During the Society’s early years, one of the brightest lights in the Fortean firmament was Frederick S. Hammett. And he continued to shine among Forteans, even after his passing.
Like Tiffany Thayer, Hammett could trace his ancestry back to early colonial settling of North America—in his case a paternal relative settled in Newport, Rhode Island around 1685. His father was a businessman. Hammett loved his mother—indeed, he confessed Oedipal tendencies—but also recognized that she had “the disposition of all the cats rolled into one person with all their meanness distilled and triple distilled into one essence.”
Hammett was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on 18 November 1885. The first of a number of serious health problems started when he was ten. e was infected with strep while undergoing tooth surgery, developed painful abscesses and suffered neuralgia for many years. Nonetheless, he graduated from Tufts in 1908. Bachelor of Arts in hand, he moved to Detroit that year, where he married Lena Lewis and met the future Fortean T. Swann Harding. Both worked at Difco, the Digestive Ferments Company, which produced media for bacteria culture. The two young men were very unsettled. As Hammett later remembered,
“Conditions at Detroit were quite entirely different with us. We were both in the beaker of experience being assayed from the impurities of mind engendered by our natural emotional reactions to disillusionment. We both of us said and did what we thought without regard to the proprieties at times and at other times attempted to cover over the stink-hole of the past by showing we could be perfect gentlemen if we wished. We were whisked hither and thither willy-nilly by the fire of our turbulent emotions and we had a bully time of it at that. Pathetic, lonely, but withal having a bully time of it.” (Hammett to Harding, 15 March 1924, Harding papers.)
Eventually, Hammett made his way back east, taking a MS from the Rhode Island State College (now the University of Rhode Island) in 1911, a master’s of art from Harvard in 1914, and a Ph.D. from that same school in 1915. After two years teaching at USC, he returned to Harvard in 1917, first as a teacher and then, during World War I, as Secretary of Harvard’s graduate school of medicine. It was during this period that Hammett, just entering his thirties, endured a number of changes. He and his first wife divorced; he had all of his teeth pulled, ending the chronic neuralgia that had plagued him; he moved to Philadelphia and remarried; he went to work at the Wistar Institute for Anatomy, near the University of Pennsylvania, and met Stanley Reimann, who would, in time, become a patron.
Hammett had interests beyond the laboratory. He was a Republican, and strong supporter of Calvin Coolidge. He practiced Episcopalianism. He studied ancient Hindu science and medicine, which influenced his religion. In 1927, he published an essay in “Open Court” (publishing home of another Fortean: Roy Petran Lingle) arguing that religion—as currently conceived—and science—by definition—could not define ultimate reality, so he advocated the grounding of identity in the Hindu ideal of a universal self. Hammett was also a great fan of the modern literature. He waxed eloquent over Joyce’s Ulysses and when Harding introduced him to James Branch Cabell (favorite of another Fortean: Burton Rascoe). “Ah mi. After reading him all else is dust and ashes in my furnace,” he sighed. Harding wanted to write literature in the same vein, and Hammett was a constant critic and admirer.
In 1927, his life again underwent a dramatic upheaval, although at the time he only knew half of it. Reimann invited him to be director of research at the Lankenau Hospital Research Institute in Philadelphia, an affiliation he maintained for the next twenty years. Hammett brought a rigorous and unusual approach to his research. The Institute was concerned with studying cancer but Hammett insisted rather than just studying the pathological processes researchers should investigate all phases of growth. In particular, he asked what were the chemical factors that control cell division. As a model organism, he used peas and onions, which caused many cancer specialists to scoff. The approach was prescient, though, and would underwrite what later became developmental biology—at the time studies in development were out of favor for research into transmission genetics.
Reimann protected Hammett, though Hammett still had trouble fitting in. He could be unctuous, he admitted:
“I have realized in the past two or three years that what I have meant as courtesy and liking for individuals in my approach to them has been construed as an attempt to ingratiate myself in their good graces. This conturing has been due to my mannerism which in turn is an hereditary taint from my probably semitic ancestry; prehaps [sic] through the spanish jew or, as I rather like to prefer it, through the moorish gametes.” (Hammett to Harding, 13 March 1924).
