What, exactly, drew J. David Stern to Charles Fort is unknown. Perhaps it is still recorded in the yet-unindexed Camden Daily Courier, or can be gleaned from his science fiction novel Eidon. I’m still checking into these. But that Stern was enthusiastic about Fort--for whatever reason--cannot be denied.
J.David Stern was born in Philadelphia--no joke!--on 1 April 1886 to a rich Jewish family. He attended Penn Charter School, graduating in 1902, and the University of Pennsylvania, finishing in 1906. The recession of 1907 ate into the family’s finances quite severely. At the time, Stern attended the University’s law school, which he graduated in 1909, but he did not practice law. From an early age, journalism drew him. In 1912, Stern took out a $10,000 loan and purchased his first newspaper. Over the years, he would own several more.
Stern was a liberal, and his papers leaned Democrat, although he was opposed to Communism and Socialism (as well as the Popular Front, which was supposed to ally liberals and communists.) He attended school with another future Fortean Scott Nearing, and they had to work together on a paper about Fourierism in America--but had to turn in separate reports because Nearing was insistent the community had failed because of external influences, Stern that the Utopian ideas themselves were the problem.
Stern also had the liberal’s disdain for pseudoscience. He bristled at the popularity of astrology in newspapers, and once suggested that papers test the reliability of astrologers, but the plan never came to fruition. Not that Fort was a proponent of astrology--but Stern’s disdain complicates whatever pleasures he found in Fort. Certainly he was not opposed to science.
Stern published The Camden Daily Courier in 1919, when Fort’s Book of the Damned appeared. Known sources indicate that Stern was a fan of the book, although whether he read it shortly after publication or sometime later is not known. He was corresponding with Fort before the publication of Fort’s second non-fiction book. (Fort’s only novel, The Outcast Manufacturers appeared in 1909.) Fort included a clipping Stern sent to him in New Lands, the news story dated 22 March 1922. The article helped Fort to contravene a common objection to his argument that winds were not responsible for rains of animals:
“Boston Transcript, March 21, 1922 — clipping sent to me by Mr. J. David Stern, Editor and Publisher of the Camden (N.J.) Daily Courier --
"Geneva, March 21 — During a heavy snow-storm in the Alps recently thousands of exotic insects resembling spiders, caterpillars and huge ants fell on the slopes and quickly died. Local naturalists are unable to explain the phenomenon, but one theory is [246/247] that the insects were blown in on the wind from a warmer climate."(18)
The fall of unknown insects in a snow storm is not the circumstance that I call most attention to. It is worth noting that I have records of half a dozen similar occurrences in the Alps, usually about the last of January, but the striking circumstance is that insects of different species and of different specific gravities fell together. The conventional explanation is that a wind, far away, raised a great variety of small objects, and segregated them according to specific gravity, so that twigs and grasses fell in one place, dust some other place, pebbles somewhere else, and insects farther along somewhere. This would be very fine segregation. There was no very fine segregation in this occurrence. Something of a seasonal, or migratory, nature, from some other world, localized in the sky, relatively to the Alps, is suggested.”
According to Fort’s biographer, Jim Steinmeyer, Stern, anxious to see Fort’s next book, asked Fort about his efforts after Charles and Anna returned to New York (from London) in June 1922. Steinmeyer’s notes, though, are frustratingly vague and hard to follow. In this case, he cites a letter from 1926 as evidence for his claim. All I can say is that Stern and Fort--again--were definitely corresponding before the publication of New Lands, which was accepted by Boni & Liveright in January 1923 and came out 8 October 1923. Given that Fort’s reference to Stern comes in the final pages of New Lands, it is possible that the correspondence did not begin until 1923.
