THE
SQUARE PEGS
Some Americans Who Dared
to be Different
by Irving Wallace
First published by
Alfred A. Knopf
1957
Collector of the Bizarre
Irving Wallace began collecting zany characters at the age of 16, when he went to interview Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who believed the earth was flat. Although not convinced, Wallace developed an abiding interest in square pegs which resulted in this delightful collection of delectable nuts.
“A vastly readable and amusing account of nine American eccentrics…”
—Boston Sun Herald
“Mr. Wallace treats his subjects with a kind of amused and gentle affection… the reader will find not only entertainment but much food for thought.”
—New York Times
“Amusing tales… Its anecdotal quality makes it a good bedside book.”
—Harper’s
“A wonderful collection of crackpots.”
—Raleigh, N.C. Observer
“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse
went on, “and they drew all manner of things—
everything that began with an M—”
“Why with an M?” said Alice.
“Why not?” said the March Hare.
LEWIS CARROLL
Contents
I • IN DEFENSE OF THE SQUARE PEG … Wherein we meet Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who believed the earth was flat, and wherein we learn the need for encouraging individualism and nonconformity.
II • THE KING OF THIRTY-SIXTH STREET … Wherein we meet Baron James A. Harden-Hickey, American ruler of Trinidad, who became an authority on the art of suicide.
III • THE MAN WHO WAS PHILEAS FOGG … Wherein we meet George Francis Train, millionaire member of the Commune, who was the first man to travel around the world in eighty days.
IV • THE FREE LOVER WHO RAN FOR PRESIDENT … Wherein we meet Victoria Woodhull, stockbroker, spiritualist, and prostitute, who competed with Ulysses S. Grant for tenancy of the White House.
V • THE FORTY-NINER WHO ABOLISHED CONGRESS … Wherein we meet Joshua Norton, self-appointed Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, who issued orders to Abraham Lincoln.
VI • THE LADY WHO MOVED SHAKESPEARE’S BONES … Wherein we meet Delia Bacon, schoolteacher frustrated in love, who became the implacable enemy of the Bard of Avon.
VII • THE EXPLORER OF THE HOLLOW EARTH … Wherein we meet John Cleves Symmes, hero of the War of 1812, who planned an expedition into the interior world through holes in the North and South poles.
VIII • THE EDITOR WHO WAS A COMMON SCOLD … Wherein we meet Anne Royall, widow and author, who interviewed a Chief Executive while he was in the nude.
IX • THE FIRST IN THE EAST … Wherein we meet Timothy Dexter, merchant prince and foe of grammar, who sent coals to Newcastle and published a book without punctuation.
A NOTE ON Principal Sources
Illustrations
Baron James A. Harden-Hickey
(Brown Brothers)
George Francis Train
(Brown Brothers, from original
negative in the Meserve Collection)
Victoria Woodhull
(Bettmann Archive)
Emperor Norton I
(California State Library)
Delia Bacon
(New York Public Library)
Captain John Cleves Symmes
(Library of the Ohio Historical Society)
Lord Timothy Dexter
(Newburyport [Massachusetts] Public Library)
I
In Defense of the Square Peg
“… a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole”
SYDNEY SMITH
On an autumn afternoon in 1932, when I was sixteen years old and filled with wonder, I sat in an office in the medieval American community of Zion City, Illinois, and heard a strange and wealthy man named Wilbur Glenn Voliva tell me that the world was not round. “The world is flat like a saucer,” Voliva said. “The North Pole is in the center of the flat earth, and the South Pole is a great ice barrier around the rim. The sky is a solid dome above, like an inverted blue basin, and the sun, the moon, the stars hang from it like a chandelier from a ceiling.”
This theory, with which I was already familiar, made a deep impression on me, not so much for its scientific stimulation as for its oddity. It was to this incredible interview that I like to attribute my first interest in the role played by the extreme individualist and nonconformist in our society. Furthermore, it was to this interview, I suppose, that I must trace the beginnings of this biography of American eccentricity.
Of course, I had always known about Wilbur Glenn Voliva. I had been raised to maturity in the shadow of his singular personality. During the first eighteen years of my life I dwelt with my parents in the small, pleasant, half-rural, half-of Zion City, had been one John Alexander Dowie, a Scot who studied for the ministry at Edinburgh University and then went on to establish a pastorate near Sydney, Australia. In 1888 Dowie brought his theories of faith healing to America. At the Columbian Exposition in Chicago he pitched a tent, and there, as Prophet Elijah III, competed with John Philip Sousa and Sandow for customers. He soon had 50,000 followers and sufficient funds to purchase ten square miles of land on the shores of Lake Michigan north of Chicago and establish his private religious settlement, Zion City. From the pulpit of his enormous Christian Apostolic Church he thundered forth against the sins of sex, oysters, and life insurance. He built huge lace, candy, and furniture factories, and he made $20,000,000.