He also did not have a whole lot of respect for Reimann, telling Harding,
“The Director to be is a perfectly corking chap; he has a fine social presence; can play the pianerr to beat the band; can get up a playlet for the nurses; and is deservedly well liked by everybody. But—as a researcher he is a fliv. He has absolutely no conception whatsoever of what research is and of course no conception of how to do it. Yet—he gets the Directorship of this Institute (the new one) with a whale of a salary; and a trip to Europe with all expenses paid. Yet I who am a pretty decent researcher get nothing of this type at all.” (Hammett to Harding, 18 May 1925).
He and Harding shared a disdain for the institution of science, which they saw as relatively corrupt. Hammett told Harding that he had inherited his mother’s disposition, but was keeping it in check with humor—a trait he thought he and Harding shared:
“It seems to me that our egotism is tinged with a certain amused realization of our fallibility; with the idea that we are tremendously pleased with our ideas because they appear to be ours; but that back of it all we don’t take ourselves so very goddamned seriously. We admit that the other fellow has a perfect right to have that particular set of ideas which best suits his temperamental demands; and moreover we keep for ourselves the right to change our ideas as the mood hits. We may at the moment rant and swear and affirm and deny and expostulate the correctness of a particular conception; and the next week be ready to uphold the opposite. We recognize that all is change; that we, wise as we are, can never be sure of what is so and what is not so, and so we play with ideas, holding to them as long as they amuse us; and discarding them when more amusing ones crop up. We know that ideas change with change in circumstance, that trends flow on surge up and die away, to give place to other trends; this we know from the wide range of our reading, both of philosophy and of customs; we who scrabble in our interests from THE GOLDEN BOUGH and Havelock Ellis to Veblen and Mencken; from Cabell to Chesterton—and from Dos Passos to Strunsky can not but help be non serious as to our own. Wand shows himself the circumscribed ass of ignorance.” [Hammett to Harding, n.d., 1920s].
Reimann remembered,
“He was a hard taskmaster, continually preaching to his associates and assistants on the necessity of employing only chemicals of utmost purity; on the use of many more control than experimental animals; on rigid cleanliness of laboratories and apparatus. He generalized rapidly; he loved arguments and often went out of his way to stir up controversy. Sometimes he was vitriolic and as can be imagined, some with whom he disputed took a long time to forget him when he showed that they were wrong.” (78)
In the early 1930s, Hammett divorced for the second (and final) time, and married for the third (and final) time. This time it was to Dorothy Wall, a physician whom he had met at her experimental lab. He also opened a marine experimental station in North Truro, on Cape Cod, near Provincetown. A flu he had contracted in 1927 had infected him with tuberculosis, which now became patent. He lost a lot of weight, became week, and could work no more than four hours a day, yet felt that he was forced to stay on at the Institute by Reimann, who warned that if he quit the Institute would lose funding from the International Cancer Foundation. [Harding to Hammett, 10 May 1934.] Hammett set up shop in Provincetown, at 493 Commercial Street, building a lab in his backyard. He did not see the researchers in Philadelphia, but insisted that all research being sent out for publication first be checked by him.
The tuberculosis cost him his battle over his own disposition. He confided to Harding,
“Ever since I have been afflicted with my present disorder I have felt pressed for time; terribly in a hurry to get things done; to get them finished; for I do not know how long I will have before the old man comes to take me away; as a result I have developed a real impatience; and from that impatience has sprung an irascibility which is not pleasing. I am not a pleasant person any more and it is too bad.” [Hammett to Harding, 12 December 1937].
And it is true that the mid-1930s saw Hammett working hard, despite his illness. He self-published a pamphlet “The Nature of Growth: A Logistic Inquiry,” which argued that growth should be studied as a singular phenomenon from four different directions: physics, chemistry, genetics, and anatomy. (The booklet had neither punctuation nor capital letters, which may have represented the speed with which he wrote it, or been an experiment in modernist literature.) He founded The Society for the Study of Growth and oversaw publication of its journal Growth, which tried to approach the topic as a unified problem, neither divided by taxonomic categories nor physiological ones. In 1938, he published an article on his vision for the future of biological research, which he suggested should be conducted by independent research institutes based around what he saw as the four essential areas of biology: physics, chemistry, genetics, and anatomy. (Later, he would condemn the National Science Foundation for restricting biological research.)
