A curmudgeonly Fortean. (Which is not a redundancy.) And more on the complicated relationship between Forteanism and the early history of organized skepticism.
Be warned, this one is long and involved.
Thomas Swann Harding was born 14 May 1890 in Wyoming, Delaware, the son of Thomas and Mary Harding, both of whom had been raised in Maryland. In 1900, when Thomas was about 10, they were living in Maryland again—Prince George county—where the elder Thomas was a salesman. The Hardings had been married around 1886, when Thomas was in his mid-twenties and Mary in her early-twenties. Thomas the younger had recently been joined by a sister, Margaret, born in Maryland in 1900. Also living in the Harding house at the time of the 1900 census was Anna B. Wilson, Thomas’s sister-in-law. Her marital status was not given, but nor was the age of her first marriage, suggesting this may have been Mary’s sister. Anna was a school teacher. The family was renting its home.
Be warned, this one is long and involved.
Thomas Swann Harding was born 14 May 1890 in Wyoming, Delaware, the son of Thomas and Mary Harding, both of whom had been raised in Maryland. In 1900, when Thomas was about 10, they were living in Maryland again—Prince George county—where the elder Thomas was a salesman. The Hardings had been married around 1886, when Thomas was in his mid-twenties and Mary in her early-twenties. Thomas the younger had recently been joined by a sister, Margaret, born in Maryland in 1900. Also living in the Harding house at the time of the 1900 census was Anna B. Wilson, Thomas’s sister-in-law. Her marital status was not given, but nor was the age of her first marriage, suggesting this may have been Mary’s sister. Anna was a school teacher. The family was renting its home.
T. Swann Harding—he was going by T. Swann, as opposed to his father’s Thomas S.—graduated from Laurel High School in 1907, just after he turned 17. It was a small class: he was one of only nine graduating students. (The early 1900s was a time when high school growth was exponential.) Likely it was around this time that Harding endured a difficult illness and subsequent nervous breakdown. He gave an account of this time—only vaguely periodized, though—in a later article:
“Of religion as a pathological manifestation I can speak as an expert; I have been a psychopath and have been addicted to that kind of religion. In my own case, very singularly too, I emerged from neurosis during the critical period of a very dangerous illness, when suddenly there came to me the strength and the decision of character to accept an agnostic attitude towards problems of the universe too stupendous for human solution, and this returning strength of will naturally marked the return of mental health and, in my case, the subsidence of religion. When actually facing death I found the metaphysical speculations of five neurotic years upon matters philosophical and religious amounted to nothing at all, while a consciousness of the fact that I was fearfully tired and that death meant rest was more than all else on earth. Where death led I cared not at all; of my fate I never thought; the past was irrevocable and I was ready to leave it without whimper and without apology; I was tired and merely wanted rest.”
The family continued to rent in Prince George county in 1910, and Thomas the elder continued his work as a salesman. The family home had grown by one addition, though. They had taken on an elderly boarder, Mrs. Julia Slater, herself born in Maryland, but from an English family. Anna Wilson was still there, still teaching. The younger Thomas did not have an occupation listed in the census. Maryland Agricultural College yearbook, though, has him as a senior. He would have been twenty, suggesting he may have skipped a year. According to the Washington Post, he graduated with a bachelor’s of science in June. (Again it was a small class, only seventeen graduating.)
Part of his religious journey landed him at Unitarianism—whether that was when he considered himself “pathological,” or afterwards, when he embraced agnosticism, is not clear from what I have read. By the time he was in college, though, he was making trouble with his new-found infidelity, poking fun at the day’s conventional morality. He said he often wrote letters to the “Baltimore American,” stirring the shit. As an example, he said, one missive recommended that America should welcome Buddhist missionaries as warmly as Americans wanted other countries to accept Christian ones—and should be willing to do at the wrong-end of a warships battlements, if that warmth wasn’t otherwise forthcoming. The writing continued, and there are examples of his (sarcastic) poetry and (sardonic) political commentary—he was especially irritated by the War, and its attendant material restrictions—in the “Washington Herald” and “Australian Argus.”
