept became--"Horrors!" Nietzsche might exclaim--democratized. In the process, the Nietzschean Superman, an idea perhaps too serious for its own good, was punctured and became deflated, only to be replaced by the democratic Superman, who fights for truth, justice, and the American way.

As it turns out, the pretender or aspirer to super-ness is more often a small man than a great one--a small man living among the masses, either in a democracy or as part of a mass movement. He is decidedly not an aristocrat or a man above men. I'm not sure that we have had a true Nietzschean Superman since the philosopher first came up with the idea. In fact, the advent of the Nietzschean Superman may very well be an impossibility. (God always has the last laugh.) On the contrary, the desire to be above the rest of humanity holds a special appeal to small men rather than big, and they can't seem to resist it. More often than not, they choose a political--especially a politico-racial--means for attempting super-ness. The recent synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh, the recent mail bomber in Florida, the castor-bean-mailer in Utah, the black-church shooter in South Carolina--these are all good examples of small men trying to be big, and necessarily failing. Lee Harvey Oswald is another example. So is the shooter in Las Vegas, who, significantly, fired on masses of people from above. To him they must have seemed like ants (or worms, in Zarathustra's formulation). All or most of the high-ranking Nazis were like that, too: small men--freaks, perverts, deviants, misfits, outcasts, losers--all trying to be big.

Unfortunately, the same kind of thing was and is sometimes at work in science fiction, especially in early science-fiction fandom. Those early fans were physically unattractive, awkward, inept at ordinary living, etc., yet some were convinced that their superior brains and vast knowledge of science, fitted to what was sure to be a better, more technologically advanced future, would make them big. In creating Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster may have been acting out a kind of fantasy--their fantasy--of achieving bigness and greatness--his bigness and greatness. But they seem to have come up with an innovation: they converted the Nietzschean Superman into a force for good rather than one for himself and his own greatness. In that way, they took the Nietzschean Superman away from the Nazis and other pretenders so well and so thoroughly that when we think of the Superman today, we think only of the DC version, not the Nazi or Nietzsche version. What a powerful thing they did! The Allies may have destroyed the Nazis, but Siegel and Shuster, two Jewish kids from Cleveland, destroyed the Nazis' physical, racial, and political ideal by wresting it from them forever.

Next: A Return to Weird Tales.

Notes

(1) And both Clark Kent and Superman may have had secret identities in their creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. Through Clark Kent, with his double English name (English occupation, clark, and English place name, Kent) and his Middle American origins, they might pass, I guess, as WASPS. And through Superman, they might pass as big, strong, powerful men rather than as ordinary Jewish urbanites. All of this (and my postscript) ignores the possibility that Clark Kent is the real identity of Superman and not the other way around. The evidence for that? Clark Kent wants Lois Lane to love him for himself rather than for what he is as Superman. Recent moviemakers have ruined the story of Superman by getting rid of the love triangle that is at its heart. They do, however, tell and retell (and retell) Superman's origin story, which is part Moses and part Jesus, or at least part Messiah.

(2) Like Magneto, Nietzsche might have found the idea of hero or villain, or hero vs. villain, to be nonsensical. It's no villain (or "reprobate," as in a quote on this blog from a few weeks ago) who strives to become the Nietzschean Superman.

(3) Super-villainess actually came last, in a review of Shadow Hall by John Paul Seabrooke, quoted in the London Observer, May 15, 1927, page 9: "Full of thrills. What a gang of villains is here led by a super villainess."

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Secret Origins of the Superhero-Part Four

"Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman--a rope over an abyss. . . . What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal . . . ."

--Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

(Penguin, 1961, pp. 43-44)

I think of Nietzsche as conservative or backward-looking, but his concept of the Superman seems forward-looking, evolutionary, futuristic, even progressive. It's no wonder that those who looked to the future--progressives, socialists, eugenicists, writers and fans of science fiction--glommed on to it. Although there were people who looked with hope towards the coming of the Superman (or who believed in themselves as Supermen), others pulled back, in doubt, skepticism, caution, fear, or--because of Nazism as much as anything--horror. The Superman in their view would be a tyrant, a destroyer, a user and oppressor of men in his exercise of his supreme will. "You have made your way from worm to man," says Zarathustra, "and much in you is still worm." (p. 42) If we fail to cross the rope, the bridge, to a higher state, are we then still worms? And if so, is the Superman right to tread upon us?