In May 1926, Fort told the science fiction author Edmond Hamilton “several years ago” Stern had suggested some kind of Fortean Society but, like Stern’s planned test of astrologers, it came to naught. Fort continued:
“The great trouble is that the majority of persons who are attracted are the ones that we do not want; Spiritualists, Fundamentalists, persons who are revolting against Science, not in the least because they are affronted by the myth-stuff of sciences, but because scientists either oppose or do not encourage them. I accept, myself, that there are psychic phenomena, and I think that Daniel Home, for instance, did have occult powers, and alleged communications with the dead, are in very different categories, in my view.”
A few months later, Fort told the writer Benjamin de Casseres that he had shared a manuscript with Stern, but had already mined some of it for New Lands:
“Mr. J. David Stern, 344 King’s Highway, Haddonfield, N.J., has a manuscript of mine, entitled ‘Chaos,’ and no doubt he would let you look it over, if you should want to. But parts of it were put into ‘New Lands’, and virtually all the remaining data were put into a new book of mine, the manuscript of which I sent to Boni & Liveright several months ago. Mr. Liveright wrote to me that B & L would probably not publish this new book, and I implored him t be firm about that and not publish it, so that I should be discouraged from writing such things, and turn to love stories and be respected and make lots of money and be literary and drink tea, afternoon, with women. After all that, judging by the contrariness of things, I suppose B. & L. will publish the book.”
The two were clearly still chummy years later. In 1930, Tiffany Thayer published his first novel, Thirteen Men, in the last chapter of which he introduced a killer motivated by (among other things) the free-thought of Charles Fort. According to Thayer, Stern accused Fort of having written the book. (How better to discredit himself?)
In November of that same year, Thayer hatched a plan to start a Fortean Society--again an idea suggested by Stern. By this time Stern was publishing The Philadelphia Record, as well, making a name for himself in journalistic circles. The foundation of the Society was timed to coordinate with the publication of Fort’s third book, which had also (partially) come out of the Chaos manuscript. Lo!, as it came to be called, was published by Claude Kendall, the same house that put out Thayer’s Thirteen Men.
The first (and only) meeting of the Fortean Society was held 26 January 1931, in the Stern’s Savoy-Plaza Hotel apartment. Stern had placed a piece on the founding of the Society in The Philadelphia Record (which had formed the basis for a write-up in Publisher’s Weekly). And he, along with Claude Kendall, who was also there, paid for the nights events--an interview and photo session before the press, dinner, and speeches.
With Thayer soon after relocating to Hollywood and Fort dying the following year, the Fortean Society went stagnant. Stern went on to buy the New York Post. In 1934, he signed the first collective bargaining agreement with American editorial staff (between the Philadelphia Record and The American Newspaper Guild. He fought a series of bruising battles with Republican publisher Moses Annenberg for control of the Philadelphia newspaper market. And he struck out a brave editorial position against Franco in Spain, which won him plaudits from George Seldes, who also became attached to the Fortean Society, although after Stern had departed. Because Stern would depart with great vitriol.
In 1937 Thayer was back in New York, working an advertising job, and ready to make good on his idea--mulled for at least the past two years--to re-start the Fortean Society with Regional Correspondents. The initial issue was kicked off by the mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. According to his own account, Thayer--through a method he would not identify at the time--sussed out where Earhart and Noonan likely crashed, only to watch in horror as rescuers looked elsewhere. “I telephoned J. David Stern,” he wrote.” He was in Washington. I got his paper to wire him.” But Thayer got no satisfaction. The first issue of The Fortean Society Magazine declared that orthodox science had ‘murdered’ Earhart and Noonan.
In the next several years, Stern had nothing to do with the Fortean Society, which was only printing issues irregularly. He was not named a Regional Correspondent, but was listed as one of the Founders of the Fortean Society. In 1939, he sold off the New York Post. In 1941, Thayer was, after a long struggle, able to get an omnibus edition of Fort’s non-fiction books out, and reported to Booth Tarkington--another of the Founders--that Stern planned to do feature stories on the book in the Philadelphia Record and the Camden Courier, which he still owned.