These were dark years, but there were moments of light. He belonged to a group known as the Beachcombers, which patronized the arts of Provincetown, and was also President of the Provincetown Arts Association. Harding wrote positively about him in Scientific American and got the New York Times’s scientific reporter Walter Kaempffert to do a piece on Hammett. He made friends with a young man across the street—the future Fortean Charles Hapgood. And he became involved with the Fortean Society, warranting his first mention in January 1940. At the time, he was in Florida, doing marine research and trying to recover his health. The rains there, though, drove him back north and as World War II came on he felt “useless” as he told Hapgood. [Hammett to Hapgood, 11 December 1941, Hapgood papers.] For days at a time he was toxemic and short of breath. His Hindu-inspired belief in the universal self meant that he felt he should be helping the betterment of humankind, but he could not, and the world was worse than he could imagine. Less than a month after Pearl Harbor he complained,
“I do not know as I have ever been so conscious of helpessness and uselessness as I am at present. While this sense is contributed to and aroused by the fact my physical state confines me to the bed for but three or four hours a day; it is brought to focus by my realization that the human race has just gone completely haywire. To think that man is killing man all over the world; instead of spending his energy and the products of his work in helping man galls me without end. And here I am impotent to be of use; either physically; mentally; or emotionally. Any word I should write against this wave of insanity to destruction would be more noiseless than a fart in a gale of Provincetown wind. And I am so saddened be [sic] the exhibition of human stupidity that I am incapable of doing anything save immersing myself into my work of computation of the correlations between several stages of Obelia development.”
After the War, Hammett’s research, which had been dwindling, came to an end. The marine lab in North Truro was closed in 1946: buildings and equipment had become run-down, and pollution had killed off much of the animal life. The following year he resigned as director of research at Lankenau and gave up his role with Growth to become fully retired. The reviews of his life’s work in Growth showed that there had been many strains, and it seems clear that both sides were happy that Hammett was finally giving up his positions. But he continued doing some scientific writing as well as indulging his avocations. In 1950, he published in the history of science journal Osiris “Agricultural and Botanic Knowledge of India.” He also became more involved with the Fortean Society.
Hammett’s name appeared in the Fortean Society Magazine throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s. He sent in an article on one of Thayer’s favorite topics—astronomical geography. It pointed out that the distance between the earth and the sun had been recalculated by 100,000 miles. (It is only a small change by percent, but Thayer had great fun given how big the whole numbers were.) Another article told of a hollow maple tree and still another of green rain. He reviewed a book for Thayer that argued the earth was an organism and we humans its mitochondria. Great fun, he said, but fantasy.
Hammett even worked Fort into a couple of his scientific writings. A 1946 article for Scientific Monthly on ‘Integration in Science Teaching’ began with a quote from The Book of the Damned: “Everything in our experience is only a part of something else that in turn is only part of still something else,” asking who could deny such wisdom? His review of The Chemistry and Physiology of Growth referenced Fort, as did an research article that he wrote.
Thayer was impressed with having Hammett on the rolls. Here was a Capital-S scientist who looked skeptically on his own profession and offered to other scientists a chance to consider Fort. In 1946, when Thayer was replacing founders who had passed or quit, he made Hammett an honorary Founder, taking the place of Booth Tarkington (who died in May 1946). Thayer wrote, “In short, Frederick S. Hammett is that singular if not unique anomoly [sic], a Fortean convert in the enemy camp, and as such we are immensely proud of him.” When Hammett himself passed, in April 1953—the victim of cancer—Thayer was insistent that this Honorary Founder position be given to another scientist: it was given to—and accepted by—Anton Julius Carlson.
But Hammett’s Fortean career had not ended. After spending the war working for a predecessor of the CIA, Charles Hapgood became a professor—of history, economics, and anthropology—during which time he became intrigued—like so many Forteans before him—with the North Pole. In 1958 he published “The Earth’s Shifting Crust,” which argued that the Pole had shifted dramatically throughout history, with catastrophic results. Albert Einstein wrote the foreward. In 1966, Hapgood was considering a revised version of the book, and was also working with Elwood Babbitt, a New England medium.
Here, in Hapgood’s words, was Hammett’s final contribution to the Fortean cause:
In my second reading I decided that I would try to renew contact with Dr. Hammett. I hoped that we could have some more of the lively talks I had enjoyed so much in the old days. I therefore handed Babbitt [his medium] a billet with Hammett’s name and a few questions. As in the first reading, he held it in his hand without unfolding it.
Soon Babbitt said a spirit had entered the room and did I know a Frederick Hammett? I replied that I did and was about to ask Hammett the questions I had put in the note when he stopped me and himself repeated the questions. I thought later that he must have gotten the questions from the folded note by a gift of psychometry similar to that of the psychic Peter Hurkos.