Science fiction fans Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster began their creation of Superman with a Nietzschian version, a superior man who is more villain than hero. Their innovation in creating the superheroic version a couple of years later was twofold. First, they made their hero super not by his positioning of himself above others but by bestowing superpowers upon him. Second, and more importantly, they turned their version of the Superman from a self-centered being to one who is selfless, from bad to good, from amoral to eminently moral. The Nietzschian Superman seems to have come out of an inverted Garden of Eden. From his loins sprang two versions of himself. The Nazi had or was his own Übermensch, a kind of anti-Abel. Siegel and Shuster, both Jewish, created Superman, an anti-Cain, a man above men ("Look! Up in the sky . . . .") but who uses his powers to their benefit. Has the anti-Cain, the good Superman, then slain the anti-Abel, the bad Übermensch? Can he? Or is the battle never-ending? Whatever the case, from Superman came the true superhero of today with his superpowers, secret identity, and readily identifiable costume. The Nietzschian Superman--the Übermensch--on the other hand became his nemesis, the comic-book supervillain. Magneto from the The Uncanny X-Men, with his desire to take mutant man to the next level of evolution, may be the best example of this type. Sorry, Lex Luthor.

1879, 1907, 1909-The Earliest Uses of Superpower

The earliest use of the word superpower that I have found is from before the Civil War and was applied to looms for industrial weaving. I assume the super- part refers to the overhead location of the power source. The earliest use for something other than machinery is in an item from The Isle of Man Weekly Times, March 29, 1879, page 6. The item is about God and religion. The word superpower refers to God's own power:

. . . for who can doubt that the Saviour's hallowed, persecuted form personified the wisdom, the super-power, love, and mercy of the Almighty Father?

The earliest use of superpower that I have found applied to a person is from The Daily News and Observer of Charlotte, North Carolina, April 18, 1907, page 4. The reference is to Theodore Roosevelt:

Roosevelt loomed before the country out of the clouds of battle as a well exploited and highly advertised fin de siecle meteor of primitive Americanism. He was the "super"-natural, super-candid, super-boyish, super-scrapping, super-type of the gentleman in "chaps." [. . .] They [men of "the literary and collegiate cults"] begin to express a fear of the super-power they have helped to rear and glorify [i.e., Roosevelt himself].

Superpower is applied here to the man himself and not to the powers he might possess. It occurred to me when I read this that the prefix super- seems to have caught on in America during the early twentieth century, and why not? Our country was a big, bustling place. Ordinary words could not describe it. We needed super-words. From frontier days, we had boasting, lying contests, tall tales, literary and journalistic hoaxes, and boosterism of the most forward and obvious kind. In 1903, for example, a baseball playoff began between the two major leagues. Those leagues were confined to the northeastern quarter of the United States, yet their playoff was called the World Series. Teddy Roosevelt was the perfect president for his time, for he was big, he was full of energy, he had accomplished great things. He was, in short, super--though not quite yet a superhero.

The best early use I have found of superpower, approximating our current concept, comes from the Chicago Tribune for January 31, 1909, page 34. It's in a poem under the heading "Your Corner" and the byline Fadette. The poem is long, but it begins with a striking line:

Some of us live in worlds and some in superworlds.

In the third stanza are these lines:

Some live ethereally in the ineffable spiritualities.
[. . .]
They have no feelings, but perceptions.
They know no powers save the superpowers of the supermen.
They have no possessions, hopes, homes, friends, or paradises save those of the spirit. (1)

I'm not sure what to make of this poem, but there is the word superpowers (supermen, too), and it came just when we might expect it to have come, not long after Nietzsche, during the Progressive Era, during a time when progressivism, boosterism, and "primitive Americanism" lived side by side, when super-words seemed to express best what was happening in the world but most especially here in the United States. It was only a matter of time before the superhero would come along as a positive archetype for the twentieth century.

To be concluded . . . 

Note
(1) Contrast Fadette's use of supermen to refer to men of the spirit with these words from Zarathustra:

     I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.

     They are despisers of life, atrophying and self-poisoned men, of whom the earth is weary: so let them be gone!

X-Men #63, December 1969, with cover art by Neal Adams and Tom Palmer. The supervillain here, Magneto, comes close, I think, to a Nietzschian Superman, one who seeks to cross the rope or bridge on which we hang between our animal past and a higher future state. In Magneto's mind, I'm sure, he isn't a villain. The very idea of "hero" or "villain" might be absurd to him. Strangely, Magneto, at least in later issues and titles, became a Jew who had been sent to Auschwitz but who had escaped. And about Magneto and bridges: see the X-Men movies in which Magneto is imprisoned beyond a bridge and even moves a bridge using his superpowers.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Secret Origins of the Superhero-Part Three

In contrast to superhero, superheroine, and superman, the word superwoman is, in its earliest use that I have found, positive. It remained mostly positive for years after that. That's a little surprising, but if I had to speculate on why the word superwoman was positive rather than negative, I would start with the realization that the evolution of popular culture in America and Britain coincided with the reign of Queen Victoria and her eponymous Age. There was a kind of sentimentality about the female sex then, but there was also a kind of power in women, not only in moral and civilizational terms but also in terms of marriage, the household, and the family. A man's sphere might be in the wider world of work, but at home, the woman reigned supreme. That's just theorizing. The actual evidence of the positive connotation of the word superwoman lies in nineteenth-century newspapers.