Tiffany Thayer managed to out-do his own theatrics in January 1942, when he put out the sixth issue of The Fortean Society Magazine. The cover story was titled “Circus Day Is Over” in which he accused the U.S., Germany, England, and Japan, of cooperating to bring about World War II in order to help bankers, government employees, and other elites. It was a “great hoax.”
The Fortean Founders were not happy with this--Stern was a liberal, “a newspaper man who felt an obligation to the underprivileged and against injustice and against the arrogance of great wealth and concentrated economic power,” sure, but he wasn’t willing to follow Thayer down what he thought of as a clearly seditious path. On 27 April 1942, he sent a copy of The Fortean Society Magazine to the FBI. The feds investigated Thayer and the Fortean Society (not for the last time) determining in early September, “While the January 1942 issue did contain matter tending toward sedition, it is our opinion that in view of the discontinuance of publication [another issue had not come out], the small circulation and the lack of influence of the magazine, no further action in connection with it is warranted at this time.”
Stern was satisfied with the conclusion, and contacted Booth Tarkington, who had also been upset over the issue:
“Closing an unpleasant incident, I have permission to send you copy of a memorandum from the office of the Attorney General of the United States. While I do not anticipate a recrudescence, I think we individually and collectively should remain on guard. I shall notify you, as I trust you will notify me, if I hear of the use of our names in connection with subversive activity.”
It seems, though, that Stern did more than keep an eye on the Fortean Society; he must have resigned--over this issue, or a later one in which Thayer took the side of Conscientious Objectors. In 1946, Thayer elevated ghost-hunter Hereward Carrington to the level of Honorary Founder, taking the place of J. David Stern. What makes this move exceptional is that the other “Honorary Founders” chosen by Thayer replaced original founders who had died. Stern had not died--he would not die until 1971, twelve years after the passing of Thayer and the Fortean Society.
The following years, his three newspapers were picketed by striking Newspaper Guild workers for 87 days, and Stern got out of the media business, retiring to write his memoirs. In 1952, he also published a science fiction novel--Eidolon: A Philosophical Phantasy Built on Syllogism--which sounds both horrible and interesting. I have not yet read it, but Edward Fitzgerald panned it in The Saturday Review of Literature:
EIDOLON. By J. David Stern. Julian Messner. $3. J. David Stern starts this one off with a promising and nicely conceived science-fiction device. Newt Muir, conceived to a genius of a mother by parthenogenesis rather than in the more sociable manner attendant on normal reproduction, had come into the world without weakness or blemish. An intellectual genius gifted with an eidetic memory, he was also capable of outstanding physical feats. A superman, in fact. The possibilities with such a character are obviously limitless. Sadly, however, it is at that point that Mr. Stern's novelistic invention flags. Newt, his self-appointed "father," and a power-
driven newspaper editor go off into an extended discussion about science, religion, the nature of the universe, simplified spelling, and the atom bomb, which may have clarified Mr. Stern's thinking on these matters but left his novel way up in the air. In the last few pages we get hurriedly back to business in time to have a femme fatale make a pass at Newt who then develops an interest in housing conditions and gets himself killed off. This ends the book but has very little relation to what has gone before. I like the idea with which Mr. Stern started but he evidently got tired of it and turned from the comic strip to the editorial page. I think he made a mistake.
Thayer was bitter about the break up. In 1943, Stern came out on the wrong side of a lawsuit, having to pay $50,000 for libel. (He had called, using the words of the Roosevelt administration, claims that the U.S. was sending Lend-Lease supplies to Britain in April 1941 a “deliberate lie.”) Thayer commented smugly to Ezra Pound:
“I NEVER see a newspaper or hear the radio or go to the movies, so that I never know what has people exercised until it filters through the barriers I have built against it. I have no face-to-face social contacts, so I never have to discuss Greece or Russia. My entire association with my fellow worms is by correspondence with members of The Society. The members read the papers for me--and send clippings they think are of greatest Fortean interest.