I asked Hammett what sort of life he was now leading, He said that he was able to engage in some activities that he had been unable to undertake in his physical lifetime, but did not go into detail. He discussed my personal problems just as he used to do, displaying intimate knowledge of them and showing the same practical wisdom I remembered. I could not doubt for moment that I was indeed talking with my old friend. I continued to consider the possibility that Babbitt was doing this by mind reading. But what is mind reading? And how could mind reading result in the reconstruction of a whole personality and recreate mental capacities peculiar to Hammett and foreign to Elwood Babbitt? I decided that the hypothesis of mind reading would not hold water.
On several later occasions, talks with Hammett profoundly influenced my personal work. I had been associate professor of history at Keene State College, a part of the University of New Hampshire, for ten years. I had had a free life there; no one interfered with my teaching or writing. In 1965, however, a change of administration and new authoritarian policies brought conflict to the campus. In the fall of 1966, I left the college and went to teach at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, where I thought my situation would be better.
Unfortunately, at New England college [sic] I found difficulties of a different kind. Here the faculty, rather than the deans, controlled the curriculum, and group teaching had been introduced. This meant that every detail of a course had to be agreed to by the five or ten instructors who were going to give it. I found that I could not teach the subjects I wanted to teach. I had prepared a course in the History of Science but was not allowed to give it. My interest in psychic research brought positive reaction from the students but negative reactions from the faculty. I found that many masters could be worse then one. In a session with Babbitt on March 12, 1967, I put this problem to Dr. Hammett, and made the following notation in the diary:
I asked Hammett, who came and was very vehement on the necessity of my finding a situation where I can be with people who value me, and where I can do the things I want to do. He suggested lecturing, saying that I was at my best when expounding to an audience on what I really believe. He suggested not only lecture tours but short courses to be offered to colleges////across the country, four to six weeks in length. He urged me to send announcements to hundreds of colleges. He promised I would get a good response and would be successful.
By the time this conversation occurred I had been with Babbitt for six months, during which time I had begun to practice automatic writing. I sat at my typewriter and wrote whatever came into my mind, by what is called free association, keeping my own critical faculties out of it. I frequently got communications in this way that seemed to originate with deceased persons, but up to this time I had not been at all sure that the communications weren’t more or less colored by my own thoughts.
I decided to put this faculty to work with the syllabus. I made a preliminary draft, roughing out the plan of the proposed course. Then I sat at my table with the draft and read it aloud. As I read each clause I listened in my own head for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from Hammett. Every time I got a negative from him I drew a line through the word or the phrase in question. Afterward, when I reread the whole syllabus, I was astonished to find that Hammett had unerringly put his finger on all the weak points of the draft. It could be truthfully said that Hammett had edited it.
This brochure was duly printed and sent out to about two hundred colleges and universities, I received about sixty answers expressing interest. All the educators I discussed it with said the idea was new and good. I have since found that there seems to have been no precedent for it. It was, therefore, an original idea that had come to me through the ind of a psychic who had no experience with education.
Several definite teaching offers also materialized from the brochure, but complications with my health prevented my accepting any of them.
I was now beginning to become more sensitive to the presence of disembodied entities. On one occasion, when I had been reading a book about Marie Antoinette and the famous affair of the diamond necklace, I felt her presence in the room, and I asked Babbitt about it. He advised me how I might increase my sensitivity in spirit communication.”…..////I had a contract to produce a revised edition of my first book, Earth’s Shifting Crust, but the effort had become too much for me. Day by day I felt my strength failing and finally I had to face the fact that I would not be able to finish the book. In this desperate situation I appealed to Dr. Hammett to help me and I had a response from him, He promised to help me with the work.
The next morning I sat at the typewriter and Hammett did in fact take over. I never again had to think about any of the intricate problems of organizing the material of the book. I had done the research, but my notes were scattered in fifty places. Hammett gave me a series of suggestions to take first this group of notes and then that. The material streamed effortlessly onto the pages. When one topic was finished, the next one was suggested. When a whole chapter was finished and I reviewed it, I found the style was astonishingly clear and free of unnecessary material, just as Dr. Hammett’s own writings were. No revision was needed. The book was finished on time and was published with the title The Path of the Pole, and I dedicated it to Dr. Hammett. The publishers did not realize that the dedication ‘To the spirit of Frederick S. Hammett’ was not just an empty phrase.”
