by Yunte Huang
A few days later, in Florence, Alabama, they appeared before the circuit judge, Sidney C. Posey. Hailing from Pendleton, South Carolina, Judge Posey also carried the license of a Methodist minister and was attended on his trips by a black slave, a wedding gift from his father-in-law, a wealthy plantation owner in Columbia, Tennessee.6 During the hearing, Judge Posey, a Southerner who thoroughly understood a man’s right to defend his honor in face of a false accusation, took it upon himself to verify the mysterious band, and, after being satisfied with the examination, dismissed the charges against the twins and required only that their manager, Charles Harris, publish a statement of explanation in the local paper so as to appease the agitated Athens citizenry. That judicious ruling led to an entry for November 1 in the twins’ expense ledger: “Judge Posey for inserting C.H.’s statement of the Athens affray in Florence ‘Gazette’ $2.”
Ironically, the Athenian fracas seemed to have boosted the twins’ popularity in Alabama, for folks down South seemed to like nothing better than a good fight. For the three days Chang and Eng appeared in Florence, the receipts totaled more than $200. Their biggest haul was in Tuscaloosa, then the state capital, in western Alabama. Staying at a local tavern called Mr. Ewing’s, Chang and Eng spent two days in this city by the Black Warrior River, paid a steep $27 for corporation tax, but grossed $308 in receipts. The hundred or so students of the newly founded University of Alabama were treated to a rare view of these wonders from afar, not realizing how these Siamese men, outlandish and freakish as they were, would slowly and resolutely inch themselves into a Southern world in ways no one could ever imagine. “For ways that are dark / And for tricks that are vain / The heathen Chinee is peculiar,” as F. Bret Harte would suggest in his wildly popular satirical poem, “The Heathen Chinee” (1870).7 But it was still four decades before that familiar nineteenth-century refrain made its way into the American lexicon.
The Siamese Twins, however, were hardly the only exotics in the Bible belt. In the woods south of Tuscaloosa, an area of backcountry that would become famous in the twentieth century thanks to the work of James Agee and Walker Evans, there was a town named Demopolis, where Chang and Eng would stop for one night. In the words of Carl Carmer, Demopolis was where “the Deep South’s most romantic story had its beginning.”8 Just like the Siamese Twins, whose story began on the other side of the globe, the genesis of Demopolis also had to do with events that unfolded in a distant land.
On Bastille Day in 1817, a band of about 150 French exiles, led by General Charles Lefebvre Desnouettes and Colonel Nicolas Raoul, heroes of Napoleonic campaigns across Europe, arrived at what then was known as the White Bluff. They had been banished from their native land by King Louis XVIII following the downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Lured by the dream of a new beginning, they decided to settle in the wilderness of Alabama and grow olives and grapes to sustain themselves like common people. They first called their settlement “Aigleville” (French for “Eagleville”), in memory of their dethroned emperor, whose royal insignia included a figure of an eagle, but they later changed the name to “Demopolis” (meaning “city of the people”), in keeping with their desire to live among ordinary folks.
Women in silky, brocaded gowns and men in tricolored military uniforms, these aristocrats, who had never done a day’s manual labor in their lives, set out courageously to clear woods, plow fields, raise cattle, milk cows, and cook meals over coals. In the evenings, after the sun had long set behind the white bluff by the river, they would light fires, play guitars, read books, drink rich wines from the Old World, and dance in the moonlight.
But the Gallic tale with a romantic beginning soon came to a tragic ending. The crops of olives and grapes failed year after year because these “farmers manqué” knew nothing about the soil or the frost that would soon ravage the Mediterranean trees and vines. Moreover, fever and diseases also significantly reduced the population of the colony. While the wealthiest among them could afford to live on imported goods (their own meager products were never adequate to sustain the group), the less fortunate had to lead lives severe beyond their imaginations. Colonel Raoul became a ferryman in a nearby creek, while his wife, formerly the Marchioness of Sinabaldi, flipped flapjacks for ferry passengers in a lonely cabin on the bank. When amnesty was finally granted by Louis Philippe a few years later, those who could afford it would either return to France or move on to other American cities. Their history remained star-crossed, for in 1822, on his way back to Europe, General Desnouettes drowned when his ship, the Albion, struck a reef off the Irish coast.