“For instance, I have John O’Donnell’s column telling how he (in the courts) trimmed the pants off J. David Stern. That delights me, because Stern was one of the Founders of the Society, but he resigned shortly after the USA went to war because of the conscientious objector stand which I took in the magazine.”
J.David Stern was born in Philadelphia--no joke!--on 1 April 1886 to a rich Jewish family. He attended Penn Charter School, graduating in 1902, and the University of Pennsylvania, finishing in 1906. The recession of 1907 ate into the family’s finances quite severely. At the time, Stern attended the University’s law school, which he graduated in 1909, but he did not practice law. From an early age, journalism drew him. In 1912, Stern took out a $10,000 loan and purchased his first newspaper. Over the years, he would own several more.
Stern was a liberal, and his papers leaned Democrat, although he was opposed to Communism and Socialism (as well as the Popular Front, which was supposed to ally liberals and communists.) He attended school with another future Fortean Scott Nearing, and they had to work together on a paper about Fourierism in America--but had to turn in separate reports because Nearing was insistent the community had failed because of external influences, Stern that the Utopian ideas themselves were the problem.
Stern also had the liberal’s disdain for pseudoscience. He bristled at the popularity of astrology in newspapers, and once suggested that papers test the reliability of astrologers, but the plan never came to fruition. Not that Fort was a proponent of astrology--but Stern’s disdain complicates whatever pleasures he found in Fort. Certainly he was not opposed to science.
Stern published The Camden Daily Courier in 1919, when Fort’s Book of the Damned appeared. Known sources indicate that Stern was a fan of the book, although whether he read it shortly after publication or sometime later is not known. He was corresponding with Fort before the publication of Fort’s second non-fiction book. (Fort’s only novel, The Outcast Manufacturers appeared in 1909.) Fort included a clipping Stern sent to him in New Lands, the news story dated 22 March 1922. The article helped Fort to contravene a common objection to his argument that winds were not responsible for rains of animals:
“Boston Transcript, March 21, 1922 — clipping sent to me by Mr. J. David Stern, Editor and Publisher of the Camden (N.J.) Daily Courier --
"Geneva, March 21 — During a heavy snow-storm in the Alps recently thousands of exotic insects resembling spiders, caterpillars and huge ants fell on the slopes and quickly died. Local naturalists are unable to explain the phenomenon, but one theory is [246/247] that the insects were blown in on the wind from a warmer climate."(18)
The fall of unknown insects in a snow storm is not the circumstance that I call most attention to. It is worth noting that I have records of half a dozen similar occurrences in the Alps, usually about the last of January, but the striking circumstance is that insects of different species and of different specific gravities fell together. The conventional explanation is that a wind, far away, raised a great variety of small objects, and segregated them according to specific gravity, so that twigs and grasses fell in one place, dust some other place, pebbles somewhere else, and insects farther along somewhere. This would be very fine segregation. There was no very fine segregation in this occurrence. Something of a seasonal, or migratory, nature, from some other world, localized in the sky, relatively to the Alps, is suggested.”
According to Fort’s biographer, Jim Steinmeyer, Stern, anxious to see Fort’s next book, asked Fort about his efforts after Charles and Anna returned to New York (from London) in June 1922. Steinmeyer’s notes, though, are frustratingly vague and hard to follow. In this case, he cites a letter from 1926 as evidence for his claim. All I can say is that Stern and Fort--again--were definitely corresponding before the publication of New Lands, which was accepted by Boni & Liveright in January 1923 and came out 8 October 1923. Given that Fort’s reference to Stern comes in the final pages of New Lands, it is possible that the correspondence did not begin until 1923.
In May 1926, Fort told the science fiction author Edmond Hamilton “several years ago” Stern had suggested some kind of Fortean Society but, like Stern’s planned test of astrologers, it came to naught. Fort continued:
“The great trouble is that the majority of persons who are attracted are the ones that we do not want; Spiritualists, Fundamentalists, persons who are revolting against Science, not in the least because they are affronted by the myth-stuff of sciences, but because scientists either oppose or do not encourage them. I accept, myself, that there are psychic phenomena, and I think that Daniel Home, for instance, did have occult powers, and alleged communications with the dead, are in very different categories, in my view.”