Like Tiffany Thayer, Hammett could trace his ancestry back to early colonial settling of North America—in his case a paternal relative settled in Newport, Rhode Island around 1685. His father was a businessman. Hammett loved his mother—indeed, he confessed Oedipal tendencies—but also recognized that she had “the disposition of all the cats rolled into one person with all their meanness distilled and triple distilled into one essence.”
Hammett was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on 18 November 1885. The first of a number of serious health problems started when he was ten. e was infected with strep while undergoing tooth surgery, developed painful abscesses and suffered neuralgia for many years. Nonetheless, he graduated from Tufts in 1908. Bachelor of Arts in hand, he moved to Detroit that year, where he married Lena Lewis and met the future Fortean T. Swann Harding. Both worked at Difco, the Digestive Ferments Company, which produced media for bacteria culture. The two young men were very unsettled. As Hammett later remembered,
“Conditions at Detroit were quite entirely different with us. We were both in the beaker of experience being assayed from the impurities of mind engendered by our natural emotional reactions to disillusionment. We both of us said and did what we thought without regard to the proprieties at times and at other times attempted to cover over the stink-hole of the past by showing we could be perfect gentlemen if we wished. We were whisked hither and thither willy-nilly by the fire of our turbulent emotions and we had a bully time of it at that. Pathetic, lonely, but withal having a bully time of it.” (Hammett to Harding, 15 March 1924, Harding papers.)
Eventually, Hammett made his way back east, taking a MS from the Rhode Island State College (now the University of Rhode Island) in 1911, a master’s of art from Harvard in 1914, and a Ph.D. from that same school in 1915. After two years teaching at USC, he returned to Harvard in 1917, first as a teacher and then, during World War I, as Secretary of Harvard’s graduate school of medicine. It was during this period that Hammett, just entering his thirties, endured a number of changes. He and his first wife divorced; he had all of his teeth pulled, ending the chronic neuralgia that had plagued him; he moved to Philadelphia and remarried; he went to work at the Wistar Institute for Anatomy, near the University of Pennsylvania, and met Stanley Reimann, who would, in time, become a patron.
Hammett had interests beyond the laboratory. He was a Republican, and strong supporter of Calvin Coolidge. He practiced Episcopalianism. He studied ancient Hindu science and medicine, which influenced his religion. In 1927, he published an essay in “Open Court” (publishing home of another Fortean: Roy Petran Lingle) arguing that religion—as currently conceived—and science—by definition—could not define ultimate reality, so he advocated the grounding of identity in the Hindu ideal of a universal self. Hammett was also a great fan of the modern literature. He waxed eloquent over Joyce’s Ulysses and when Harding introduced him to James Branch Cabell (favorite of another Fortean: Burton Rascoe). “Ah mi. After reading him all else is dust and ashes in my furnace,” he sighed. Harding wanted to write literature in the same vein, and Hammett was a constant critic and admirer.
In 1927, his life again underwent a dramatic upheaval, although at the time he only knew half of it. Reimann invited him to be director of research at the Lankenau Hospital Research Institute in Philadelphia, an affiliation he maintained for the next twenty years. Hammett brought a rigorous and unusual approach to his research. The Institute was concerned with studying cancer but Hammett insisted rather than just studying the pathological processes researchers should investigate all phases of growth. In particular, he asked what were the chemical factors that control cell division. As a model organism, he used peas and onions, which caused many cancer specialists to scoff. The approach was prescient, though, and would underwrite what later became developmental biology—at the time studies in development were out of favor for research into transmission genetics.
Reimann protected Hammett, though Hammett still had trouble fitting in. He could be unctuous, he admitted:
“I have realized in the past two or three years that what I have meant as courtesy and liking for individuals in my approach to them has been construed as an attempt to ingratiate myself in their good graces. This conturing has been due to my mannerism which in turn is an hereditary taint from my probably semitic ancestry; prehaps [sic] through the spanish jew or, as I rather like to prefer it, through the moorish gametes.” (Hammett to Harding, 13 March 1924).
He also did not have a whole lot of respect for Reimann, telling Harding,
“The Director to be is a perfectly corking chap; he has a fine social presence; can play the pianerr to beat the band; can get up a playlet for the nurses; and is deservedly well liked by everybody. But—as a researcher he is a fliv. He has absolutely no conception whatsoever of what research is and of course no conception of how to do it. Yet—he gets the Directorship of this Institute (the new one) with a whale of a salary; and a trip to Europe with all expenses paid. Yet I who am a pretty decent researcher get nothing of this type at all.” (Hammett to Harding, 18 May 1925).