When he tried to spread his gospel, Dowie met his first reverses. He failed in New York, in London, and finally in Mexico. In desperation, he sent to Australia for one of his most successful assistant prophets, a thirty-seven-year-old Indiana-born preacher named Wilbur Glenn Voliva. By the time Voliva reached Zion City, old Dowie had suffered a paralytic stroke. In a moment of weakness, he gave Voliva power of attorney, and Voliva savagely turned upon him. In 1905 Voliva ordered his superior suspended from the church and exiled from Zion City on the charges that he had appropriated $2,000,000 of community funds for private luxuries and that he had engaged in polygamy. Dowie was driven to insanity and finally to his death two years later. Thereafter, Voliva was dictator, and the 6,000 persons who depended upon his tabernacle for spiritual comfort and upon his industries for physical sustenance were entirely in his grip.
Yet, when I was led into his presence in an expansive office of Shiloh House on the day of our appointment, I was agreeably surprised. In his record I had read only ruthlessness, and I had been apprehensive. But seated in the straight chair behind his walnut desk, he had the look of a benevolent businessman. His head was massive, partially bald, and his eyes were quick. He closely resembled portraits I had seen of President William McKinley, but when he grasped his black satin robe and began to speak, it was not McKinley but Savonarola.
Voliva made it plain at once that the Bible was his entire scientific library. Astronomers were “ignorant fools.” The Scriptures suggested a flat world, and Voliva was a fundamentalist. The earth was as “flat as a saucer, a pancake, a stove lid.” It was surrounded by an enormous wall of ice that was the South Pole. “That barrier exists,” he said. “If you doubt me, then go read the testimony of Sir James Ross, the only explorer who ever went all the way around the world near the inside of the ice wall, sailing some sixty thousand miles and taking nearly four years to make the trip. The Byrd expedition was only further proof of that wall. They found an unconquerable barrier what I call the falling-off place, the end of the world.”
Voliva’s conception of the universe, with its blue, solid roof, was e
qually bizarre. “Books tell you the sun is ninety-three million miles away,” he said. “That’s nonsense. The sun is only three thousand miles away, and is only thirty-two miles in diameter. It circles above the plane earth, spirally, and makes one circuit every twenty-four hours, always at the same height. All that talk about the rising and setting sun is an optical illusion.” On another occasion, when asked to explain why he thought the sun so near the earth, he remarked: “God made the sun to light the earth, and therefore must have placed it close to the task it was designed to do. What would you think of a man who built a house in Zion and put a lamp to light it in Kenosha, Wisconsin?”
During our hour meeting, I timorously suggested that I had prepared a scientific list of proofs usually given in support of a globular earth. These proofs were, indeed, sophomoric, but they were the best I knew at that time, and I thought they would serve to draw Voliva out. With great forbearance, he asked for my proofs. I presented them in the form of a series of questions. Why does a vessel disappear in the distance when it steams away? How can astronomers predict eclipses? Why is the earth’s shadow on the moon round? How was Magellan able to circumnavigate the earth?
Obviously, Voliva had been through all this before, and he recited his answers as if by rote. “Ships don’t disappear in the distance, at all You can see a ship twenty-five miles out at sea if you look through field glasses. According to scientists, the curvature of the earth for those twenty-five miles, allowing for refraction, should be three hundred and fifty-eight feet. If the earth is round, how can you see your ship over a hump of water three hundred and fifty-eight feet high? … Modern astronomers weren’t the first to predict eclipses. Before Columbus, when sensible people knew the world was flat, they were constantly predicting eclipses with accuracy. One old-time scientist, who knew the earth was flat, predicted fifteen thousand eclipses and they all turned out exactly right. As for that round shadow on the moon, the flat earth would still cast a round shadow. A saucer is round, isn’t it? … Of course Magellan sailed around the world and came back to where he started. He went around the flat earth exactly as a Victrola needle goes around a phonograph record. Millions of men have sailed around the world from east to west, and west to east. It can be done on a saucer, too. But do you know of anyone who has ever sailed around the world from north to south? Of course not. Those who tried fell off . That’s why so many explorers have disappeared.”
Well, that all took place in 1932, and now it seems very long ago. The depression years ruined Voliva’s industries, rival churches moved their missionaries in to destroy his religious control, and finally a newly enlightened generation rejected his candidates at the polls. His grip was broken. By the time he died, in October 1942, Zion City had cigarettes, pork, lipstick, and a physician at last.
Wilbur Glenn Voliva was wrong, of course. He was a throwback to a darker era of ignorance and superstition. He was a bigot. He was a tyrant. Perhaps he was even a fool. He stood for nothing I then believed or now believe. But occasionally, still, I remember him with grateful affection. For, by his existence, he taught me two lessons: first, that I must never forget Voltaire’s promise to Rousseau: “I do not believe in a word that you say, but I will defend with my life, if need be, your right to say it”; and second, that I must never forget that the nonconformist, no matter how eccentric, no matter if pathetically wrong or divinely right, deserves tolerance, respect, and the human freedom to be different.
The high school debate?
My colleagues and I won it easily. The judges, you see, were also no more than aged sixteen and they, too, in those shining years, had not yet become the fainthearted captives of conformity.
If it was Voliva who stimulated my first interest in nonconformity, it was certainly the venerable Sydney Smith, English preacher, editor, and wit, who inadvertently suggested the framework for this biographical examination of eccentricity. During the course of a lecture delivered before the Royal Institution in 1824, Smith stated:
“If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes, some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong, and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other.”
