This one’s a stretch. I might not have the right Norman Macbeth. But even if I don’t, I’ve got an interesting one.
The name Norman Macbeth appears twice in The Fortean Society magazine. First in that list of contributors given in issue 3, January 1940. Then again two years later in the notorious issue number 6 that got J. David Stern to sic the FBI on Thayer. Macbeth’s contribution is unrelated to the main controversy. He sent news clippings about earthquakes in Missouri. [Fortean Society Magazine 6 (January 1942): 14.]
Not much to go on. He isn’t mentioned in any of Thayer’s correspondence I have seen. There’s no address. And his name is rather plain. In many other cases like this, I haven’t been able to find any more information about the Fortean and let it go. If I was doing this research 20 years ago I certainly wouldn’t have been able to find anything. But Google came to the rescue.
I put the name of everyone Fortean I encounter through a number of Google searches: the name (and its possible variations) combined with “Tiffany Thayer” or “Fortean” or “Charles Fort.” Usually, I just turn up The Fortean Society Magazine, and that’s the end of the matter. In this case, something more interesting turned up. A pdf of “Journal for Anthroposophy” from 1965—six years after the demise of the Fortean Society.
The Journal was published twice a year by the Anthroposophical Society of America. Anthroposophy is a philosophy developed by the German Rudolf Steiner in the early years of the twentieth century that focused on inner development of imagination and intuition to investigate a spiritual world that Steiner thought was as objective as the material one, with results that were as robust and rigorous as the conclusions of natural science. Anthroposophy has influenced medicine (anthroposophical medicine), education (Waldorf schools), and agriculture (biodynamic farming), among other subjects.
In this case, what Google found was a review of the second edition of Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957) by a Norman Macbeth. [Norman Macbeth, Setting the Record Straight: A Book Review, Journal for Anthroposophy 1 (Spring 1965): 14-16.] The editor’s note admitted the book under review was old, but still thought the review “timely and necessary.” In the review, Macbeth took apart Gardner’s logic with precision, during the course of which he made several references to Fort and the Fortean Society, including the continuing need for the Society. Is this the same Norman Macbeth who sent clippings about earthquakes in Missouri to Tiffany Thayer more than twenty years earlier? There is no way to know definitively. But it is likely. And even if not, here was a man who was fond of Charles Fort—was a Fortean in that sense, at least—and, it turns out, did some interesting work.
Norman Macbeth was born 3 November 1910 in Los Angeles California. His mother, Lucia Holliday, had been born in Indiana in 1879 and that was where she met Norman MacBeth (Sr.), who had emigrated from England in 1903. Like Lucia, he had been born in 1879. The two were married in 1906. The 1910 census has them living in with a two-year old son named John (along with a servant). By 1918, they had moved to Los Angeles, and Norman became a naturalized citizen. [US Census; Indiana Marriage Index.]
According to the 1920 census, they had moved, although still in Los Angeles, and had a new servant—as well as her daughter. John was working as a salesman for a cement company. There were two sons in the house, Alexander, the youngest at 5, and Norman Jr. 9. John Macbeth had died in June 1919. Worse still for the family, only ten months later, Alexander died. [US census]
No later than 1928, the Macbeth parents had divorced. In that year, Norman travelled to Hawaii, and listed his marital status as single. Also in that year, Lucia and Norman Jr. travelled together to Italy. [Ny Outgoing Passenger Lists; Honolulu Incoming Passenger lists]
The 1930 census captures Norman Jr. in two spots. He was a lodger in Palo Alto, where he was attending Stanford University. He was also living with his mother and a servant in Los Angeles. Lucia was not working, so the source of their income is something of a mystery. Norman Jr. graduated from Stanford in 1932. [US census; Ronald Brady, Angus Macbeth, Edward Saiif, Rivista di Biologia 83 (1990): 523-525.]
Norman travelled a lot in the 1930s, visiting England at least three times, and France once. He attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1935. He’s listed in the 1937 Los Angeles City Directory as an attorney. Meanwhile, Lucia moved back to Indiana, where she stayed until her death in 1955; she was buried with her son, Alexander. Norman Sr. remarried, rose to the level of vice president with his cement company, and died in 1940. That year found Norman Jr. in New York City.