He and Harding shared a disdain for the institution of science, which they saw as relatively corrupt. Hammett told Harding that he had inherited his mother’s disposition, but was keeping it in check with humor—a trait he thought he and Harding shared:
“It seems to me that our egotism is tinged with a certain amused realization of our fallibility; with the idea that we are tremendously pleased with our ideas because they appear to be ours; but that back of it all we don’t take ourselves so very goddamned seriously. We admit that the other fellow has a perfect right to have that particular set of ideas which best suits his temperamental demands; and moreover we keep for ourselves the right to change our ideas as the mood hits. We may at the moment rant and swear and affirm and deny and expostulate the correctness of a particular conception; and the next week be ready to uphold the opposite. We recognize that all is change; that we, wise as we are, can never be sure of what is so and what is not so, and so we play with ideas, holding to them as long as they amuse us; and discarding them when more amusing ones crop up. We know that ideas change with change in circumstance, that trends flow on surge up and die away, to give place to other trends; this we know from the wide range of our reading, both of philosophy and of customs; we who scrabble in our interests from THE GOLDEN BOUGH and Havelock Ellis to Veblen and Mencken; from Cabell to Chesterton—and from Dos Passos to Strunsky can not but help be non serious as to our own. Wand shows himself the circumscribed ass of ignorance.” [Hammett to Harding, n.d., 1920s].
Reimann remembered,
“He was a hard taskmaster, continually preaching to his associates and assistants on the necessity of employing only chemicals of utmost purity; on the use of many more control than experimental animals; on rigid cleanliness of laboratories and apparatus. He generalized rapidly; he loved arguments and often went out of his way to stir up controversy. Sometimes he was vitriolic and as can be imagined, some with whom he disputed took a long time to forget him when he showed that they were wrong.” (78)
In the early 1930s, Hammett divorced for the second (and final) time, and married for the third (and final) time. This time it was to Dorothy Wall, a physician whom he had met at her experimental lab. He also opened a marine experimental station in North Truro, on Cape Cod, near Provincetown. A flu he had contracted in 1927 had infected him with tuberculosis, which now became patent. He lost a lot of weight, became week, and could work no more than four hours a day, yet felt that he was forced to stay on at the Institute by Reimann, who warned that if he quit the Institute would lose funding from the International Cancer Foundation. [Harding to Hammett, 10 May 1934.] Hammett set up shop in Provincetown, at 493 Commercial Street, building a lab in his backyard. He did not see the researchers in Philadelphia, but insisted that all research being sent out for publication first be checked by him.
The tuberculosis cost him his battle over his own disposition. He confided to Harding,
“Ever since I have been afflicted with my present disorder I have felt pressed for time; terribly in a hurry to get things done; to get them finished; for I do not know how long I will have before the old man comes to take me away; as a result I have developed a real impatience; and from that impatience has sprung an irascibility which is not pleasing. I am not a pleasant person any more and it is too bad.” [Hammett to Harding, 12 December 1937].
And it is true that the mid-1930s saw Hammett working hard, despite his illness. He self-published a pamphlet “The Nature of Growth: A Logistic Inquiry,” which argued that growth should be studied as a singular phenomenon from four different directions: physics, chemistry, genetics, and anatomy. (The booklet had neither punctuation nor capital letters, which may have represented the speed with which he wrote it, or been an experiment in modernist literature.) He founded The Society for the Study of Growth and oversaw publication of its journal Growth, which tried to approach the topic as a unified problem, neither divided by taxonomic categories nor physiological ones. In 1938, he published an article on his vision for the future of biological research, which he suggested should be conducted by independent research institutes based around what he saw as the four essential areas of biology: physics, chemistry, genetics, and anatomy. (Later, he would condemn the National Science Foundation for restricting biological research.)