A few months later, Fort told the writer Benjamin de Casseres that he had shared a manuscript with Stern, but had already mined some of it for New Lands:
“Mr. J. David Stern, 344 King’s Highway, Haddonfield, N.J., has a manuscript of mine, entitled ‘Chaos,’ and no doubt he would let you look it over, if you should want to. But parts of it were put into ‘New Lands’, and virtually all the remaining data were put into a new book of mine, the manuscript of which I sent to Boni & Liveright several months ago. Mr. Liveright wrote to me that B & L would probably not publish this new book, and I implored him t be firm about that and not publish it, so that I should be discouraged from writing such things, and turn to love stories and be respected and make lots of money and be literary and drink tea, afternoon, with women. After all that, judging by the contrariness of things, I suppose B. & L. will publish the book.”
The two were clearly still chummy years later. In 1930, Tiffany Thayer published his first novel, Thirteen Men, in the last chapter of which he introduced a killer motivated by (among other things) the free-thought of Charles Fort. According to Thayer, Stern accused Fort of having written the book. (How better to discredit himself?)
In November of that same year, Thayer hatched a plan to start a Fortean Society--again an idea suggested by Stern. By this time Stern was publishing The Philadelphia Record, as well, making a name for himself in journalistic circles. The foundation of the Society was timed to coordinate with the publication of Fort’s third book, which had also (partially) come out of the Chaos manuscript. Lo!, as it came to be called, was published by Claude Kendall, the same house that put out Thayer’s Thirteen Men.
The first (and only) meeting of the Fortean Society was held 26 January 1931, in the Stern’s Savoy-Plaza Hotel apartment. Stern had placed a piece on the founding of the Society in The Philadelphia Record (which had formed the basis for a write-up in Publisher’s Weekly). And he, along with Claude Kendall, who was also there, paid for the nights events--an interview and photo session before the press, dinner, and speeches.
With Thayer soon after relocating to Hollywood and Fort dying the following year, the Fortean Society went stagnant. Stern went on to buy the New York Post. In 1934, he signed the first collective bargaining agreement with American editorial staff (between the Philadelphia Record and The American Newspaper Guild. He fought a series of bruising battles with Republican publisher Moses Annenberg for control of the Philadelphia newspaper market. And he struck out a brave editorial position against Franco in Spain, which won him plaudits from George Seldes, who also became attached to the Fortean Society, although after Stern had departed. Because Stern would depart with great vitriol.
In 1937 Thayer was back in New York, working an advertising job, and ready to make good on his idea--mulled for at least the past two years--to re-start the Fortean Society with Regional Correspondents. The initial issue was kicked off by the mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. According to his own account, Thayer--through a method he would not identify at the time--sussed out where Earhart and Noonan likely crashed, only to watch in horror as rescuers looked elsewhere. “I telephoned J. David Stern,” he wrote.” He was in Washington. I got his paper to wire him.” But Thayer got no satisfaction. The first issue of The Fortean Society Magazine declared that orthodox science had ‘murdered’ Earhart and Noonan.
In the next several years, Stern had nothing to do with the Fortean Society, which was only printing issues irregularly. He was not named a Regional Correspondent, but was listed as one of the Founders of the Fortean Society. In 1939, he sold off the New York Post. In 1941, Thayer was, after a long struggle, able to get an omnibus edition of Fort’s non-fiction books out, and reported to Booth Tarkington--another of the Founders--that Stern planned to do feature stories on the book in the Philadelphia Record and the Camden Courier, which he still owned.
Tiffany Thayer managed to out-do his own theatrics in January 1942, when he put out the sixth issue of The Fortean Society Magazine. The cover story was titled “Circus Day Is Over” in which he accused the U.S., Germany, England, and Japan, of cooperating to bring about World War II in order to help bankers, government employees, and other elites. It was a “great hoax.”