By the time Chang and Eng arrived in Demopolis, on February 26, 1834, the former French settlement had already lost most of its Gallic luster. Only a few of the olive trees that had survived frostbite were scattered around town, bearing fruit each year to the delight of the more hardy avian population. Anything else left of this strange episode of Alabama history seemed to be buried in place names scattered in the area, words with etymologies rooted in Napoleonic imperial dreams: Marengo, Linden, Arcola, and Moscow. The twins made stops at these Alabama towns and counties on their way back from a two-month tour in Mississippi and Louisiana, which included a stint in America’s capital of carnival, New Orleans. Near Demopolis, they paid Colonel Raoul a dollar to be ferried across the creek and stayed at a hostel run by one Mr. Drummond. In a town of only a few hundred souls, their one-day show grossed $61. At the ticket price of twenty-five cents per person, not including the sale of lithographic portraits, biographical sketches, and cigars, it amounted to more than two hundred visitors. That’s nothing less than a riot in the woods.
Perhaps the French authority had been right four years earlier, when they denied entry to the Siamese Twins for fear of maternal impressions. Judging by their phenomenal popularity among the French expatriates, it seems that the twins would not only wield a sort of necromantic power over pregnant women but also appeal to displaced souls, or anyone troubled by a sense of alienation from one’s self. Whether it’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the picture of Dorian Gray, the freak, to quote Flannery O’Connor again, is “a figure for our essential displacement,” an estrangement from ourselves, from God.
As the twins traveled in the backwoods, bayous, and swamps of the antebellum Deep South, a fad simultaneously began sweeping through the United States, a new so-called science of mind, one lacking empty theological speculations and futile metaphysical doubts. It was nothing less than a supposed intellectual fever that would grip almost everyone in nineteenth-century America, including Chang and Eng.
22
Head Bumps
A phrenologist and a mesmerizer came—and went again and left the village duller and drearier than ever.
—Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
“The Siamese Twins,” declared Orson and Lorenzo Fowler in 1837, “furnish another striking example of the truth of phrenological science.”1 By then, late into the decade when Martin Van Buren was president, phrenology—which some regarded as harmless quackery practiced upon the gullible, while others saw it as a scientific discovery of the relationships between a person’s character and the shape of the skull—had reached the apex of its popularity in the United States.
Whether chicanery or science, phrenology was first developed in Austria by German physician Franz Joseph Gall, who proposed that mental phenomena have natural causes that can be determined. Gall believed that the human mind is not unitary but is composed of independent and ascertainable faculties that are catalogued under at least thirty-seven rubrics, including Combativeness, Veneration, Benevolence, Adhesiveness, Amativeness, Language, Murder, and so on. These faculties, or aspects of a person’s character, are localized in different organs or regions of the brain. “The development of these thirty-seven organs affects the size and contour of the cranium, so that a well-developed region of the head indicates a correspondingly well-developed faculty (propensity) for that region. Consequently, it was thought possible that a man could make a fairly accurate c
haracter analysis by studying the shape of a subject’s head in conjunction with his temperament.”2