1856-The First Use of Superwoman

On February 22, 1856, a woman named Violet, living in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, screwed up her courage to write to the editors of the Louisville (Kentucky) Courier. It was her first to any newspaper editor. In their issue of February 27, the editors kindly printed it under the heading "A Letter from Pewee Valley" (p. 2). She wrote in part:

The day--the day on which I make this, my first epistolary attempt, imparts to my spirit a sort of super-woman strength and inspiration--the birthday of the glorious and immortal founder of our great republic. While I write, I hear the roar of the cannon in the direction of Louisville, saluting the spirit of the great defender of human rights and human liberty. What a multitude of reflections does the recurrence of this day suggest! [. . .] It is the day of all others fit to be held sacred to the Genius of Liberty, and it would seem on this occasion she had literally illustrated her power, in breaking the chains which hoary Old Winter has bound us [. . . .]

Superwoman is here used as an adjective--"super-woman strength and inspiration"--yet it approaches our idea of the powers possessed by our present-day superheroes. What's more, Violet felt inspired, in the original sense of the word, by the long-departed figure of George Washington. But did she also feel inspired by Liberty? It seems so. So was she like an antebellum Billy Batson who, by invoking the strength, convictions, and activity of George Washington and the power and genius of Liberty, took on the powers of a superwoman sufficient to do something she had never done before, that is, pen a letter to a newspaper editor? That might not be as farfetched as it sounds.

There is a similar use of superwoman in an article in The Inter Ocean of Chicago, dated April 7, 1877, under the heading "Woman's Kingdom" (p. 6). The author of the article, Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, quoted another writer, Grace Greenwood, in her praises of yet a third female journalist, Fanny Fern, who, in fourteen years with the New York Ledger, had never missed a deadline:

Think of what this fact proves--what habits of industry, what system, what thoughtfulness, what business integrity, what super-woman punctuality, and, O Minerva, Hygeia, what health!

Here again is the positive use of the descriptor superwoman and again the invocation of powerful figures from history or mythology.

This generally positive connotation of superwoman carried through in the few uses of the word I have found in the late nineteenth century, but after the 1890s--after Nietzsche--the Superwoman, like the Superman, was looked upon less positively than before. For example:

"Woman and Superwoman" by Montrose J. Moses from The Theatre, December 1904, page 319. The situation as described in the introduction to Moses' poem is suggestive of a dystopian future. And I think that the author looked upon the Superman and the Superwoman as Alfred Sutro later looked upon the superhero and superheroine of literature, for each pair, though strong, is loveless. What kind of tradeoff is that? And why have we made it, just as Moses and Sutro foresaw that we would?

Notice that instead of an adjective, superwoman came to be used as a noun as the nineteenth century progressed, and so we got closer to the actual figure of a Superwoman, which seems to have been just the distaff version of Nietzsche's Superman. Neither was universally admired or thought of as desirable. Regardless, George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman, from 1903, gave both enough traction that by the early 1900s, readers seem to have had a pretty clear idea of just what these new men and women were without having to be told. Some people apparently even wanted to be Supermen and Superwomen. (Remember the progressive affinity for eugenics.) An example:

An advertisement for To-Morrow Magazine, appearing in, of all places, the Blue-Grass Blade of Lexington, Kentucky, September 23, 1906, page 3. To-Morrow was a progressive journal, its writers and editor believing in a better, more rational world to come. As the small print says, the magazine was "[f]or the Superman and Superwoman and the New Civilization." Evidently there was no need for an explanation as to what those terms might mean. In any case, we have seen this combination of words--Superman and civilization--before, in Siegel and Shuster's story "The Reign of the Superman," printed in their fanzine Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization #3,  from January 1933. In other words, more than a quarter of a century had passed between To-Morrow and Siegel and Shuster's story, and yet people still believed at some level in the coming of the Nietzschian Superman and a utopian New World or New Civilization of the future. But then reality and the fallen nature of man intervened and we instead had the Nazis' Thousand Year Reich and the Bolsheviks' Workers' Paradise, both designed to bring about a glorious future civilization and both proving murderous and oppressive in the extreme.

