Inspired by Fort to dismiss the germ theory.
Guy Fred Rogers died in the summer of 1952. At the time, he was living in Gainesville, Florida, with his wife, Nell Rogers. He had lived throughout the Southeast corner of the United States for most of his life, moving often. Rogers had been involved in radical politics and developing alternative theories of medicine. He is recorded several times in the pages of Doubt, the Fortean Society magazine, throughout the late 1940s and into the early 1950s.
Late in 1951, he and Nell published what would stand as their magnum opus: The Medical Mischief, You Say!: Degerminating the Germ Theory. It was a relatively short pamphlet, supplemented with excerpts from other writers, such as Bernar MacFadden—the physical culturalist who influenced Fortean Scott Nearing to take up vegetarianism, and the Naturopath and Fortean George S. White. The book dismissed the germ theory of disease, and embraced, instead, a naturopathic emphasis on food and healthy habits. But the germ theory was only the starting point of a critique that encompassed medicine, science, American society, war, commercialism, and capitalism. These were issues that had consumed them for decades and fit them easily into the left-libertarian tradition that supported so much of the Fortean Society.
Guy Fred Rogers died in the summer of 1952. At the time, he was living in Gainesville, Florida, with his wife, Nell Rogers. He had lived throughout the Southeast corner of the United States for most of his life, moving often. Rogers had been involved in radical politics and developing alternative theories of medicine. He is recorded several times in the pages of Doubt, the Fortean Society magazine, throughout the late 1940s and into the early 1950s.
Late in 1951, he and Nell published what would stand as their magnum opus: The Medical Mischief, You Say!: Degerminating the Germ Theory. It was a relatively short pamphlet, supplemented with excerpts from other writers, such as Bernar MacFadden—the physical culturalist who influenced Fortean Scott Nearing to take up vegetarianism, and the Naturopath and Fortean George S. White. The book dismissed the germ theory of disease, and embraced, instead, a naturopathic emphasis on food and healthy habits. But the germ theory was only the starting point of a critique that encompassed medicine, science, American society, war, commercialism, and capitalism. These were issues that had consumed them for decades and fit them easily into the left-libertarian tradition that supported so much of the Fortean Society.
Three years before, during the presidential election, Nell, at least, stumped for the quixotic candidate General Herbert C. Holdridge. He was known for being the only general to retire during World War II. Earlier he had expressed Socialist sympathies, but in this election he was running on a state’s right platform and opposed forceful integration of the races—but he was run out of Alabama during the Dixiecrat convention. Nell Rogers was hoping to get him onto the Democratic ticket. She appreciated that he opposed the military’s “caste system” according to a newspaper report in the Salt Lake Tribune, 18 July 1948.
By that point, Nell was just embarking on what would become a lifelong passion of observing Florida politics. She first came to the 1947 session, and wouldn’t miss another one, despite failing eyesight, until 1974, just before she died. Attired in sneakers, trousers (which gave her the sobriquet, the Bloomer Lady), sunglasses and a large straw hat, she would read each and every bill, write digests on them, and offer commentary. As a good Fortean—in Thayer's sense, at least--she of course opposed the fluoridation of Florida's drinking water.
The 1945 Florida state census has them in Gainesville, as does the 1940 U.S. Census. Guy was 51 at the time; Nell 43. He had only completed three years of college, while she had a degree. Guy was working as a carpenter, apparently for the government—which gives an edge to his anti-government rhetoric—and had worked for 38 weeks the prior year, making $530. They owned their home. Also living there were the Rogers’s three children, Yasodhara Lynn, 23, a daughter; Volney Trust [edit: Trent], 20, a son who was working as a photographic assistant, and Rene Mount [edit: Montgomery] Rogers, 13, a son, who was still in school. Yasodhara had finished high school and not gone to college; Volney seems to have been in college.
During the 1930s—the exact dates I have not pinned down, but it seems likely to have been from about 1930 to 1936—there was a magazine coming out of Gainesville called PINS, which was to disseminate information about the People’s Industrial System. Rogers was probably behind this initiative, as he and Nell had both recently joined the PINS movement [edit: more than jus a magazine, PINS was a community, a socialist colony]. The People’s Industrial System had been started in 1925 by Sheridan Webster, of St. Louis, based on the social credit ideas of Major Douglas and Henry George—that old Fortean warhorse. The movement was tied to socialism but differed from it in important respects, and called for a whole new monetary system. Among others allied with the social credit idea was the Fortean Ezra Pound. I have no information on why PINS died, although funding seems like it would have been an issue, especially during the worst parts of the Depression.