Gall’s phrenological theory was introduced to the Anglo-American world by his collaborator and disciple Johann Gaspar Spurzheim. In Edinburgh, where the prestigious medical establishment regarded the new “science of mind” with skepticism, Spurzheim’s lectures and publications in the 1810s found an important convert in a brilliant young barrister, George Combe. Revolting against his own Calvinist roots, Combe eagerly seized upon the optimistic new science that promised a way out of the pessimism, the doom and gloom caused by the Protestant beliefs in predestination and the total depravity of man. In his book The Constitution of Man (1828), perhaps the best known and most inspirational of all phrenological publications, Combe asked, “Why should man have existed so long, and made so small an advance in the road to happiness?” He suggested: “The grand sources of human suffering at present arise from bodily disease and mental distress . . . and these will be traced to infringement, through ignorance or otherwise, of physical, organic, moral, or intellectual laws, which when expounded, appear in themselves calculated to promote the happiness of the race.” Now phrenology made it clear that “mental talents and dispositions are determined by the size and constitution of the brain,” not by what Calvinists would call God’s “unconditional election.” Morality, therefore, became a science with the aid of phrenology.3 In this way, phrenology offered a hopeful interpretation, one that banished the threat of dark recesses with an assurance that everything could be brought to light, to the surface.4
In 1829, the same year that the Siamese Twins had arrived in Boston, Combe’s book was enjoying a vogue in America, a nation that had witnessed the decline of Calvinism and the rise of the common man. Even a skeptic like Ralph Waldo Emerson, otherwise averse to what he called a “shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight table, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology,” had to admit that The Constitution of Man was “the best Sermon I have read for some time.”5 Whether or not Emerson would concede, there was an affinity between his transcendentalist idea of self-reliance and phrenology’s pragmatic motto “Self-made or never made.” Or, for that matter, the Jacksonian bugle call of the “manifest destiny” was an optimistic rhetoric just as phrenology was a hopeful hermeneutic.
Many of the pioneers of American medicine were also devotees of phrenology. John Warren, the Brahmin Harvard doctor who first examined Chang and Eng, had studied Gall’s works as early as 1808 and had attended Spurzheim’s Paris lectures in 1821. Warren incorporated phrenology into his Harvard lectures, and, beginning in 1820, he made it the subject of an annual address to the Massachusetts Medical Society.6 Similarly, Dr. Philip Physick, another titan of medicine who also happened to have examined the twins, actually spearheaded the formation of the Central Phrenological Society in Philadelphia in March 1822.
When Spurzheim visited the United States in 1832—a trip comparable to Sigmund Freud’s historic tour nearly a century later that would bring the gospel of psychoanalysis to America—the German phrenologist sparked a popular enthusiasm transcending the medical and scientific communities. Everywhere he went, he was mobbed; everywhere he spoke, the venue was packed. His landing in New York on August 7 was duly noted by Philip Hone in his diary: “Spurzheim, the celebrated phrenologist, a disciple of Dr. Gall, arrived here on Tuesday in the Rhone from Havre.”7 Spurzheim’s appearance at Yale College’s commencement made “the professors [fall] in love with him,” with one of them remarking that “no stranger ever visited the United States who . . . possessed the power at once so fully to absorb and gratify the public mind.” At his final stop in Boston, where he gave a series of eighteen public lectures on phrenology, Spurzheim was wined and dined by John Warren in the latter’s capacity as the former dean of Harvard Medical School. Unfortunately, however, the strenuous schedule caused Spurzheim’s health to fail, and he died in Boston on November 10, just days after Andrew Jackson’s reelection. Dr. Warren, ever the impresario of medical theater, did the popularizer of phrenology the ultimate honor by performing a public autopsy on Spurzheim, preceded by a lecture at Harvard (even autopsies by that time had on occasion become public spectacles!). One might even say that Warren literally dined Spurzheim alive and dissected him dead. After a funeral attended by thousands, the man who brought phrenology to Anglo-America became the second person to be buried in Cambridge’s newly opened Mount Auburn Cemetery—the nation’s first rural cemetery—while his phrenologically superior brain, weighing a massive fifty-seven ounces, was kept at the Boston Athenaeum for posterity.