Some time after graduating, Harding became a chemist for the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA’s science services were at the time growing at an almost exponential rate, and given Harding’s proximity to the nation’s capital, it’s not a surprise he ended up in government service. On 23 September 1912, Harding married Lenora L. Fairall, a Maryland woman only a few weeks his senior, in Washington, D.C. He filled out a draft card for the Great War—which is how it is possible to know his career. He claimed an exemption, reporting that he had suffered a nervous breakdown at some point, and did not serve. (Though he translated a letter from a Belgian for the Washington Herald.) The draft card, in the vague way of reporting associated with the first world war, listed him as tall and slender, and without any obvious physical defect. Sometime shortly thereafter, he moved to Detroit, where he worked for Difco, the Digestive Ferments Company, which produced media for bacteria culture. It was also when he met fellow future Fortean, and fellow curmudgeon, Frederick S. Hammett.
In 1918, on the 19th of October, Lennora died. She had contracted the flu—1918 was the year of the pandemic, though I don’t know if that was the strain which infected her—and then developed pneumonia. It was, reportedly, a brief but intense illness. (Harding himself had been ill with influenza, too, and lost his hair, though he later was skeptical of his disease’s etiology.) Lenore’s body was returned to Maryland, where it was interred. The death came not even a month after their sixth anniversary—and after Harding had already suffered on nervous breakdown. So it’s probably not a surprise that, according to eh 1920 census, his family was living in the same Detroit boarding house as him, his father, his mother, and his sister. The elder Thomas was selling jewelry. Neither his wife nor his daughter were employed, according to the census.
The younger Harding was not only doing chemical work, but thinking hard, and writing, too. And, he was pushing against the dying Victorian proprieties. Hammett remembered Harding as dirty, uncouth, rough-hewn, and obsessed wth sex, looking at pornography, reading smutty books. The two apparently cruised for women a lot, and paid for sex on more than one occasion. In a letter written in the mid-1920s,, by which time they had both left Difco, Hammett said,
“Conditions at Detroit were quite entirely different with us. We were both in the beaker of experience being assayed from the impurities of mind engendered by our natural emotional reactions to disillusionment. We both of us said and did what we thought without regard to the proprieties at times and at other times attempted to cover over the stink-hole of the past by showing we could be perfect gentlemen if we wished. We were whisked hither and thither willy-nilly by the fire of our turbulent emotions and we had a bully time of it at that. Pathetic, lonely, but withal having a bully time of it.”
The slow trickle of newspaper pieces continued, prelude to a deluge. Clearly, he was working through his wife’s death, as well as trying to find a soft place to fall, philosophically. In June 1919, he published a couple of essays in the “Detroit Free Press”—on the women’s page, predecessor of the later lifestyle sections—concerning loneliness. Apparently, this was a topic of some moment in Detroit at the time, the city struggling against a reputation as unfriendly. Harding affirmed that Detroit was a difficult place: it had not developed the culture central to East Coast cities; he admitted, too, that loneliness was part of the human condition (a fact that must have seemed especially stark to him at the time: a war just ended, his love cruelly taken from him, living in a distant city), but it could be ameliorated, through friends, to an extent, but especially through reading.
As best I can tell, Harding broke out of newspapers by finding a niche in “The Open Court.” This was a Chicago-Based periodical, started in the late 1800s, that was supposed to be a place where writers could consider philosophy, science, religion—and their various interrelations—without concern for censorship. (Motto: “Devoted to the science of religion, the religion of science, and the extension of the religious parliament of idea.’) The Open Court was, broadly, associated with the free-thought movement and was part-and-parcel of what secularization looked like on the ground, as opposed to high-falutin’ theories of the death of religion and God: secularism was about the loosening of tradition, the waning power of religious institutions—but by no means their end—and the rising freedom to choose among different religious options. In essence, Harding was sorting through a pack of cards, looking for the one that appealed to him most. And he was not the only person to be doing so. “The Open Court” featured the writings of a number of Forteans before the founding of his eponymous Society: Roy Petran Lingle, Maximilian Rudwin, Hereward Carrington, Frederick Hammett, and T. Swann Harding.