While Smith’s graphic analogy was meant to illustrate the variance between most people and the roles assigned to them in life, it was corrupted by a passage of time to mean something quite different. For from this speech evolved the familiar expression “like a square peg in a round hole,” indicating the unusual individualist who could not fit into a niche of his society. When I determined to investigate, and recount, in terms of human beings, the drama of Americans in history at odds with the mores of their times, I decided I would limit my search to Smith’s “square person” or square peg who was trying to fit himself “into the round hole.” To my mind, the square peg represented the eccentric personality, and the round hole represented the pattern of conformity demanded by the society in which he lived.
The usual dictionary definition of conformity is “correspondence in form, manner, or character; a point of resemblance, as of tastes … Harmony; agreement; congruity . . Action, or an act, of conforming to something established, as law or fashion; compliance; acquiescence.” In short, the conformist moves in step with his fellows, following the social standards, established and supported by law, religion, and custom, generally practiced by the majority in his time. Various psychological tests, given through the years, have indicated that from ninety to ninety-eight persons out of every hundred conform to the dictates of their law, religion, and custom. They conform for many reasons: because it is easier and less exhausting; because it is simpler and less confusing; because it is safe and less dangerous; because it enhances the ego and invites less disapproval; because it is more relaxing and less lonely; and because it is a habit of long training, and less radical. No doubt, many of these very reasons for conformity had great appeal to Mary Shelley, who had lived with a total nonconformist for eight years. Shortly after the drowning of her poet-husband she was urged to send her son to an advanced school, where the boy might be encouraged to think for himself. “To think for himself!” she exclaimed. “Oh, my God, teach him to think like other people!”
The most spectacular type of nonconformist is, of course, the eccentric. The word itself derives from the Greek “out of the center.” The historical and literary definition of eccentricity is “deviation from customary conduct; oddity … divergence from the usual.” Psychiatric sources are even more explicit. According to one, eccentricity means “off center or unsymmetrical with reference to a center; hence odd in behavior.” According to another, eccentricity denotes “unusual freedom from conventional types of response.”
While psychiatrists, in their exploration of eccentricity, have found that causes vary widely in individual cases, they have emerged with a few basic generalities. Most full-time eccentrics are regarded as psychopathic personalities who, in the words of a British psychiatric dictionary, “have been from childhood or early youth abnormal in their emotional reactions and in their general behavior, but who do not reach, except perhaps episodically, a degree of abnormality amounting to certifiable insanity, and who show no intellectual defect. They exhibit lack of perseverance, persistent failure to profit by experience, and habitual lack of ordinary prudence.”
Dr. Eugen Kahn, who was Sterling Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University, finds that most eccentrics, emerging from an insecure childhood, grow up in opposition to their environment, intent on making their way alone. Usually, they become obsessed by some “overvalued idea,” and their personalities are clouded by dementia præcox, excessive fanaticism, paranoia, and schizophrenia. They may be more imaginative and even more intelligent
than the so-called average person, but at the same time they are likely to be more immature and impractical.
Above all, most psychiatrists seem to agree that the lot of the eccentric is unhappier than that of the conforming “average personality.” If the eccentric is sufficiently integrated to succeed in some field, to gain wealth or power, he is admired and respected and his oddity is overlooked. But if the eccentric fails, he is pitied or ridiculed and shunned as something strange. Most often, the penalties for deviation from the norm are harsh. The eccentric is alone, suspected, and often hurt. Constantly, he is hounded by society’s watchdogs the government, the church, the social organization, the community and he suffers physical punishments such as arrest, exile, personal violence, or spiritual punishments in the form of social boycott and disapproval.
Yet, despite these unhappy prospects, men have continued to indulge in eccentricity sometimes because they could not do otherwise, but as often because they preferred the freer air of nonconformity. And all through history these few individualists, though often persecuted by the many, have had encouragement from the best minds of their day. Ralph Waldo Emerson dared, as we shall see, to flaunt public opinion in assisting the eccentric Delia Bacon. “The virtue in most request is conformity,” wrote Emerson. “Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs … Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”
In all ages the eccentric perhaps because of, and not in spite of, his nonconformity has furthered the cause of science, built great empires, improved the public welfare, and created memorable works of art. In their own time such men as Kant, Thoreau, Paganini, Pascal, Disraeli, Poe, Whitman, Heine, and Goldsmith were considered eccentric. History has recorded countless other names of rare individualists ranging from the poet Charles Baudelaire, with his green hair and his confessions of cannibalism, to the millionaire businessman Russell Sage, with his pride in eight-dollar suits and formal lunches at which he served only apples all of whom contributed to their contemporary society and to civilization. Yet, the major bequest of most eccentrics has been something less tangible. In subtle ways, they have helped their fellows profit by their original example. “Eccentrics do a lot of good,” Henry Morton Robinson once wrote. “They point out what the rest of us forget the delightfully erratic possibilities of human life. They get far away from the good, the true, and the beautiful, substituting for this dour trinity the rarer qualities of the rare, the cuckoo, and the courageous.”
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