The history of the word and concept of superwoman is really interesting and more complicated than I thought it would be. (You should see the newspapers of the 1910s and '20s.) A person could write a book about all of this. But I'm not here to write a book. Instead I'll move on to my last batch of super-words before returning to Weird Tales.

To be continued . . .

Happy Halloween from Tellers of Weird Tales!

Original text and captions copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Secret Origins of the Superhero-Part Two

The earliest reference to an actual living person as a superhero that I have found is from The Sun of New York, New York, December 24, 1909, page 6, just two months after Alfred Sutro had his talks on the subject first summarized in the London Observer. Again, the use here of the word is not positive. Instead it is sarcastic. The author of the item, entitled "The Little General," seems to have wanted to take his subject down a peg or two. And who was his subject? None other than the Honorable John Francis Fitzgerald (1863-1950), aka "Honey Fitz," grandfather of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Here is the reference:

     Fitz has not only covered his chief antagonist [James J. Storrow II] with confusion. He is swimming in a sea of glory. He is the real hero, the super-hero of the Spanish War. Hear him beat himself at Captain John Drum Camp, Spanish Veterans:

          "I acted like a little General in giving orders about the camp."

     Not only did he command the well; he nursed the sick. He had physicians and nurses sent to Virginia. If there is a Massachusetts Iberian Veteran alive to-day, he owes his life to Fitz.

It sounds like Fitzgerald, like politicians of today, boasted about himself and his exploits, likely to build himself up in the eyes of his constituents and to win votes. The item quoted here makes him sound small, though, not large, certainly not like an Übermensch. Nonetheless, he was a political figure, and nowhere would the Übermensch be as active--or as lethal--in the twentieth century as in politics.

The term and concept of the Übermensch is of course German. It comes from Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, written by Friedrich Nietzsche and published in four parts from 1883 to 1891. According to Wikipedia, the word is translated as "Beyond-Man," "Superman," "Overman," "Superhuman," "Hyperman," or "Hyperhuman." (My friend Larry Blake, knowing that the word superhero is protected by trademark, instead refers to his comic book characters as "hyper-heroes.") The word superman clearly came before superhero or superheroine. The earliest occurrence of superman that I have found is again from a British newspaper, from 1892.

1892-The First Use of Superman

In its issue of April 15, 1892, the Birmingham Daily Post (p. 7) printed a long article with the heading "London Gossip" and the subheading "The New Light of Anarchy." The subject is the German philosopher the paper calls  "Nietsche," who was by then "lying at the last extremity" at a maison de santé. "He is now deprived of speech, recognises [sic] no one, and is apparently unconscious," quoted the article. Nietzsche would linger in that state or something like it for eight more years, finally to die in 1900. The article mentions "The Coming Book," Zarathustra: A Book for Everybody and Nobody, then in print in Paris but slouching towards Great Britain. The author of the article was confident that his countrymen would resist Nietzsche's worst ideas. He had far less confidence in his Continental counterparts. Anyway, here's the context:

The hero Zarathustra, disgusted with the sordid meanness and base motives of the human race, has retired to a cavern in the desert, with no other companions but an eagle and a serpent. He spends his life meditating on the "Super-Man," the ideal being who is to reform, by precept and example, the whole human race, and bring all men to equality of fortune, position, and intelligence. (1)

So the word and seeming concept of the Superman sprang directly from the philosophical musings of one man. It did not grow out of a generalized culture or popular culture. The author of the article and probably countless critics and observers since Nietzsche's time have seen the Superman as a negative, just as Alfred Sutro saw the superhero and superheroine as negatives in 1909. (2) Even as late as January 1933, science fiction fans Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster cast their version of the Superman as an evil or malevolent being. The title character of their seminal tale "The Reign of the Superman" fell short of success, though, and so Siegel and Shuster refashioned him into a superhero instead of a supervillain. And that's how Superman was born.

To be continued . . .

Note

(1) Nietzsche's concept of the Superman seems to have ties to Darwinian evolution. I don't think we should overlook the influence in turn of Nietzsche and Darwin on the development of eugenics or the influence of all three on Nazi ideas of race and racial superiority. However, Nietzsche was opposed to antisemitism; Nazi crimes can hardly be laid at his feet. I'm no expert on Nietzsche at all, but it seems to me that as a kind of physician, he observed, described, and diagnosed problems among us and in the human psyche. He even made prognoses that have turned out accurate. However, it seems extremely unlikely to me that he would have prescribed Nazism or any other socialist or collectivist system, or any kind of mass movement at all.