What drew Norman to Anthroposophy is not known. His schooling seems to have been conventional. There was an active community recruiting out of, and so maybe he came in contact with Steiner’s thought there. At any rate, when he returned to Los Angeles in the late 1930s, he was committed to the cause, becoming a kind of godfather to the anthroposophical community in southern California. Joseph Lebensart established the first known biodynamic farm in 1936, and every Saturday Norman would go to his farm near Chino and help break by hand clay that Lebensart imported to improve the soil. In 1942, he started translating Rudolf Steiner’s works from their original German into English, an avocation he would maintain for decades. As the community matured, labor was divided, and Macbeth became the group’s secretary; using his lawyerly skills, he wrote set up the Anthroposophical Foundation of California, found it a home at 240 South Normandy, and stopped by daily to flip through the mail and make certain everything was in order. [Henry Barnes, Into the Heart’s Land, Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2005, 253-270.]
Around 1942, Norman married Agnes Ashe (born Agnes Biedenkapp.) She was eight his senior, and divorced. She was also a committed anthroposophist. She had spent a year in Maine’s north woods teaching at a small Waldorf school. While in New York, she had studied euthymy. And she was interested in biodynamic farming. Agnes and Ashe had two children, Angus, born in 1942, and Christa, born in 1947. An athroposophical visitor to Los Angeles recalled, “The home of Mr. and Mrs. Norman Macbeth is a meeting place for numerous friends, a source of many impulses, and a welcome to many visitors.” [Us census; Barnes, Into the Heart’s Land, 118-119, 270.]
All the while, Norman continued to practice law—until 1958, the year before Thayer and the Fortean Society died. Illness forced him to retire, and he moved, for a time, to Switzerland. A man of active mind, Norman noticed that—in preparation for the centennial celebration of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which would also take place in 1959—there were many books published about evolution. Reading them, he became frustrated with what he considered a lack of logical rigor. [Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried, Boston: Gambit Incorporated, 1971; Rivista di Biologia]And here is where Macbeth’s Forteanism and Anthroposophy intersected.
Macbeth would eventually be convinced that Darwin’s theory, at least as taught to the public, was tautological—that is to say, the theory was true, but didn’t explain anything. Fort had famously pointed this out in The Book of The Damned:
“The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest --
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.” [p. 21]
By the time that Macbeth’s review of Martin Gardner’s book appeared, in 1965, he had been building his case against Darwinism for six years, and the review reflected that. He noted, for example, that Gardner harbored a great animosity towards Immanuel Velikovsky—although Velikovsky nowhere met Gardner’s own definition of a crank—and suspected it was because Velikovsky’s catastrophist views undermined evolutionary theory.
The review also shows Macbeth’s soft spot for Fort—as well as another influence of Fort on his own writing:
“Mr. Gardner devotes all of Chapter 4 to Charles Fort and returns to him frequently later. He applies his usual method, asserting that Fort’s theories are thus and so, then knocking them on the head. But he cannot grasp what his own quotations show — that Fort made no serious suggestions and espoused no theories. Occasionally this be comes preposterous, as when he asserts (312-14) that Fort experimented and that he offered a vision, when the quoted language is obviously in jest.
“Mr. Gardner (43) recognizes the nature, and apparently admits the justification, of Fort’s “self-appointed mission” of undamning the damned, by which he “meant all those views which are excluded by dogmatic science — the ‘lost souls’ of data.” He quotes (53) Fort’s own words: “if nobody looks up, or checks up, what the astronomers tell us, they are free to tell us anything that they want to tell us.” Nevertheless, between these passages Mr. Gardner wonders (51) why the Fortean Society continues to exist despite his own conviction that there is no “point in preserving an organization to remind scientists of their limitations.” He should read, in Hardin: Nature and Man’s Fate (Mentor, 1961), the passage on pages 173-5 beginning: “ Although it is not widely known among the laity, scientists not uncommonly throw away embarrassing data.’”
Of course, by the time Macbeth’s review finally saw print, the Fortean Society no longer existed. But Fort still influenced Macbeth, in a manner of speaking. All of his work culminated int eh 1971 publication of “Darwin Retried,” which—while not a creationist tract—became very popular among fundamentalists and creationists. Macbeth would soon eventually move to the northeast, work for a time at the American Museum of Natural History, and teach on evolutionary topics while splitting time at his home in Vermont. [Rivista di Biologia]
Even some scientists acknowledged the force of some of Macbeth’s arguments. What was especially impressive was that he did not offer his own theory to replace Darwinian evolution (either classical Darwinism or neo-Darwinism as reflected in the so-called Modern Synthesis). Thus, he appeared to have no ax to grind—he wasn’t cherry-picking data and sweeping away old ideas to make room for his own—in the manner of, say, Albert E. Page. He was pointing out errors in the received wisdom. And as he made clear in his review, this was a technique he saw—and admired—in Fort’s work. Gardner, he said,
“reveals, as in the case of Charles Fort, a naive belief that the attacker must give the reader his own explanation of the fossil record instead of merely pointing out errors in Darwinism.”