After Spurzheim’s death, the task of championing the cause of phrenology fell to Combe and two newcomers, the Fowler brothers. While Combe remained the brain of phrenology (pun intended), it was the Fowlers who turned the new science into a practical profession and a feverish fad in America. The elder brother, Orson Fowler, who liked to ride the railroad because he believed it energized him with electricity, began his career in phrenology when he was still studying for the ministry at Amherst College. He teamed up with his classmate, Henry Ward Beecher, son of a Calvinist minister and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, in lecturing on the new science and giving character readings in nearby western Massachusetts towns. Upon graduation, while Beecher became a minister as planned (although he continued to use the pulpit to harangue his congregation about the virtues of phrenology), Fowler decided to answer his newfound calling. He initiated his younger brother, Lorenzo, into the cause, and the two started a lucrative phrenological tour in the Northeast, lecturing on the new science and examining heads for fees. The success of the Fowler brothers soon drew followers and emulators. “Others of the same stamp, foot-loose young men, some educated but others not, took off on the lecture trail,” observes John D. Davies in Phrenology, Fad and Science (1955). “During the 1830’s and 40’s there was probably not a village in the nation that did not entertain at least one visit from an itinerant practical phrenologist.”8 Thus, on the busy open roads of America appeared a new figure—peripatetic as a Yankee peddler, entertaining as the Siamese Twins and other showmen. In Orson Fowler’s own words, their modus operandi went like this: “Let me plant a course of lectures in a little village, containing but a single tavern, two stores, and a blacksmith’s shop, and a dozen houses, and they flock in from their mountains and their valleys for ten miles in all directions, and fill up any meeting-house that can be found.”9 The nation’s long-lasting craze for phrenology was aptly portrayed in this chapter’s Mark Twain epigraph, from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where the teenage protagonist lamented the unbearable boredom of village life after a spellbinding visit by a phrenologist and a mesmerizer, who often were the same person in disguises, as Melville shrewdly observed in The Confidence-Man.
To Combe and other brainier advocates, these practical phrenologists, who would apply calipers to measure head bumps and interpret characters for fees, had degraded the science and reduced it to the level of palmistry and fortune-telling, a mere charlatan’s trickery performed at county fairs and in village squares. Some enterprising phrenologists would even stage exhibitions of giants, dwarfs, and other freaks as added attractions, or run a gambling scheme on the side for extra profit. As the con man Duke of Bridgewater admitted in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he was a printer by trade but would also “do a little in patent medicines; theatre-actor—tragedy, you know; take a turn in mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing geography school for a change; sling a lecture, sometimes.” In other words, he would do “anything that comes handy.”10 But, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Fowler brothers, phrenology became a reputable science and art in nineteenth-century America, with a broad base and popular appeal. Phrenological theory thus was applied to fields as various as education, health, medicine, literature, religion, and career counseling. Celebrities who counted themselves as aficionados came from all walks of life, ranging from presidents to general
s, writers, doctors, and tycoons.
It is now a story known to all students of literature that one day in July 1849, Walt Whitman walked into the Phrenological Cabinet on Nassau Street in New York and asked to have his head examined by Lorenzo Fowler. This visit was a turning point in Whitman’s career, because his talent as a poet as well as his superior character as a man was confirmed by the phrenological findings:
You were blessed by nature with a good constitution and power to live to a good old age. . . . You have a large sized brain giving you much mentality as a whole. You are well calculated to enjoy social life—Few men have all the social feelings as strong as you have. . . . You choose to fight with tongue and pen rather than with your fist. . . . Your courage is probably more moral than physical. . . . You are a great reader and have a good memory of facts and events much better than their time. . . . You have a good command of language especially if excited.
Numerically, Whitman received top-notch scores on most of his faculties: 6 for Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Adhesiveness, Inhabitiveness, Combativeness, Alimentiveness, Cautiousness, Conscientiousness, Individuality, Form, Size, Weight, Locality, Eventuality, Comparison, and Human Nature; 6 to 7 for Self-Esteem, Firmness, Benevolence, and Sublimity.11 Whitman liked his phrenological chart so much that he would first publish it in the Brooklyn Daily Times and then bind it into the first three editions of Leaves of Grass, a collection of experimental poems full of phrenological references, such as
Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
Have you learn’d the physiology, phrenology, politics,
geography, pride, freedom, friendship of the land?