I count eleven articles by him for the publication between 1919 and 1922. These were amateur efforts—as Hammett would point out, Harding sending them to him for commentary—jumping from idea to idea, never quite precise, calling attention to their own erudition. They are also way too long, each of them. But they show him grappling with real ideas: his first, published the year after Lennora’s passing, discussed how the proximity of death can clarify one’s thinking. He was also dealing with the after-effects of the war: he hated the war, was inclined toward Pacifism, but especially hated the hypocrisy and lack of thought it exposed in Americans: how quickly they could be taught to hate some new monster that was once a friend. He feared that there was little place for intellectuals in America, that the country was too hidebound, too conventional, too conservative, too focused on commerce: he variously explained it as “retarded evolution,” “conventional virtue,” conservatism, psychosis, and convention. What he wanted were liberals—people who expanded the universe of categories about which one could think, rather than conservatives who opposed anything that wasn’t traditional. Harding praised the work of Dreiser—even if he was skeptical of him as a writer—and Cabell and Veblen in challenging the old order.
By the end of his (first) run in “The Open Court,” Harding still hadn’t essayed a positive view of what was needed: only what needed to be cleared out, dogmatism of all sorts, not only religious and social, but scientific and atheistic. (He said he was no fan of the free-thought magazine “Truth Seeker” because of its hard-line against religion.) It’s clear from the correspondence with Hammett—although only Hammett’s letters survive—that Harding was still unsure of himself, too. He seems to have asked several times if Hammett thought what they had done in Detroit was all right. (Hammett reassured him that they both had gone through intense experiences and needed the release all that sex brought them; it was fine.) He was struggling, too, because he wanted to be an author—he wrote at least three novels in the early 1920s, none of which were published, as far as I can tell, though seemingly at least one of his poems was—and also seems to have been disenchanted with his own work. Hammett chided him for mocking those with doctorate degrees, which was becoming increasingly common in government science, seeing in it Harding’s own insecurity about only having a bachelor’s degree. And it is true that at some point during the 1920s, while he remained with the USDA, he switched over to editing its scientific publications.
During the mid-1920s, Harding continued to write, though it would be a couple of years before he returned to The Open Court, and I haven’t found any of his material from about 1922 to 1928, save for two articles in “The Nation.” He does seem to have fit some traveling into this period, and also a marriage—when his writing career was just taking off, and after his wild years, which covered a relatively short span of time on 18 September 1920 (five days before the eight anniversary of his first marriage), Harding married a Mrs. May Morrison Meyers, aged 29, in Chicago, Illinois. I do not know much about her, though other records have her first name as Mary—the same as Harding’s mother’s name, just as he had his father’s name. She was born in the early 1890s (1891, 1892, variously) and emigrated from Scotland, naturalizing around 1916. (This is from the census; I have not found immigration papers.) She married first when she was 24—and may have also married in 1919, as there is a record from Detroit of a Mary Morrison, born in Scotland in 1892, wedding a man with the surname Meyers.
Harding, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, but revealingly and patronizingly anyway, described her in a 1929 article as a bit vain, very conscious of class standards, and tremendously put upon keeping up their six-room (two bathroom house), as well as attending to all of his cleaning and feeding. (According the 1930 census, they owned their home.) The family had not yet purchased a modern iron or a wash machine, so indeed her chores were heavy. They were not flush—they wrote up a budget (and actually had it published in a magazine, as an example)—but they did have a radio and an icebox. Harding contributed his bit to the chores—mowing the lawn, cleaning the ashes from the furnace—but most of his time seems to have been spent working, either with the USDA, doing his own writing, or giving lectures on science. Records seem to indicate, though, that the couple—they never had children—moved around a bit, orbiting Washington, D.C: various places in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. itself.