These were dark years, but there were moments of light. He belonged to a group known as the Beachcombers, which patronized the arts of Provincetown, and was also President of the Provincetown Arts Association. Harding wrote positively about him in Scientific American and got the New York Times’s scientific reporter Walter Kaempffert to do a piece on Hammett. He made friends with a young man across the street—the future Fortean Charles Hapgood. And he became involved with the Fortean Society, warranting his first mention in January 1940. At the time, he was in Florida, doing marine research and trying to recover his health. The rains there, though, drove him back north and as World War II came on he felt “useless” as he told Hapgood. [Hammett to Hapgood, 11 December 1941, Hapgood papers.] For days at a time he was toxemic and short of breath. His Hindu-inspired belief in the universal self meant that he felt he should be helping the betterment of humankind, but he could not, and the world was worse than he could imagine. Less than a month after Pearl Harbor he complained,
“I do not know as I have ever been so conscious of helpessness and uselessness as I am at present. While this sense is contributed to and aroused by the fact my physical state confines me to the bed for but three or four hours a day; it is brought to focus by my realization that the human race has just gone completely haywire. To think that man is killing man all over the world; instead of spending his energy and the products of his work in helping man galls me without end. And here I am impotent to be of use; either physically; mentally; or emotionally. Any word I should write against this wave of insanity to destruction would be more noiseless than a fart in a gale of Provincetown wind. And I am so saddened be [sic] the exhibition of human stupidity that I am incapable of doing anything save immersing myself into my work of computation of the correlations between several stages of Obelia development.”
After the War, Hammett’s research, which had been dwindling, came to an end. The marine lab in North Truro was closed in 1946: buildings and equipment had become run-down, and pollution had killed off much of the animal life. The following year he resigned as director of research at Lankenau and gave up his role with Growth to become fully retired. The reviews of his life’s work in Growth showed that there had been many strains, and it seems clear that both sides were happy that Hammett was finally giving up his positions. But he continued doing some scientific writing as well as indulging his avocations. In 1950, he published in the history of science journal Osiris “Agricultural and Botanic Knowledge of India.” He also became more involved with the Fortean Society.
Hammett’s name appeared in the Fortean Society Magazine throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s. He sent in an article on one of Thayer’s favorite topics—astronomical geography. It pointed out that the distance between the earth and the sun had been recalculated by 100,000 miles. (It is only a small change by percent, but Thayer had great fun given how big the whole numbers were.) Another article told of a hollow maple tree and still another of green rain. He reviewed a book for Thayer that argued the earth was an organism and we humans its mitochondria. Great fun, he said, but fantasy.
Hammett even worked Fort into a couple of his scientific writings. A 1946 article for Scientific Monthly on ‘Integration in Science Teaching’ began with a quote from The Book of the Damned: “Everything in our experience is only a part of something else that in turn is only part of still something else,” asking who could deny such wisdom? His review of The Chemistry and Physiology of Growth referenced Fort, as did an research article that he wrote.
Thayer was impressed with having Hammett on the rolls. Here was a Capital-S scientist who looked skeptically on his own profession and offered to other scientists a chance to consider Fort. In 1946, when Thayer was replacing founders who had passed or quit, he made Hammett an honorary Founder, taking the place of Booth Tarkington (who died in May 1946). Thayer wrote, “In short, Frederick S. Hammett is that singular if not unique anomoly [sic], a Fortean convert in the enemy camp, and as such we are immensely proud of him.” When Hammett himself passed, in April 1953—the victim of cancer—Thayer was insistent that this Honorary Founder position be given to another scientist: it was given to—and accepted by—Anton Julius Carlson.
But Hammett’s Fortean career had not ended. After spending the war working for a predecessor of the CIA, Charles Hapgood became a professor—of history, economics, and anthropology—during which time he became intrigued—like so many Forteans before him—with the North Pole. In 1958 he published “The Earth’s Shifting Crust,” which argued that the Pole had shifted dramatically throughout history, with catastrophic results. Albert Einstein wrote the foreward. In 1966, Hapgood was considering a revised version of the book, and was also working with Elwood Babbitt, a New England medium.
Here, in Hapgood’s words, was Hammett’s final contribution to the Fortean cause:
In my second reading I decided that I would try to renew contact with Dr. Hammett. I hoped that we could have some more of the lively talks I had enjoyed so much in the old days. I therefore handed Babbitt [his medium] a billet with Hammett’s name and a few questions. As in the first reading, he held it in his hand without unfolding it.
Soon Babbitt said a spirit had entered the room and did I know a Frederick Hammett? I replied that I did and was about to ask Hammett the questions I had put in the note when he stopped me and himself repeated the questions. I thought later that he must have gotten the questions from the folded note by a gift of psychometry similar to that of the psychic Peter Hurkos.