Norman Macbeth died in 1989. HIs wife Agnes passed away the next year.
The name Norman Macbeth appears twice in The Fortean Society magazine. First in that list of contributors given in issue 3, January 1940. Then again two years later in the notorious issue number 6 that got J. David Stern to sic the FBI on Thayer. Macbeth’s contribution is unrelated to the main controversy. He sent news clippings about earthquakes in Missouri. [Fortean Society Magazine 6 (January 1942): 14.]
Not much to go on. He isn’t mentioned in any of Thayer’s correspondence I have seen. There’s no address. And his name is rather plain. In many other cases like this, I haven’t been able to find any more information about the Fortean and let it go. If I was doing this research 20 years ago I certainly wouldn’t have been able to find anything. But Google came to the rescue.
I put the name of everyone Fortean I encounter through a number of Google searches: the name (and its possible variations) combined with “Tiffany Thayer” or “Fortean” or “Charles Fort.” Usually, I just turn up The Fortean Society Magazine, and that’s the end of the matter. In this case, something more interesting turned up. A pdf of “Journal for Anthroposophy” from 1965—six years after the demise of the Fortean Society.
The Journal was published twice a year by the Anthroposophical Society of America. Anthroposophy is a philosophy developed by the German Rudolf Steiner in the early years of the twentieth century that focused on inner development of imagination and intuition to investigate a spiritual world that Steiner thought was as objective as the material one, with results that were as robust and rigorous as the conclusions of natural science. Anthroposophy has influenced medicine (anthroposophical medicine), education (Waldorf schools), and agriculture (biodynamic farming), among other subjects.
In this case, what Google found was a review of the second edition of Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957) by a Norman Macbeth. [Norman Macbeth, Setting the Record Straight: A Book Review, Journal for Anthroposophy 1 (Spring 1965): 14-16.] The editor’s note admitted the book under review was old, but still thought the review “timely and necessary.” In the review, Macbeth took apart Gardner’s logic with precision, during the course of which he made several references to Fort and the Fortean Society, including the continuing need for the Society. Is this the same Norman Macbeth who sent clippings about earthquakes in Missouri to Tiffany Thayer more than twenty years earlier? There is no way to know definitively. But it is likely. And even if not, here was a man who was fond of Charles Fort—was a Fortean in that sense, at least—and, it turns out, did some interesting work.
Norman Macbeth was born 3 November 1910 in Los Angeles California. His mother, Lucia Holliday, had been born in Indiana in 1879 and that was where she met Norman MacBeth (Sr.), who had emigrated from England in 1903. Like Lucia, he had been born in 1879. The two were married in 1906. The 1910 census has them living in with a two-year old son named John (along with a servant). By 1918, they had moved to Los Angeles, and Norman became a naturalized citizen. [US Census; Indiana Marriage Index.]
According to the 1920 census, they had moved, although still in Los Angeles, and had a new servant—as well as her daughter. John was working as a salesman for a cement company. There were two sons in the house, Alexander, the youngest at 5, and Norman Jr. 9. John Macbeth had died in June 1919. Worse still for the family, only ten months later, Alexander died. [US census]
No later than 1928, the Macbeth parents had divorced. In that year, Norman travelled to Hawaii, and listed his marital status as single. Also in that year, Lucia and Norman Jr. travelled together to Italy. [Ny Outgoing Passenger Lists; Honolulu Incoming Passenger lists]
The 1930 census captures Norman Jr. in two spots. He was a lodger in Palo Alto, where he was attending Stanford University. He was also living with his mother and a servant in Los Angeles. Lucia was not working, so the source of their income is something of a mystery. Norman Jr. graduated from Stanford in 1932. [US census; Ronald Brady, Angus Macbeth, Edward Saiif, Rivista di Biologia 83 (1990): 523-525.]
Norman travelled a lot in the 1930s, visiting England at least three times, and France once. He attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1935. He’s listed in the 1937 Los Angeles City Directory as an attorney. Meanwhile, Lucia moved back to Indiana, where she stayed until her death in 1955; she was buried with her son, Alexander. Norman Sr. remarried, rose to the level of vice president with his cement company, and died in 1940. That year found Norman Jr. in New York City.
What drew Norman to Anthroposophy is not known. His schooling seems to have been conventional. There was an active community recruiting out of, and so maybe he came in contact with Steiner’s thought there. At any rate, when he returned to Los Angeles in the late 1930s, he was committed to the cause, becoming a kind of godfather to the anthroposophical community in southern California. Joseph Lebensart established the first known biodynamic farm in 1936, and every Saturday Norman would go to his farm near Chino and help break by hand clay that Lebensart imported to improve the soil. In 1942, he started translating Rudolf Steiner’s works from their original German into English, an avocation he would maintain for decades. As the community matured, labor was divided, and Macbeth became the group’s secretary; using his lawyerly skills, he wrote set up the Anthroposophical Foundation of California, found it a home at 240 South Normandy, and stopped by daily to flip through the mail and make certain everything was in order. [Henry Barnes, Into the Heart’s Land, Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2005, 253-270.]