From what I have found, the late 1920s and early 1930s was the period of Harding’s most productive writing. No longer a bench chemist, but an editor of scientific papers, he turned out a whole series of his own works, too, in “The Open Court,” up to the cessation of its publication in 1936; in various magazines; in the Little Blue Book Series which was also a favored outlet of early Forteans (such as Maynard Shipley); in academic journals on philosophy and sociology; and in Theodore Dreiser’s “American Spectator.” By the end of his career, in the early 1950s, his publications must have numbered in the 100s. There were also books, too, such as “The Joy of Ignorance” and “The Popular Practice of Fraud.” He must have been fairly well off, between all of his publications, the steady pay of a government job, and the relatively small expenses incurred by being a childless couple.
Roughly speaking, his writing output can be divided into three streams, with only glancing references to the modernist authors who had influenced him—he turned Hammett on to James Joyce’s Ulysses and the works of James Branch Cabell—such as a brief reference to James Laughlin, who would launch the important publishing house “New Directions.” As the 1930s wore on, these different strands would often overlap, and it is clear that Harding’s writing was facilitated by a constant recurrence to the same examples. (And his books repeated entire articles.) The one which came to be most closely associated with his name was the calling out of medical frauds and hoaxes—the pablums and nostrums that were common then, certainly, but also other “common sense” myths that he thought deserved debunking: that smoking was bad for you—not proven, he said—or that exercise was good for you—probably not if done too vigorously.
A second strand of writing concerned government, and, particularly, agricultural policy. Harding seems to have been influenced strongly by the Progressive movement of the 1910s, particularly the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration, and he thought that government should play a role in the everyday life of people, and in offering scientific suggestions. He was especially keen to point out the way that business and its money could deform and deflect good policy, and sully the practice of science. At the same time, he confronted the limits of government, and through the thirties seems to have grown increasingly conservative. He hated war from an early age—having seen the carnage of the Great War—and among its many other sins numbered the way that war wasted the state’s resources and ate away at democracy by inspiring fear, which in turn led to the rise of totalitarians. He came to see the New Deal as embodying some of these traits, a governmental response to a real crisis that promoted fear and an increasing bureaucratization. Especially problematic, from his perspective, was that science had not kept up with the growth of the state, and so even as agencies multiplied and structured the lives of regular people, there were not enough properly trained administrators to offer good, sound policy.
A third strand of his writing underlay both of the other two, a philosophical one that promoted science but also skepticism. He tried to work out these ideas in a series of articles for “The Open Court” and lay them out in “The Little Blue Books,” but his writing was not always clear on this matter—these were some of the worst essays in his middle period—and he ended up tying himself into some unusual knots. These philosophical musings built on his earlier thoughts about the rise of a modern society, asking what the individual and scientist’s responsibility was in this new world. Interestingly, his ideas about secularism echo very strongly recent developments in historiography on the subject.
Harding’s basic idea was that human’s had two essential faculties, the mystical and materialist. The mystical involved total involvement—participation, as the anthropologist Claude Levy-Bruhl had it—in the world, dissolving the boundary between reality and imagination. Harding argued that this response to the world remained common in children, “primitives,” and the animal world. But that modern society, with the rise of its complicated civilization, had made it impossible for Westerners. He saw the mysticism of his day—Theosophy, Psychical Research—as ridiculous throwbacks, vestiges. (In this way, he was indulging the earlier theories of secularization: the the modern world had been disenchanted, and any continuing enchantments were necessarily atavistic.) What the modern world needed was a proper scientific understanding of the world: that was the only way to rationally proceed.