I asked Hammett what sort of life he was now leading, He said that he was able to engage in some activities that he had been unable to undertake in his physical lifetime, but did not go into detail. He discussed my personal problems just as he used to do, displaying intimate knowledge of them and showing the same practical wisdom I remembered. I could not doubt for moment that I was indeed talking with my old friend. I continued to consider the possibility that Babbitt was doing this by mind reading. But what is mind reading? And how could mind reading result in the reconstruction of a whole personality and recreate mental capacities peculiar to Hammett and foreign to Elwood Babbitt? I decided that the hypothesis of mind reading would not hold water.
On several later occasions, talks with Hammett profoundly influenced my personal work. I had been associate professor of history at Keene State College, a part of the University of New Hampshire, for ten years. I had had a free life there; no one interfered with my teaching or writing. In 1965, however, a change of administration and new authoritarian policies brought conflict to the campus. In the fall of 1966, I left the college and went to teach at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, where I thought my situation would be better.
Unfortunately, at New England college [sic] I found difficulties of a different kind. Here the faculty, rather than the deans, controlled the curriculum, and group teaching had been introduced. This meant that every detail of a course had to be agreed to by the five or ten instructors who were going to give it. I found that I could not teach the subjects I wanted to teach. I had prepared a course in the History of Science but was not allowed to give it. My interest in psychic research brought positive reaction from the students but negative reactions from the faculty. I found that many masters could be worse then one. In a session with Babbitt on March 12, 1967, I put this problem to Dr. Hammett, and made the following notation in the diary:
I asked Hammett, who came and was very vehement on the necessity of my finding a situation where I can be with people who value me, and where I can do the things I want to do. He suggested lecturing, saying that I was at my best when expounding to an audience on what I really believe. He suggested not only lecture tours but short courses to be offered to colleges////across the country, four to six weeks in length. He urged me to send announcements to hundreds of colleges. He promised I would get a good response and would be successful.
By the time this conversation occurred I had been with Babbitt for six months, during which time I had begun to practice automatic writing. I sat at my typewriter and wrote whatever came into my mind, by what is called free association, keeping my own critical faculties out of it. I frequently got communications in this way that seemed to originate with deceased persons, but up to this time I had not been at all sure that the communications weren’t more or less colored by my own thoughts.
I decided to put this faculty to work with the syllabus. I made a preliminary draft, roughing out the plan of the proposed course. Then I sat at my table with the draft and read it aloud. As I read each clause I listened in my own head for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from Hammett. Every time I got a negative from him I drew a line through the word or the phrase in question. Afterward, when I reread the whole syllabus, I was astonished to find that Hammett had unerringly put his finger on all the weak points of the draft. It could be truthfully said that Hammett had edited it.
This brochure was duly printed and sent out to about two hundred colleges and universities, I received about sixty answers expressing interest. All the educators I discussed it with said the idea was new and good. I have since found that there seems to have been no precedent for it. It was, therefore, an original idea that had come to me through the ind of a psychic who had no experience with education.
Several definite teaching offers also materialized from the brochure, but complications with my health prevented my accepting any of them.
I was now beginning to become more sensitive to the presence of disembodied entities. On one occasion, when I had been reading a book about Marie Antoinette and the famous affair of the diamond necklace, I felt her presence in the room, and I asked Babbitt about it. He advised me how I might increase my sensitivity in spirit communication.”…..////I had a contract to produce a revised edition of my first book, Earth’s Shifting Crust, but the effort had become too much for me. Day by day I felt my strength failing and finally I had to face the fact that I would not be able to finish the book. In this desperate situation I appealed to Dr. Hammett to help me and I had a response from him, He promised to help me with the work.
The next morning I sat at the typewriter and Hammett did in fact take over. I never again had to think about any of the intricate problems of organizing the material of the book. I had done the research, but my notes were scattered in fifty places. Hammett gave me a series of suggestions to take first this group of notes and then that. The material streamed effortlessly onto the pages. When one topic was finished, the next one was suggested. When a whole chapter was finished and I reviewed it, I found the style was astonishingly clear and free of unnecessary material, just as Dr. Hammett’s own writings were. No revision was needed. The book was finished on time and was published with the title The Path of the Pole, and I dedicated it to Dr. Hammett. The publishers did not realize that the dedication ‘To the spirit of Frederick S. Hammett’ was not just an empty phrase.”