The 1930 census has them in the same town, Gainesville, with all three children, albeit Yasodhara was going by the name Lynn. Their finances seem to have been a bit stretched. They were renting a home—at $10—and did not have a radio. Guy was working as a printer and Nell as a gardener—the printing referring to his publications of PINS. Interestingly, the age difference between the two of them has changed significantly, and Nell is listed as a year older than Guy. Lynn and Volney were both in school, but Rene was still too young. Yasodhara, by the by, is the wife of Buddha, left by her husband after thirteen years of marriage, on the day of the birth of their only child, so that he could lead a holy life. She was a featured character in The Yellow Robe, Robert Payne’s 1948 novelization of Buddha’s life that was a favorite of Forteans George Haas and Clark Ashton Smith.
In the late 1920s, apparently around 1927—that is, right around the time that Lilith Lorraine was setting herself up as a prophet in the San Francisco Bay Area and Charles Fort was recovering his eyesight enough that he would go on to publish two more books—the Rogers joined the Newllano colony (aka New Llano), in Vernon Parish, Louisiana. The original Llano Colony had been established thirteen years earlier in California as a socialist cooperative. A few members had migrated to Louisiana in 1918 and established the offspring group. According to Robert V. Hine, who wrote about California’s Utopian Colonies, there was conflict between the immigrants—Westerners with radical economic and social views—and the more conservative locals, particularly in regards to race relations.
The Rogers only stayed at Newllano for two years. Guy published the newspaper The Llano Colonist and Rene, their youngest child, was born here. But over time they two came to think that the colony’s leader, George T. Pickett, was bilking everyone else—shades of the Fortean couple Annie and Alfred Barley, who left England to follow Brother Twelve to the wilds of the American Pacific Northwest, only to see that utopian colony fall from Twelve’s mismanagement. (All of which recalls the debate between future Forteans Scott Nearing and J. David Stern, when they were still in school, over what caused the failure of the Fourier experiment in living.) The Newllano colony would eventually declare bankruptcy, anyway, and was liquidated.
Louisiana State University, which holds a handful of the Rogers’s personal papers, has them arriving at Newllano from Michigan, but I have no other sources that put them there and so no way of knowing what they were up to. They couldn't have been in Michigan for very long, though. In 1921, Guy wrote to the “Appeal to Reason” in Girard, Kansas, from Gage Oklahoma, meaning that they were in Michigan for six years at the most, probably less. The letter concerned a brouhaha over Upton Sinclair and the “Literary Digest.” Sinclair claimed that the Digest had censored one of his articles on journalism. Readers of “The Appeal” protested—but while the “Digest” claimed to have only received four letters from these readers, the “Appeal” know of more than a score, and printed out a series of responses. Rogers’s was one of those responses, however, he admitted to not complaining to the Digest: “I DID NOT write The Literary Digest, for the reason that I am tired of praying to stone gods that sit aloof with a paralyzed smile on their hard faces and never hear nor answer my prayers.” All of which is to say, that Rogers was deeply involved in the minutiae of radical politics.
The 1920 census has them in Tennessee; Volney had not yet been born as of the time of the census-taking, but his birth state would be given as Tennessee—so sometime before they moved on to Oklahoma. According to this census, Nell was two years older than Guy. There only child was Yasodhora, then aged almost three. Guy was working as an efficiency man for a boiler house. They were renting their home. This time in Tennessee seems to have been sandwiched between two stays in Oklahoma.
For the next earlier record of the Rogers is from Guy’s World War I draft card. According to what he wrote there, the Rogers lived in Ottawa County, Oklahoma. He was a driller at the Ore Mining Company, near Miami, Oklahoma. He was 29, married, and the father of one child. Interestingly, he did not fill in the blank giving his race. Likely, that was just an oversight, but it’s worth noting anyway. The card was signed 5 June 1917. Yasodhara had been born only a few months earlier, in March of that year. Guy did not serve.
Three years earlier, in September of 1914, Guy and Nell married. The index has Guy as 26 and Nell as 27. At the time, they were in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Likely, this is when Guy was doing some studying at the University of Arkansas, which he claimed later, as that University is in Fayetteville.
There are no records documenting the decade and half before that. (A Guy and Nellie Rogers show up in Kansas for the 1910 census, but this cannot be the same couple, although the ages are about right, because they would not have been married yet, and they give different birthplaces for their parents.) From later recollections, it seems that both Guy and Nell attended Oklahoma A and M (now Oklahoma State University). According to the introduction to their book on germ theory, “Nell was the first woman to graduate in Agriculture at the Oklahoma A&M College. She had strong faculty opposition—‘Why the idea; studying Stock Judging in a class of boys!’ Guy balked at ‘Military ‘Science’—teaching boys how to jab the bayonet under the ribs—so Guy did not graduate, tho later he studied at the University of Arkansas, and at the University of Florida, in addition to his completion of the Junior year at the Oklahoma A&M.” Provided that Guy—whose age is more stable—started school at 18, and left at 21, his time at Oklahoma A&M would have been about 1906-1909.