Around 1942, Norman married Agnes Ashe (born Agnes Biedenkapp.) She was eight his senior, and divorced. She was also a committed anthroposophist. She had spent a year in Maine’s north woods teaching at a small Waldorf school. While in New York, she had studied euthymy. And she was interested in biodynamic farming. Agnes and Ashe had two children, Angus, born in 1942, and Christa, born in 1947. An athroposophical visitor to Los Angeles recalled, “The home of Mr. and Mrs. Norman Macbeth is a meeting place for numerous friends, a source of many impulses, and a welcome to many visitors.” [Us census; Barnes, Into the Heart’s Land, 118-119, 270.]
All the while, Norman continued to practice law—until 1958, the year before Thayer and the Fortean Society died. Illness forced him to retire, and he moved, for a time, to Switzerland. A man of active mind, Norman noticed that—in preparation for the centennial celebration of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which would also take place in 1959—there were many books published about evolution. Reading them, he became frustrated with what he considered a lack of logical rigor. [Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried, Boston: Gambit Incorporated, 1971; Rivista di Biologia]And here is where Macbeth’s Forteanism and Anthroposophy intersected.
Macbeth would eventually be convinced that Darwin’s theory, at least as taught to the public, was tautological—that is to say, the theory was true, but didn’t explain anything. Fort had famously pointed this out in The Book of The Damned:
“The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest --
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.” [p. 21]
By the time that Macbeth’s review of Martin Gardner’s book appeared, in 1965, he had been building his case against Darwinism for six years, and the review reflected that. He noted, for example, that Gardner harbored a great animosity towards Immanuel Velikovsky—although Velikovsky nowhere met Gardner’s own definition of a crank—and suspected it was because Velikovsky’s catastrophist views undermined evolutionary theory.
The review also shows Macbeth’s soft spot for Fort—as well as another influence of Fort on his own writing:
“Mr. Gardner devotes all of Chapter 4 to Charles Fort and returns to him frequently later. He applies his usual method, asserting that Fort’s theories are thus and so, then knocking them on the head. But he cannot grasp what his own quotations show — that Fort made no serious suggestions and espoused no theories. Occasionally this be comes preposterous, as when he asserts (312-14) that Fort experimented and that he offered a vision, when the quoted language is obviously in jest.
“Mr. Gardner (43) recognizes the nature, and apparently admits the justification, of Fort’s “self-appointed mission” of undamning the damned, by which he “meant all those views which are excluded by dogmatic science — the ‘lost souls’ of data.” He quotes (53) Fort’s own words: “if nobody looks up, or checks up, what the astronomers tell us, they are free to tell us anything that they want to tell us.” Nevertheless, between these passages Mr. Gardner wonders (51) why the Fortean Society continues to exist despite his own conviction that there is no “point in preserving an organization to remind scientists of their limitations.” He should read, in Hardin: Nature and Man’s Fate (Mentor, 1961), the passage on pages 173-5 beginning: “ Although it is not widely known among the laity, scientists not uncommonly throw away embarrassing data.’”
Of course, by the time Macbeth’s review finally saw print, the Fortean Society no longer existed. But Fort still influenced Macbeth, in a manner of speaking. All of his work culminated int eh 1971 publication of “Darwin Retried,” which—while not a creationist tract—became very popular among fundamentalists and creationists. Macbeth would soon eventually move to the northeast, work for a time at the American Museum of Natural History, and teach on evolutionary topics while splitting time at his home in Vermont. [Rivista di Biologia]
Even some scientists acknowledged the force of some of Macbeth’s arguments. What was especially impressive was that he did not offer his own theory to replace Darwinian evolution (either classical Darwinism or neo-Darwinism as reflected in the so-called Modern Synthesis). Thus, he appeared to have no ax to grind—he wasn’t cherry-picking data and sweeping away old ideas to make room for his own—in the manner of, say, Albert E. Page. He was pointing out errors in the received wisdom. And as he made clear in his review, this was a technique he saw—and admired—in Fort’s work. Gardner, he said,
“reveals, as in the case of Charles Fort, a naive belief that the attacker must give the reader his own explanation of the fossil record instead of merely pointing out errors in Darwinism.”
Norman Macbeth died in 1989. HIs wife Agnes passed away the next year.