The Fortean Founders were not happy with this--Stern was a liberal, “a newspaper man who felt an obligation to the underprivileged and against injustice and against the arrogance of great wealth and concentrated economic power,” sure, but he wasn’t willing to follow Thayer down what he thought of as a clearly seditious path. On 27 April 1942, he sent a copy of The Fortean Society Magazine to the FBI. The feds investigated Thayer and the Fortean Society (not for the last time) determining in early September, “While the January 1942 issue did contain matter tending toward sedition, it is our opinion that in view of the discontinuance of publication [another issue had not come out], the small circulation and the lack of influence of the magazine, no further action in connection with it is warranted at this time.”
Stern was satisfied with the conclusion, and contacted Booth Tarkington, who had also been upset over the issue:
“Closing an unpleasant incident, I have permission to send you copy of a memorandum from the office of the Attorney General of the United States. While I do not anticipate a recrudescence, I think we individually and collectively should remain on guard. I shall notify you, as I trust you will notify me, if I hear of the use of our names in connection with subversive activity.”
It seems, though, that Stern did more than keep an eye on the Fortean Society; he must have resigned--over this issue, or a later one in which Thayer took the side of Conscientious Objectors. In 1946, Thayer elevated ghost-hunter Hereward Carrington to the level of Honorary Founder, taking the place of J. David Stern. What makes this move exceptional is that the other “Honorary Founders” chosen by Thayer replaced original founders who had died. Stern had not died--he would not die until 1971, twelve years after the passing of Thayer and the Fortean Society.
The following years, his three newspapers were picketed by striking Newspaper Guild workers for 87 days, and Stern got out of the media business, retiring to write his memoirs. In 1952, he also published a science fiction novel--Eidolon: A Philosophical Phantasy Built on Syllogism--which sounds both horrible and interesting. I have not yet read it, but Edward Fitzgerald panned it in The Saturday Review of Literature:
EIDOLON. By J. David Stern. Julian Messner. $3. J. David Stern starts this one off with a promising and nicely conceived science-fiction device. Newt Muir, conceived to a genius of a mother by parthenogenesis rather than in the more sociable manner attendant on normal reproduction, had come into the world without weakness or blemish. An intellectual genius gifted with an eidetic memory, he was also capable of outstanding physical feats. A superman, in fact. The possibilities with such a character are obviously limitless. Sadly, however, it is at that point that Mr. Stern's novelistic invention flags. Newt, his self-appointed "father," and a power-
driven newspaper editor go off into an extended discussion about science, religion, the nature of the universe, simplified spelling, and the atom bomb, which may have clarified Mr. Stern's thinking on these matters but left his novel way up in the air. In the last few pages we get hurriedly back to business in time to have a femme fatale make a pass at Newt who then develops an interest in housing conditions and gets himself killed off. This ends the book but has very little relation to what has gone before. I like the idea with which Mr. Stern started but he evidently got tired of it and turned from the comic strip to the editorial page. I think he made a mistake.
Thayer was bitter about the break up. In 1943, Stern came out on the wrong side of a lawsuit, having to pay $50,000 for libel. (He had called, using the words of the Roosevelt administration, claims that the U.S. was sending Lend-Lease supplies to Britain in April 1941 a “deliberate lie.”) Thayer commented smugly to Ezra Pound:
“I NEVER see a newspaper or hear the radio or go to the movies, so that I never know what has people exercised until it filters through the barriers I have built against it. I have no face-to-face social contacts, so I never have to discuss Greece or Russia. My entire association with my fellow worms is by correspondence with members of The Society. The members read the papers for me--and send clippings they think are of greatest Fortean interest.
“For instance, I have John O’Donnell’s column telling how he (in the courts) trimmed the pants off J. David Stern. That delights me, because Stern was one of the Founders of the Society, but he resigned shortly after the USA went to war because of the conscientious objector stand which I took in the magazine.”