Earlier events are even murkier. I am not sure about Nell’s family at all. Guy’s is also a little difficult to trace, given how common his name is, but I know he was born 28 June 1888 in Kansas. That likely makes him the son of William Rogers and Hattie Eibert. If this indeed is him, he was the eldest of four children, the names of which suggest there was a dramatic cultural change in the family during the 1890s. Guy Fred was followed by Arthur Saiem in 1891, Zenobia Lavica in 1893, and Eunice Mildred in 1895. The 1900 census has them living in Oklahoma, where William was a farmer and Guy a laborer. Their surname was then spelled with a d—Rodgers. All the children had been born in Kansas. Guy’s mother would die sometime between 1900 and 1910.
The story obviously has many Fortean resonances, but I do not know when either of the Rogers first came across Fort. Certainly, there would have been many opportunities. They do not appear to have joined the Fortean community until 1947, when Guy was first named in Doubt (#18, July 1947)—and the mention does make it seem as though this were an introduction of sorts. In time, though, both would come to closely identify with Fort, even if if was only Guy who ever became a member (without having to pay cash money, at that). On page 270 of that issue, under the title “PINS,” Thayer wrote,
“For some months longer than six years, from the middle of 1930 AD to the end of the year 6 FS, Guy F. Rogers and Sheridan Webster published a paper called PINS, first from New Orleans, then from Gainesville, Florida. PINS was the organ of the People’s Industrial System, which these men conceived as a means to improve world-wide economy.
“Rogers gives all credit to Webster for perfecting the system, which is described as Henry George’s philosophy improved by substitution of the ‘PINS Plan’ for the Single Tax. If the plan had prospered, the monetary system of ‘Coin’ Harvey would have been adopted, a system you have been carefully trained to laugh at, but worth another look all the same.
“Tobacco and liquor were frowned upon by PINS, as were medical doctors, meat eaters and selfishness. Under that handicap, the miracle is that PINS staggered as far as it did. Those other two ‘poisons,’ salt and coffee, were in use at Gainesville, however.
“For the past few years Rogers has been ‘prefabricating’ concrete houses, and indefatigably filling columns in a wide variety of critical papers with his independent thinking on every subject under the sun [I have been unable to find these writings]. He has contributed a complete file of the publication PINS, valued in excess of $100, to the Fortean Society archives, in consideration of which he has been made an Honorary Life Member.
“So it is HLMFS Rogers who is now planing a book about the Medical Follies, to be called “The Medical Mischief, You Say!” It will have 200 contributors and, of course, will be obtainable from the Society. It will be announced when ready.”
It would be several years before that book appeared, in a slimmer form, but Rogers continued to contribute to and correspond with the Society, a Fortean being born (or coming to attention). He had credits in the very next issue, as well as Doubt 24 (April 1949). The material from Doubt 19 (October 1947) concerned flying saucers—his credit was unconnected to any particular story—as well as some other bit of Forteana—again the exact subject is not made clear by Thayer’s sourcing. But it was definitively not about flying saucers, since Thayer separated the two subjects—UFOs and Forteana—in this issue. The bit in the later issue was about a black, “carbon-like” snow falling from the clear sky in Birmingham, Alabama on January 15 1949. A local professor blamed fungal spores. (I have the news report; there’s no follow up.) He would also get a couple of untraceable credits in Doubt 29 (July 1950) and Doubt 37 (June 1952).
Over the years, there would be five more mentions of Guy Rogers in Doubt, four of them focused on politics, especially those related to medicine.Doubt 25 carried notice—brought to Thayer’s attention by Guy—that Nell Foster Rogers had published a small pamphlet against modern medicine, likely an early stage of their work on “The Medical Mischief, You Say!” It was called “Medical Sabotage” and was being offered for a penny—or a hundred for a dollar. A copy is held at Columbia University, in the archives of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights, which was a Jewish group opposed to Nazism that gradually spread its mission to include civil rights more generally.
Doubt 28 (April 1950) saw Rogers plowing the field of monetary reform, sending Thayer a new source for information on the subject. Thayer wrote, under the title “Government is a Counterfeiter,” “Among the ‘rights’ usurped by government, probably none is more important to humans than the minting monopoly. Attention has already been called to several critics of the present monetary systems of the world. Now comes a new one—worth looking into. It is the Valun Institute, 226 East 26th Street, New York 10, N.Y. They publish “The New Approach to Freedom,” by E. C. Riegel. Send 60 cents to them for a copy. The proposal is to restore the minting power to those who bestow its real value upon any medium of exchange. The means to work this restoration by easy stages is the burthen [sic] of the book. Cr. Rogers.”
The last contribution Rogers made before his death appeared in Doubt 37 (June 1952), as part of Thayer’s culling through the mails. It showed again Rogers’s concern for the underdog, in this case prison rioters (or strikers, depending upon one’s point of view) in Michigan who were demanding more humane treatment, including steak and ice cream. Thayer quoted Rogers as saying, “Don’t you think those striking jail birds deserve Fortean honors? Where is an Honest Citizen these days brave enough to stand up for his rights, a square deal and a steak dinner?” The comment also showed the way that Rogers was blending politics and Forteanism, seeing Fort as a kind of patron saint of lost causes. Thayer was impressed that Rogers would stand in solidarity for steak given that, as he noted parenthetically, “Rogers is a vegetarian.”
Only one issue and a few months before—in Doubt 36, April 1952—Thayer finally announced the publication of the Rogers’s anti-medical establishment book, which tied together politics and Forteanism and showed that the Rogers had adopted Fortean as a key part of their identity. Of the book, Thayer wrote, “LMFS Guy Rogers and his wife Nell don’t believe that germs cause disease, and they have assailed the bastions of Organized Medicine all their lives. Their latest blast is a booklet in which they marshall much red-hot evidence and call some high-powered witnesses to support their position--Bechamp, Herbert M. Shelton, Bernarr MacFadden, Trall, Tilden. It’s THE MEDICAL MISCHIEF, YOU SAY!--exciting reading. Illustrated. From the Society. $1.00”
But that description undersold the book as a Fortean text—or as a text which showed one line of development in Fortean thought, a political, anarchist, civil libertarian line. Note the cover: There’s the title and subtitle—The Medical Mischief, You Say! (Degerminating the Germ Theory)—and the byline, with its own subtitle: By Nell & Guy Rogers (Forteans).” Forteans! Right there on the cover. Underneath is an old-fashioned sketch of a scientist peering through a microscope. Unusual for such a pamphlet,”The Medical Mischief, You Say,” seems to have had a formal publisher (or at least was not self-published), copyrighted instead to R. G. Wildborn, D.C., in Pasadena California. (The book would later be republished by Health Research Books, in Pomeroy, Washington.)
The beginning of the book, with the title and subtitle, above the name of the authors, again reports that they are Forteans, this time giving “Forteans” its own line. The language here, regrettably, is less like Fort and more like other Fortean supporters—Albert Page, for example, with no sense of style and confusing references piling up, one on another. It is clear from the outset, though, that the authors are against commercialism and advertising—an odd starting point for a book on medical mischief, unless you grant there implicit thesis that it’s all connected: that the entire system is rotten, social, political, cultural, medical. Germs were just used by advertisers as boogey monsters to sell continually new and improved products that stood against them, that killed them and protected the buyer from them.
Having laid out that thesis, they then stop, again, to genuflect in Fort’s direction: “The word ‘science’, if used in this book, should follow an introduction of the reader (readers, f more than one) to The Books of Charles Fort. Fort knew all the can-end-bulging [read: advertising] techniques. He loved to lift the Mystery out of the mysterious, especially ‘scientific’ involvements, and would sometimes replace it with a deeper mystery, like, ‘Why do unforced men believe such astounding volumes of unbelievable rot?’ The Rogers then go on to quote a long excerpt from New Lands in which Fort disbelieves that the Earth moves around the sun. After which, the Rogers return to germs, which, they say, scientists have not seen, but only postulate.
This quoting of Fort supports their new program, now that they’d outgrown Newllano socialism and PINS economic reform—well, maybe not those subjects, but at least those movements. The ideal, they said, was now to stimulate independent thinking by readers of all sorts—to question the contemporary dogmas and live a fuller, better life away from the defining control of science and politics: “Of all the plans for Utopia, Guy and Nell have adopted as the Best, Teaching people to think, independently.”
Fort and the Fortean Society appeared a few more times in the pamphlet, as did Forteans. They recommended Fort’s books, of course, obtainable from the Fortean Society, as well as Jay Nock’s “Our Enemy the State,” also obtainable through the Society. They spent a lot of time on a book that compared the work of two French scientists Antoine Béchamp and Louis Pasteur, who had differing views of germ theory, with Béchamp arguing that bacteria were the product of unhealthy systems and could not otherwise invade healthy ones. “We have used much space for ‘Bechamp or Pasteur?’ This book with ‘The Books of Chales Fort,’ ‘The Hygienic System,’ and ‘Walden,’ Henry David Thoreau’s Paean of Liberty, could make a firm four-point base for a Global Fire Tower—Florida crackers of the Piney Woods will know what we mean. The KEYNOTE of all these books is personal integrity—independent thinking—inviolable individuality.”
It was the exact kind of action that Thayer was hoping his Society would spur. There’s little conventional Forteana here—mysterious falls and disappearances—and none of Fort’s own cosmological theories—we are all just parts of the same cheese—but there is his skepticism of science and authority wedded to Thayer’s skepticism of political structures and praise for individual liberty uber alles. Thayer did not want individuals to be seen as mere consumers—but neither did he want them to be citizens. They were not to be abused by the state, and they had no obligation to civic society.
The final mention of Rogers came in July 1953 (Doubt 41). The article was a necrolog, with Thayer noting “Forteanism losses in the past few months have been especially severe”: Gainesville, Fl, last summer, Life Member Guy F. Rogers died. “His life-long rebellion entered every phase of existence and his indefatigable pamphleteering and correspondence must forever remain an inspiration to men who would become individuals in spite of all the forces ranked against us. His work will be carried on by his widow, Nell Rogers, no less tireless than he.”
By that point, Nell was just embarking on what would become a lifelong passion of observing Florida politics. She first came to the 1947 session, and wouldn’t miss another one, despite failing eyesight, until 1974, just before she died. Attired in sneakers, trousers (which gave her the sobriquet, the Bloomer Lady), sunglasses and a large straw hat, she would read each and every bill, write digests on them, and offer commentary. As a good Fortean—in Thayer's sense, at least--she of course opposed the fluoridation of Florida's drinking water.
The 1945 Florida state census has them in Gainesville, as does the 1940 U.S. Census. Guy was 51 at the time; Nell 43. He had only completed three years of college, while she had a degree. Guy was working as a carpenter, apparently for the government—which gives an edge to his anti-government rhetoric—and had worked for 38 weeks the prior year, making $530. They owned their home. Also living there were the Rogers’s three children, Yasodhara Lynn, 23, a daughter; Volney Trust [edit: Trent], 20, a son who was working as a photographic assistant, and Rene Mount [edit: Montgomery] Rogers, 13, a son, who was still in school. Yasodhara had finished high school and not gone to college; Volney seems to have been in college.
During the 1930s—the exact dates I have not pinned down, but it seems likely to have been from about 1930 to 1936—there was a magazine coming out of Gainesville called PINS, which was to disseminate information about the People’s Industrial System. Rogers was probably behind this initiative, as he and Nell had both recently joined the PINS movement [edit: more than jus a magazine, PINS was a community, a socialist colony]. The People’s Industrial System had been started in 1925 by Sheridan Webster, of St. Louis, based on the social credit ideas of Major Douglas and Henry George—that old Fortean warhorse. The movement was tied to socialism but differed from it in important respects, and called for a whole new monetary system. Among others allied with the social credit idea was the Fortean Ezra Pound. I have no information on why PINS died, although funding seems like it would have been an issue, especially during the worst parts of the Depression.
The 1930 census has them in the same town, Gainesville, with all three children, albeit Yasodhara was going by the name Lynn. Their finances seem to have been a bit stretched. They were renting a home—at $10—and did not have a radio. Guy was working as a printer and Nell as a gardener—the printing referring to his publications of PINS. Interestingly, the age difference between the two of them has changed significantly, and Nell is listed as a year older than Guy. Lynn and Volney were both in school, but Rene was still too young. Yasodhara, by the by, is the wife of Buddha, left by her husband after thirteen years of marriage, on the day of the birth of their only child, so that he could lead a holy life. She was a featured character in The Yellow Robe, Robert Payne’s 1948 novelization of Buddha’s life that was a favorite of Forteans George Haas and Clark Ashton Smith.
In the late 1920s, apparently around 1927—that is, right around the time that Lilith Lorraine was setting herself up as a prophet in the San Francisco Bay Area and Charles Fort was recovering his eyesight enough that he would go on to publish two more books—the Rogers joined the Newllano colony (aka New Llano), in Vernon Parish, Louisiana. The original Llano Colony had been established thirteen years earlier in California as a socialist cooperative. A few members had migrated to Louisiana in 1918 and established the offspring group. According to Robert V. Hine, who wrote about California’s Utopian Colonies, there was conflict between the immigrants—Westerners with radical economic and social views—and the more conservative locals, particularly in regards to race relations.
The Rogers only stayed at Newllano for two years. Guy published the newspaper The Llano Colonist and Rene, their youngest child, was born here. But over time they two came to think that the colony’s leader, George T. Pickett, was bilking everyone else—shades of the Fortean couple Annie and Alfred Barley, who left England to follow Brother Twelve to the wilds of the American Pacific Northwest, only to see that utopian colony fall from Twelve’s mismanagement. (All of which recalls the debate between future Forteans Scott Nearing and J. David Stern, when they were still in school, over what caused the failure of the Fourier experiment in living.) The Newllano colony would eventually declare bankruptcy, anyway, and was liquidated.
Louisiana State University, which holds a handful of the Rogers’s personal papers, has them arriving at Newllano from Michigan, but I have no other sources that put them there and so no way of knowing what they were up to. They couldn't have been in Michigan for very long, though. In 1921, Guy wrote to the “Appeal to Reason” in Girard, Kansas, from Gage Oklahoma, meaning that they were in Michigan for six years at the most, probably less. The letter concerned a brouhaha over Upton Sinclair and the “Literary Digest.” Sinclair claimed that the Digest had censored one of his articles on journalism. Readers of “The Appeal” protested—but while the “Digest” claimed to have only received four letters from these readers, the “Appeal” know of more than a score, and printed out a series of responses. Rogers’s was one of those responses, however, he admitted to not complaining to the Digest: “I DID NOT write The Literary Digest, for the reason that I am tired of praying to stone gods that sit aloof with a paralyzed smile on their hard faces and never hear nor answer my prayers.” All of which is to say, that Rogers was deeply involved in the minutiae of radical politics.
The 1920 census has them in Tennessee; Volney had not yet been born as of the time of the census-taking, but his birth state would be given as Tennessee—so sometime before they moved on to Oklahoma. According to this census, Nell was two years older than Guy. There only child was Yasodhora, then aged almost three. Guy was working as an efficiency man for a boiler house. They were renting their home. This time in Tennessee seems to have been sandwiched between two stays in Oklahoma.
For the next earlier record of the Rogers is from Guy’s World War I draft card. According to what he wrote there, the Rogers lived in Ottawa County, Oklahoma. He was a driller at the Ore Mining Company, near Miami, Oklahoma. He was 29, married, and the father of one child. Interestingly, he did not fill in the blank giving his race. Likely, that was just an oversight, but it’s worth noting anyway. The card was signed 5 June 1917. Yasodhara had been born only a few months earlier, in March of that year. Guy did not serve.
Three years earlier, in September of 1914, Guy and Nell married. The index has Guy as 26 and Nell as 27. At the time, they were in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Likely, this is when Guy was doing some studying at the University of Arkansas, which he claimed later, as that University is in Fayetteville.
There are no records documenting the decade and half before that. (A Guy and Nellie Rogers show up in Kansas for the 1910 census, but this cannot be the same couple, although the ages are about right, because they would not have been married yet, and they give different birthplaces for their parents.) From later recollections, it seems that both Guy and Nell attended Oklahoma A and M (now Oklahoma State University). According to the introduction to their book on germ theory, “Nell was the first woman to graduate in Agriculture at the Oklahoma A&M College. She had strong faculty opposition—‘Why the idea; studying Stock Judging in a class of boys!’ Guy balked at ‘Military ‘Science’—teaching boys how to jab the bayonet under the ribs—so Guy did not graduate, tho later he studied at the University of Arkansas, and at the University of Florida, in addition to his completion of the Junior year at the Oklahoma A&M.” Provided that Guy—whose age is more stable—started school at 18, and left at 21, his time at Oklahoma A&M would have been about 1906-1909.
Earlier events are even murkier. I am not sure about Nell’s family at all. Guy’s is also a little difficult to trace, given how common his name is, but I know he was born 28 June 1888 in Kansas. That likely makes him the son of William Rogers and Hattie Eibert. If this indeed is him, he was the eldest of four children, the names of which suggest there was a dramatic cultural change in the family during the 1890s. Guy Fred was followed by Arthur Saiem in 1891, Zenobia Lavica in 1893, and Eunice Mildred in 1895. The 1900 census has them living in Oklahoma, where William was a farmer and Guy a laborer. Their surname was then spelled with a d—Rodgers. All the children had been born in Kansas. Guy’s mother would die sometime between 1900 and 1910.
The story obviously has many Fortean resonances, but I do not know when either of the Rogers first came across Fort. Certainly, there would have been many opportunities. They do not appear to have joined the Fortean community until 1947, when Guy was first named in Doubt (#18, July 1947)—and the mention does make it seem as though this were an introduction of sorts. In time, though, both would come to closely identify with Fort, even if if was only Guy who ever became a member (without having to pay cash money, at that). On page 270 of that issue, under the title “PINS,” Thayer wrote,
“For some months longer than six years, from the middle of 1930 AD to the end of the year 6 FS, Guy F. Rogers and Sheridan Webster published a paper called PINS, first from New Orleans, then from Gainesville, Florida. PINS was the organ of the People’s Industrial System, which these men conceived as a means to improve world-wide economy.
“Rogers gives all credit to Webster for perfecting the system, which is described as Henry George’s philosophy improved by substitution of the ‘PINS Plan’ for the Single Tax. If the plan had prospered, the monetary system of ‘Coin’ Harvey would have been adopted, a system you have been carefully trained to laugh at, but worth another look all the same.
“Tobacco and liquor were frowned upon by PINS, as were medical doctors, meat eaters and selfishness. Under that handicap, the miracle is that PINS staggered as far as it did. Those other two ‘poisons,’ salt and coffee, were in use at Gainesville, however.
“For the past few years Rogers has been ‘prefabricating’ concrete houses, and indefatigably filling columns in a wide variety of critical papers with his independent thinking on every subject under the sun [I have been unable to find these writings]. He has contributed a complete file of the publication PINS, valued in excess of $100, to the Fortean Society archives, in consideration of which he has been made an Honorary Life Member.
“So it is HLMFS Rogers who is now planing a book about the Medical Follies, to be called “The Medical Mischief, You Say!” It will have 200 contributors and, of course, will be obtainable from the Society. It will be announced when ready.”
It would be several years before that book appeared, in a slimmer form, but Rogers continued to contribute to and correspond with the Society, a Fortean being born (or coming to attention). He had credits in the very next issue, as well as Doubt 24 (April 1949). The material from Doubt 19 (October 1947) concerned flying saucers—his credit was unconnected to any particular story—as well as some other bit of Forteana—again the exact subject is not made clear by Thayer’s sourcing. But it was definitively not about flying saucers, since Thayer separated the two subjects—UFOs and Forteana—in this issue. The bit in the later issue was about a black, “carbon-like” snow falling from the clear sky in Birmingham, Alabama on January 15 1949. A local professor blamed fungal spores. (I have the news report; there’s no follow up.) He would also get a couple of untraceable credits in Doubt 29 (July 1950) and Doubt 37 (June 1952).
Over the years, there would be five more mentions of Guy Rogers in Doubt, four of them focused on politics, especially those related to medicine.Doubt 25 carried notice—brought to Thayer’s attention by Guy—that Nell Foster Rogers had published a small pamphlet against modern medicine, likely an early stage of their work on “The Medical Mischief, You Say!” It was called “Medical Sabotage” and was being offered for a penny—or a hundred for a dollar. A copy is held at Columbia University, in the archives of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights, which was a Jewish group opposed to Nazism that gradually spread its mission to include civil rights more generally.
Doubt 28 (April 1950) saw Rogers plowing the field of monetary reform, sending Thayer a new source for information on the subject. Thayer wrote, under the title “Government is a Counterfeiter,” “Among the ‘rights’ usurped by government, probably none is more important to humans than the minting monopoly. Attention has already been called to several critics of the present monetary systems of the world. Now comes a new one—worth looking into. It is the Valun Institute, 226 East 26th Street, New York 10, N.Y. They publish “The New Approach to Freedom,” by E. C. Riegel. Send 60 cents to them for a copy. The proposal is to restore the minting power to those who bestow its real value upon any medium of exchange. The means to work this restoration by easy stages is the burthen [sic] of the book. Cr. Rogers.”
The last contribution Rogers made before his death appeared in Doubt 37 (June 1952), as part of Thayer’s culling through the mails. It showed again Rogers’s concern for the underdog, in this case prison rioters (or strikers, depending upon one’s point of view) in Michigan who were demanding more humane treatment, including steak and ice cream. Thayer quoted Rogers as saying, “Don’t you think those striking jail birds deserve Fortean honors? Where is an Honest Citizen these days brave enough to stand up for his rights, a square deal and a steak dinner?” The comment also showed the way that Rogers was blending politics and Forteanism, seeing Fort as a kind of patron saint of lost causes. Thayer was impressed that Rogers would stand in solidarity for steak given that, as he noted parenthetically, “Rogers is a vegetarian.”
Only one issue and a few months before—in Doubt 36, April 1952—Thayer finally announced the publication of the Rogers’s anti-medical establishment book, which tied together politics and Forteanism and showed that the Rogers had adopted Fortean as a key part of their identity. Of the book, Thayer wrote, “LMFS Guy Rogers and his wife Nell don’t believe that germs cause disease, and they have assailed the bastions of Organized Medicine all their lives. Their latest blast is a booklet in which they marshall much red-hot evidence and call some high-powered witnesses to support their position--Bechamp, Herbert M. Shelton, Bernarr MacFadden, Trall, Tilden. It’s THE MEDICAL MISCHIEF, YOU SAY!--exciting reading. Illustrated. From the Society. $1.00”
But that description undersold the book as a Fortean text—or as a text which showed one line of development in Fortean thought, a political, anarchist, civil libertarian line. Note the cover: There’s the title and subtitle—The Medical Mischief, You Say! (Degerminating the Germ Theory)—and the byline, with its own subtitle: By Nell & Guy Rogers (Forteans).” Forteans! Right there on the cover. Underneath is an old-fashioned sketch of a scientist peering through a microscope. Unusual for such a pamphlet,”The Medical Mischief, You Say,” seems to have had a formal publisher (or at least was not self-published), copyrighted instead to R. G. Wildborn, D.C., in Pasadena California. (The book would later be republished by Health Research Books, in Pomeroy, Washington.)
The beginning of the book, with the title and subtitle, above the name of the authors, again reports that they are Forteans, this time giving “Forteans” its own line. The language here, regrettably, is less like Fort and more like other Fortean supporters—Albert Page, for example, with no sense of style and confusing references piling up, one on another. It is clear from the outset, though, that the authors are against commercialism and advertising—an odd starting point for a book on medical mischief, unless you grant there implicit thesis that it’s all connected: that the entire system is rotten, social, political, cultural, medical. Germs were just used by advertisers as boogey monsters to sell continually new and improved products that stood against them, that killed them and protected the buyer from them.
Having laid out that thesis, they then stop, again, to genuflect in Fort’s direction: “The word ‘science’, if used in this book, should follow an introduction of the reader (readers, f more than one) to The Books of Charles Fort. Fort knew all the can-end-bulging [read: advertising] techniques. He loved to lift the Mystery out of the mysterious, especially ‘scientific’ involvements, and would sometimes replace it with a deeper mystery, like, ‘Why do unforced men believe such astounding volumes of unbelievable rot?’ The Rogers then go on to quote a long excerpt from New Lands in which Fort disbelieves that the Earth moves around the sun. After which, the Rogers return to germs, which, they say, scientists have not seen, but only postulate.
This quoting of Fort supports their new program, now that they’d outgrown Newllano socialism and PINS economic reform—well, maybe not those subjects, but at least those movements. The ideal, they said, was now to stimulate independent thinking by readers of all sorts—to question the contemporary dogmas and live a fuller, better life away from the defining control of science and politics: “Of all the plans for Utopia, Guy and Nell have adopted as the Best, Teaching people to think, independently.”
Fort and the Fortean Society appeared a few more times in the pamphlet, as did Forteans. They recommended Fort’s books, of course, obtainable from the Fortean Society, as well as Jay Nock’s “Our Enemy the State,” also obtainable through the Society. They spent a lot of time on a book that compared the work of two French scientists Antoine Béchamp and Louis Pasteur, who had differing views of germ theory, with Béchamp arguing that bacteria were the product of unhealthy systems and could not otherwise invade healthy ones. “We have used much space for ‘Bechamp or Pasteur?’ This book with ‘The Books of Chales Fort,’ ‘The Hygienic System,’ and ‘Walden,’ Henry David Thoreau’s Paean of Liberty, could make a firm four-point base for a Global Fire Tower—Florida crackers of the Piney Woods will know what we mean. The KEYNOTE of all these books is personal integrity—independent thinking—inviolable individuality.”
It was the exact kind of action that Thayer was hoping his Society would spur. There’s little conventional Forteana here—mysterious falls and disappearances—and none of Fort’s own cosmological theories—we are all just parts of the same cheese—but there is his skepticism of science and authority wedded to Thayer’s skepticism of political structures and praise for individual liberty uber alles. Thayer did not want individuals to be seen as mere consumers—but neither did he want them to be citizens. They were not to be abused by the state, and they had no obligation to civic society.
The final mention of Rogers came in July 1953 (Doubt 41). The article was a necrolog, with Thayer noting “Forteanism losses in the past few months have been especially severe”: Gainesville, Fl, last summer, Life Member Guy F. Rogers died. “His life-long rebellion entered every phase of existence and his indefatigable pamphleteering and correspondence must forever remain an inspiration to men who would become individuals in spite of all the forces ranked against us. His work will be carried on by his widow, Nell Rogers, no less tireless than he.”