(2) That's not to say that the idea of the superhero or the Superman was entirely negative before comic-book superheroes came along in the 1930s. In 1918 and 1919, American newspapers referred to fighting men of extraordinary valor and accomplishment as superheroes, including Sergeant Alvin C. York of the U.S. Army and Sergeant G. Morini of the Italian Bersaglieri. Also in 1918, A Soldier's Oath, by William Farnum, was advertised with the blurb "[a] super-hero in a super-play." So maybe going into the 1920s--only a decade or so from the birth of the first superheroes in comics--there was the positive concept of the superhero and the negative concept of the Superman. In Superman, maybe Siegel and Shuster brought the concepts together as a positive character, thus leaving space for the arrival of the supervillain.

"The Reign of the Superman" by Jerry Siegel writing as Herbert S. Fine and illustrated by Joe Shuster. Siegel's story was published in the fanzine Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization #3, from January 1933, the same month in which Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Like Alfred Sutro before them, Siegel and Shuster were Jewish.

The Superman versus the Übermensch and look who comes out on top. Superman #17, from July/August 1942 with cover art by Fred Ray. 

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Secret Origins of the Superhero-Part One

Before Spider-Man and Superman, before Marvel and DC, even before comic books, there was the word superhero. (1) My hypothesis is that the word and the concept originated in the 1890s, give or take a decade, just as so much of our popular culture originated at that time. In order to test my hypothesis, I have used an online search engine/database/index of newspapers dating to the nineteenth century. I can't say that the newspaper articles I have found were actually the earliest occurrences in print of the following words. Even if they're not, my guess is that they're close, as ideas, concepts, and memes seem to arise at a certain time, often in a certain place, and in a certain society or culture.

1909-The First Use of Superhero and Superheroine

In late 1909, the British author, playwright, and critic Alfred Sutro (1863-1933) gave a series of talks on the then-current state of literature and fiction-writing in his native country. An article in The Observer of London, dated October 17, 1909, is the earliest use I have found of the words superhero and superheroine (p. 10). The article is in fact entitled "Super-Heroes and Super-Women," and it summarizes a talk Sutro gave at Working Men's College, Camden Town, the evening before. He would give that talk more than once over the month or so to follow. By November and December, summaries of his talk had reached readers in the United States.

Sutro's superhero and superheroine of literature are not positive types. They are instead selfish, self-centered, hedonistic, cruel, brutal, callous. They set themselves above others and know no bounds to their desires or conduct. "The note of the new departure [from the old literature and the old types]," wrote The Observer in its summary of Sutro's talk, "was a force of relentless egoism, a brushing aside of all ties and duties in the quest of self-development, self-gratification--self, always self." Upon reading those words, we might wonder, are we talking here about 1909 or 2018?

Sutro may have given his talk at a liberal or progressive institution, but his ideas are decidedly conservative. As is so often the case, the conservative critic here possessed a keenness of vision often lacking in his more liberal counterparts. Sutro may have been talking about his own time, but he also seems to have foreseen our current situation. There is more to his ideas--so much that pertains today--that I have included an image of the original article below. After you have read it, you might start to think that we are all now like Sutro's superheroes and superheroines--cruel, brutal, callous, unloved and unloving, self-seeking, selfish, self-centered. Maybe that's the general state of humanity and why we are so desperately in need of escape, redemption, and salvation.

When we think of the superhero, we imagine someone with great or extraordinary powers. Alfred Sutro used this new term in a different way, though. His superhero isn't our superhero. His is a man positioning himself above the rest of humanity, and I don't mean above as in "Look! Up in the sky! It's Superman!" I mean above as in the original sense of the word, meaning over or on top of. In the twentieth century, we saw cruel and brutal men who considered themselves above the rest of humanity and who seized or attained power to exercise their will to be so positioned. As with Sutro's superheroes, they were driven by intellectual or pseudo-intellectual ideas which granted them their superiority or over-ness. (See the article below regarding intellectualism.) Some of those men even had a term for themselves: Übermenschen--Overmen. They also had a term for those who must be under them: Untermenschen--Undermen. The first term at least comes from a writer and a work from the previous century. That work, Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, by Friedrich Nietzsche, was published as a complete edition in German in the 1890s. The first English translation, entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra, was published in 1896, that great and seminal year in our popular culture. The first translation done by an Englishman (or maybe he was Scottish) was by Thomas Common. His version came out in 1909, the year in which Alfred Sutro gave his talks at Camden Town.

Sutro, by the way, was Jewish.

To be continued . . .

Note

(1) I'll use the word superhero interchangeably with its variants, super-hero and super hero. Likewise with the words superheroine, superman, and superwoman.

Text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley