Flagg in 2007. A fascinating Fortean, fascinated by Korzybski.
Allen Elias Flagg was born 24 June 1922 in Ord, Nebraska. His grandfather, Asa, had been a Commodore China Steamship Navigation Co, and his father was born in Shanghai in 1895. Gould Bailey Flagg returned to his family home state of Maine in 1910, then moved to Nebraska to live with an uncle. He served during World War I. Some time between 1920 and 1923, Gould married a woman named Doris. She gave birth to three children, first two boys, then a daughter. Allan Elias Flagg was the eldest.
According to the 1930 census, Gould made a good living at selling automobiles: the family owned a home worth $6,000 dollars, this just as the Great Depression was settling not he nation, and the Flagg’s were at heart of the dustbowl. Also according to the census, the family spoke Chinese at home, which may account for some of Allen’s later interests. A decade later, the family was still in Ord, Gould still selling cars, but its fortunes had declined. They rented a home, at $18, with Gould only making $390 for 52 weeks of work (54 hours per week). Doris also did some work—she reported having worked 7 weeks in 1939 as a news reporter, making $10. Allen, 17, sold clothes, making $125 for 16 weeks of work in 1939, and even his 15 year old brother, Gould, Jr., put in 5 weeks of work as a custodian, bringing to the family pot $72. Only Priscilla, aged 13, reported no employment or income.
Flagg served during World War II as part of the marines. Afterwards, he attended New York University. The yearbook puts him in the school of arts, where, he said, he majored in mathematics and minored in English. Afterwards, he went to work as an insurance casualty underwriter, settling in New York City and its environs.
Allen Elias Flagg was born 24 June 1922 in Ord, Nebraska. His grandfather, Asa, had been a Commodore China Steamship Navigation Co, and his father was born in Shanghai in 1895. Gould Bailey Flagg returned to his family home state of Maine in 1910, then moved to Nebraska to live with an uncle. He served during World War I. Some time between 1920 and 1923, Gould married a woman named Doris. She gave birth to three children, first two boys, then a daughter. Allan Elias Flagg was the eldest.
According to the 1930 census, Gould made a good living at selling automobiles: the family owned a home worth $6,000 dollars, this just as the Great Depression was settling not he nation, and the Flagg’s were at heart of the dustbowl. Also according to the census, the family spoke Chinese at home, which may account for some of Allen’s later interests. A decade later, the family was still in Ord, Gould still selling cars, but its fortunes had declined. They rented a home, at $18, with Gould only making $390 for 52 weeks of work (54 hours per week). Doris also did some work—she reported having worked 7 weeks in 1939 as a news reporter, making $10. Allen, 17, sold clothes, making $125 for 16 weeks of work in 1939, and even his 15 year old brother, Gould, Jr., put in 5 weeks of work as a custodian, bringing to the family pot $72. Only Priscilla, aged 13, reported no employment or income.
Flagg served during World War II as part of the marines. Afterwards, he attended New York University. The yearbook puts him in the school of arts, where, he said, he majored in mathematics and minored in English. Afterwards, he went to work as an insurance casualty underwriter, settling in New York City and its environs.
These various elements of his background—growing up in house where English was not the only language, though it could have been, a mind drawn to mathematics and language—prepared him for an interest in General Semantics, which Alfred Korzybski had introduced to the United States in the 1930s and was taking off int he 1940s and 1950s. Korzybski argued that human understanding the world was mediated by language, and so the structure of language shaped the structures of thought. By paying attention to the way language worked, one could also train (or retrain) one’s thoughts. To this end, he set up the Institute of General Semantics, which headquarters moved from Chicago to Connecticut in 1946—in New York City’s orbit.
In 1952, according to his own recollections, Flagg attended a lecture at the New York Academy of Sciences given by Horace Kallen. Passed through the crowd was a form from the Institute, then with an office in the same building, and Flagg signed up for their mailings. He then started attending the New York Society for General Semantic’s lectures, and was involved with a reading group that went through Korzybski’s “Science and Sanity.” By 1959, he helped Harry Maynard teach an introduction to General Semantics at Great Neck High School. (This was not part of the school’s curriculum, but open to people int he community and done out of hours.) This led him to also teaching the subject at Queens College, then other, similar gigs.
For a long time—how long is unclear—Flagg was interested in dreams and their interpretation. This interest was heightened when, through a General Semantics board member, he met Clara Stewart, whom he married in 1966. She was interested in using dream symbols to improve work. (Her ideas had been taken from her first husband, the anthropologist Kilton Stewart, who studied the Senoi of Malaysia.) For Flagg, this seemed a natural adjunct to General Semantics. Traditional GS works on intellectual and cognitive factors, while dream work works on unconscious and intuitive factors. By paying attention to the symbolic acting out of dreams, one could combat anxieties, fears, and frustrations, the Flaggs explained din a 1974 newspaper article. The interest in dreams led him to Noetic Science, founded by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
Flagg’s interest in General Semantics and prescience continued through the 1960s and 1970s, as he moved up through the hierarchy of the Institute. He published she of his ideas, in articles and books. He was also a runner and continued to attend marine reunions.
The last I know of Flagg is from 2006, when he gave an interview to Etc., the Review of General Semantics.
********
I do not know how Flagg came to Fort, Forteanism, or the Fortean Society. It predates his interest in General Semantics, starting in the late 1940s. At first blush, the record suggests that General Semantics replaced Forteanism, but a closer look suggests that they supplemented each other. This complement is not surprising. A number of Forteans had an interest in both, as well as their much-maligned relative, Dianetics—A.E. Van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and William Burroughs prominent among them. Even Thayer came to see General Semantics as a “rich man’s” Fort, questioning the categories used to understand experience, although Korzybski’s system was burned by a hypertrophied (one is tempted to say otiose) vocabulary and, once one worked through it, a definite system and notion of truth, as opposed to Fort’s suspended judgment and skepticism.
Flagg appeared in five issues of Doubt between 1948 and 1950—that is after he graduated and before he found General Semantics. This pattern is not uncommon: as I’ve repeated ad nauseam, a number of Forteans found the Society in the late 1940s and dropped out as the next decade bloomed. In Flagg’s case, the drift away from the Society can be (partially) explained by his discovery of General Semantics. But even as he became less active in the Society—or, at least, even as Thayer bothered less to mention him, the two possibilities always hard to pull apart—he did not give up Forteanism entirely. Or—again: at least—he came back to Forteanism. In 1974, Etc., reported he gave a lecture and three-session workshop in San Diego which taught participants to practically apply “Dynamic Meditation, Haikus, Koans, Fortean Phenomena, and I CHING.” The aim was “for new insights into personal possibilities, into the interaction f our intellect and emotions, of logic and mysticism—not ‘either-or’ but ‘both-and.’” He shows up on the roster of the International Fortean Organization (INFO) in the mid-1990s.
As is often the case, though, it’s not always possible to be one-hundred percent sure that the person mentioned in Doubt is the same person under investigation. His first mention—assuming it was him—came in Doubt 20 (March 1948), when “Flagg” was among a number of members credited with sending in clippings about flying saucers. (Again as usual, given Thayer’s style, it is impossible to take Flagg to any particular clipping, or even now if the clipping he sent in was used.) The name appeared again the following issue, June 1938, Flagg credited with sending a contribution to Thayer for the establishment of his notional—and, in the end, only hypothetical—Fortean University. By this time, Flagg had graduated from NYU and was working, so he had some money to spare, and he seems to have been interested in the cause—and heretical causes more generally, given his later enthusiasms. There is a strong chance that the Flagg credited here was, indeed, Allen Flagg, given the two Gs an Thayer never mentioning another member with the same last name, but the point cannot be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Firmer ground is found in Doubt 24 (April 1949)—a contribution that shows how deep into the weeds Flagg had become with Forteana, but also exposed some of Thayer’s hypocrisy. Since very early in the run, he had been printing transcripts of the notes Fort made at the New York Public Library and the British Library—some of the tens of thousands of notes upon which his books were written and which Thayer absconded with after Fort’s death, to Theodore Dreiser’s fierce irritation. (These eventually ended up at the New York Public Library after Thayer’s death.) it was never clear the purpose of running the notes, though. They confused more often than enlightened—witness Ed Simpson’s bewilderment at reading them when he first received Doubt. The notes were done in abbreviated form, without any of Fort’s wit or whimsy. And were sometimes impossible to interpret. Thayer, for example, had no idea what an “A” on one note meant, and asked the readership if they could figure it out.
Thus, Allen Flagg made a breakthrough. The note in question referred to something that happened in August 1846—again, the utility of the notes is not clear. Flagg dug into the literature around that date, finding a number of references to shooting stars, comets, and the Aurora Borealis. (In New York, Flag would have had access to the same material Fort used.) The portion of the letter from Flagg that Thayer chose to print gives summaries of all these different reports, but does not conclude anything about the A. Thayer reserves that for himself—making it unclear whether it was Flagg who deduced the meaning or Thayer. According to Thayer, the A referred to “Auroral Phenomena.” Which may or may not be correct, but in any matter underlines how useless the notes were for most readers, given their lack of access to primary sources—and even if they did, it’s not clear what they were supposed to get from the notes once they were decoded.
The summer of 1949 saw the publication of Doubt 25, and Flagg was in that issue, too—four appearances over the course of six issues. (And there were no citations in issue 22, which was a list of books on Pre-Columbian contact with the Americas.) Really, he had only not been in issue 23. In this case, Flagg was adding—or had added—a clipping that had been overlooked in issue 24. Thayer had reviewed examples of Phantom Anesthetists—like the Mad Gasser of Mattoon—and had omitted the name of Carlo di Iorio, who had suffered from the effects of cycloprane in New Rochelle on 16 February. If nothing else, the clipping from Flagg proves that he was being attendant to the various Fortean phenomena as they were developed by Thayer. He knew the rubric.
Then, after that rash of appearances, Flagg went silent for more than a year—or his contributions were not used. He did not appear again until Doubt 30 (October 1950)—which was also the last mention of his name. He had four credits: one for a flying saucer contribution, otherwise undescribed; another for sending in an article about a meteor, again otherwise undescribed; a cryptozoological contribution, once more undescribed; and, finally, a religious item of some type. As in the other cases, Flagg’s name appeared in a paragraph of credits appended tot he column. This column, though is, short enough to summarize: there were two stories of preachers railing against Santa Claus as ant-Christian; another of a Japanese man arrested for saying he wanted t kill Douglas MacArthur, but then released when he said MacArthur was like Santa Claus, and so of course no one would kill him; and the Tennessee pastor he accidentally drowned his grand-daughter when baptizing her in a river.
That last contribution is the most interesting, as it suggests that there may have been political gripes that lead Flagg to the Fortean Society, or at least kept him there, but the evidence is too scanty to put hold any real interpretive weight. Otherwise, it is clear that he had an interest in aerial and astrological anomalies, and a ken for research. Other anomalies also seem to draw him, and while these—mysterious gassers, weird animals—were definitely in Fort’s own writing, Thayer developed them much more. It is not clear how Flagg understood these phenomena, but if we can speculate, a bit, based on his later ideas, than it is likely he did not see them as disproving science, but pointing toward a different kind of science, a more complete science, one that could account for the anomalies, and not just damn them.
Certainly General Semantics presented itself as a science, and judged on his writing from the 1970s, Flagg understood it as a science. That he continued to find refreshment in Fortean Phenomena and bind them together with his interest in Korzybski’s theories suggests a continuity in his thought, as though General Semantics gave him the framework he was hunting for, the one that Fort’s ideas showed was still needed. Others interested in Fort had similar leanings—the science fiction editor John W. Campbell, for example, and the popular science writer Maynard Shipley.
Still, this is speculation and post hoc rationalizations. Fort himself would have a field day taking it apart. There is just too little known about Flagg’s Fortean ideas to make any coherent and conclusive statement. He flapped in the Fortean breeze for a few years, then withdrew for other, what were for him more fertile, fields.
In 1952, according to his own recollections, Flagg attended a lecture at the New York Academy of Sciences given by Horace Kallen. Passed through the crowd was a form from the Institute, then with an office in the same building, and Flagg signed up for their mailings. He then started attending the New York Society for General Semantic’s lectures, and was involved with a reading group that went through Korzybski’s “Science and Sanity.” By 1959, he helped Harry Maynard teach an introduction to General Semantics at Great Neck High School. (This was not part of the school’s curriculum, but open to people int he community and done out of hours.) This led him to also teaching the subject at Queens College, then other, similar gigs.
For a long time—how long is unclear—Flagg was interested in dreams and their interpretation. This interest was heightened when, through a General Semantics board member, he met Clara Stewart, whom he married in 1966. She was interested in using dream symbols to improve work. (Her ideas had been taken from her first husband, the anthropologist Kilton Stewart, who studied the Senoi of Malaysia.) For Flagg, this seemed a natural adjunct to General Semantics. Traditional GS works on intellectual and cognitive factors, while dream work works on unconscious and intuitive factors. By paying attention to the symbolic acting out of dreams, one could combat anxieties, fears, and frustrations, the Flaggs explained din a 1974 newspaper article. The interest in dreams led him to Noetic Science, founded by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
Flagg’s interest in General Semantics and prescience continued through the 1960s and 1970s, as he moved up through the hierarchy of the Institute. He published she of his ideas, in articles and books. He was also a runner and continued to attend marine reunions.
The last I know of Flagg is from 2006, when he gave an interview to Etc., the Review of General Semantics.
********
I do not know how Flagg came to Fort, Forteanism, or the Fortean Society. It predates his interest in General Semantics, starting in the late 1940s. At first blush, the record suggests that General Semantics replaced Forteanism, but a closer look suggests that they supplemented each other. This complement is not surprising. A number of Forteans had an interest in both, as well as their much-maligned relative, Dianetics—A.E. Van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and William Burroughs prominent among them. Even Thayer came to see General Semantics as a “rich man’s” Fort, questioning the categories used to understand experience, although Korzybski’s system was burned by a hypertrophied (one is tempted to say otiose) vocabulary and, once one worked through it, a definite system and notion of truth, as opposed to Fort’s suspended judgment and skepticism.
Flagg appeared in five issues of Doubt between 1948 and 1950—that is after he graduated and before he found General Semantics. This pattern is not uncommon: as I’ve repeated ad nauseam, a number of Forteans found the Society in the late 1940s and dropped out as the next decade bloomed. In Flagg’s case, the drift away from the Society can be (partially) explained by his discovery of General Semantics. But even as he became less active in the Society—or, at least, even as Thayer bothered less to mention him, the two possibilities always hard to pull apart—he did not give up Forteanism entirely. Or—again: at least—he came back to Forteanism. In 1974, Etc., reported he gave a lecture and three-session workshop in San Diego which taught participants to practically apply “Dynamic Meditation, Haikus, Koans, Fortean Phenomena, and I CHING.” The aim was “for new insights into personal possibilities, into the interaction f our intellect and emotions, of logic and mysticism—not ‘either-or’ but ‘both-and.’” He shows up on the roster of the International Fortean Organization (INFO) in the mid-1990s.
As is often the case, though, it’s not always possible to be one-hundred percent sure that the person mentioned in Doubt is the same person under investigation. His first mention—assuming it was him—came in Doubt 20 (March 1948), when “Flagg” was among a number of members credited with sending in clippings about flying saucers. (Again as usual, given Thayer’s style, it is impossible to take Flagg to any particular clipping, or even now if the clipping he sent in was used.) The name appeared again the following issue, June 1938, Flagg credited with sending a contribution to Thayer for the establishment of his notional—and, in the end, only hypothetical—Fortean University. By this time, Flagg had graduated from NYU and was working, so he had some money to spare, and he seems to have been interested in the cause—and heretical causes more generally, given his later enthusiasms. There is a strong chance that the Flagg credited here was, indeed, Allen Flagg, given the two Gs an Thayer never mentioning another member with the same last name, but the point cannot be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Firmer ground is found in Doubt 24 (April 1949)—a contribution that shows how deep into the weeds Flagg had become with Forteana, but also exposed some of Thayer’s hypocrisy. Since very early in the run, he had been printing transcripts of the notes Fort made at the New York Public Library and the British Library—some of the tens of thousands of notes upon which his books were written and which Thayer absconded with after Fort’s death, to Theodore Dreiser’s fierce irritation. (These eventually ended up at the New York Public Library after Thayer’s death.) it was never clear the purpose of running the notes, though. They confused more often than enlightened—witness Ed Simpson’s bewilderment at reading them when he first received Doubt. The notes were done in abbreviated form, without any of Fort’s wit or whimsy. And were sometimes impossible to interpret. Thayer, for example, had no idea what an “A” on one note meant, and asked the readership if they could figure it out.
Thus, Allen Flagg made a breakthrough. The note in question referred to something that happened in August 1846—again, the utility of the notes is not clear. Flagg dug into the literature around that date, finding a number of references to shooting stars, comets, and the Aurora Borealis. (In New York, Flag would have had access to the same material Fort used.) The portion of the letter from Flagg that Thayer chose to print gives summaries of all these different reports, but does not conclude anything about the A. Thayer reserves that for himself—making it unclear whether it was Flagg who deduced the meaning or Thayer. According to Thayer, the A referred to “Auroral Phenomena.” Which may or may not be correct, but in any matter underlines how useless the notes were for most readers, given their lack of access to primary sources—and even if they did, it’s not clear what they were supposed to get from the notes once they were decoded.
The summer of 1949 saw the publication of Doubt 25, and Flagg was in that issue, too—four appearances over the course of six issues. (And there were no citations in issue 22, which was a list of books on Pre-Columbian contact with the Americas.) Really, he had only not been in issue 23. In this case, Flagg was adding—or had added—a clipping that had been overlooked in issue 24. Thayer had reviewed examples of Phantom Anesthetists—like the Mad Gasser of Mattoon—and had omitted the name of Carlo di Iorio, who had suffered from the effects of cycloprane in New Rochelle on 16 February. If nothing else, the clipping from Flagg proves that he was being attendant to the various Fortean phenomena as they were developed by Thayer. He knew the rubric.
Then, after that rash of appearances, Flagg went silent for more than a year—or his contributions were not used. He did not appear again until Doubt 30 (October 1950)—which was also the last mention of his name. He had four credits: one for a flying saucer contribution, otherwise undescribed; another for sending in an article about a meteor, again otherwise undescribed; a cryptozoological contribution, once more undescribed; and, finally, a religious item of some type. As in the other cases, Flagg’s name appeared in a paragraph of credits appended tot he column. This column, though is, short enough to summarize: there were two stories of preachers railing against Santa Claus as ant-Christian; another of a Japanese man arrested for saying he wanted t kill Douglas MacArthur, but then released when he said MacArthur was like Santa Claus, and so of course no one would kill him; and the Tennessee pastor he accidentally drowned his grand-daughter when baptizing her in a river.
That last contribution is the most interesting, as it suggests that there may have been political gripes that lead Flagg to the Fortean Society, or at least kept him there, but the evidence is too scanty to put hold any real interpretive weight. Otherwise, it is clear that he had an interest in aerial and astrological anomalies, and a ken for research. Other anomalies also seem to draw him, and while these—mysterious gassers, weird animals—were definitely in Fort’s own writing, Thayer developed them much more. It is not clear how Flagg understood these phenomena, but if we can speculate, a bit, based on his later ideas, than it is likely he did not see them as disproving science, but pointing toward a different kind of science, a more complete science, one that could account for the anomalies, and not just damn them.
Certainly General Semantics presented itself as a science, and judged on his writing from the 1970s, Flagg understood it as a science. That he continued to find refreshment in Fortean Phenomena and bind them together with his interest in Korzybski’s theories suggests a continuity in his thought, as though General Semantics gave him the framework he was hunting for, the one that Fort’s ideas showed was still needed. Others interested in Fort had similar leanings—the science fiction editor John W. Campbell, for example, and the popular science writer Maynard Shipley.
Still, this is speculation and post hoc rationalizations. Fort himself would have a field day taking it apart. There is just too little known about Flagg’s Fortean ideas to make any coherent and conclusive statement. He flapped in the Fortean breeze for a few years, then withdrew for other, what were for him more fertile, fields.