Here, though, Harding departed with a lot of his contemporaries, and, indeed, the main historiographical tradition of the era, which followed Max Weber in seeing the world as disenchanted. For Harding had a very particular notion of science. Harding continued to have no tolerance for rabid materialists and atheists, nor of scientists who preached that science had all the answers to the world’s problems. (Indeed, one of his problems with the Society for Psychical Research was that it was too positive in its announcements.) Eighteen years at the bench had taught him he needed to be very careful in what he admitted was true, and take any scientific result as provisional. The problem, as he saw it—especially in his research on fakes and frauds—was that “science” was being used to see the world a bill of goods, to bilk, to defraud, and to pervert the government. (In this he anticipated the “dialectical” view of secularism that would be most forcefully put forth by the Marxists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer int he 1940s: that wha we called modernism was actually a kind of totalitarianism in disguise, that there was a false sense of wonder being used to pervert true rationality.)
In the late 1920s, Harding thought of science in terms of “organized common sense” and he was leery of modern physics, which departed so far from lived experience, was too abstruse and based in mathematics. Later, after more and more experimental verification of modern physical notions, he would be more accepting, but also have a more refined notion of what science was doing. It was not organizing common sense, but creating fictions: the fiction of the atom, of gravity, of vitamins, of evolution. These fictions structured scientific research, as scientists attempted to verify them through more and more testing. But they always remained fictions, and could be discarded: they were to be lightly held. This was not mysticism; it was materialism, but of an ironic stripe. He wanted everyone to understand that even within science there was a great deal of ignorance.
But here is where Harding twisted himself around and around. For Harding, every human lived by fictions, according to unsupported beliefs. Scientist pushed against these, testing them, but could only do so a little at a time. How, then, could science make government work better? Or people live better? One way was to understand that all science—social and natural—followed the same procedures; another was to make clear definitions. (He was increasingly irritated by the balkanization of science.) But there was no way to cure humanity’s ignorance totally. So, on the one hand, he suggested people embrace it—to either recognize their fictions as fictions and enjoy them, or just recognize they were ignorant and not care. He doubted seriously that most people could be scientists or enjoy a proper scientific outlook: he was elitist that way. Which led him to propose that scientists needed to establish a metaphysical religion—science itself was too abstract and cold to be properly religious, too provisional to be a foundation of ethics—that lay people could subscribe to, while scientist sweet about their business of figuring out the proper laws of ethics. His skepticism, thus, led him to a very odd place, where scientists were left alone to figure out the laws of the universe, while the rest of the world remained deluded.
Which, in a strange way, presages the current view on secularization and modernity, which sees it as mixing the wondrous and the scientific, which emphasizes the ironic use of imagination—while still ultimately privileging science and technology as drivers of social change. Fort instance, it’s hard not to read the following as in the spirit of postmodernism, which would develop much later: “The scientist deals constantly with provisional constructs of the imagination, with out-and-out fictions, and with partly verified hypotheses.”
Harding continued to work for the USDA until 1951, when he finally retired. Through this period, he continued to write, including a history of the USDA, and articles on the importance of agriculture for a true democracy—as well as on medical and scientific frauds.
I do not know what he did after his retirement. I cannot find many writings after that time. He did take a trip to the Caribbean at what seems to be shortly after his retirement.
Thomas Swann Harding, Jr., died in the month of his birth—May—1973, in Rehoboth Delaware. He was 82 or 83.
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I do not know when Harding came across the writings of Charles Fort. His skeptical philosophy was obviously compatible with Fort’s thought, though not congruent: Harding gave more credit to scientists that Fort would, and did not share Fort’s monism. But in none of his early writings did I find a reference to Fort—this despite Harding’s wide reading, and early interest in Theodore Dreiser. He came to Thayer and the Society relatively early after Thayer relaunched it, and was an important contributor, though his own persnicketiness, matched with Thayer’s meant that they had a love-hate relationship, one that reflected Harding’s relationship to the Society, as well, if not to Fort. Indeed, it’s hard to say what Harding though about Fort at all from his writings: his Forteanism must be inferred from the elective affinity between his ideas and the Bronx’s scientific gadfly.
The first connection I can draw between Harding and Fort, the Fortean Society, and came in August 1937, which was after Thayer had announced the renaissance of the Society, but before the first issue of its magazine appeared. Thayer had just discovered Hardin’g writings and wanted him in the Society. The letter, preserved in Harding’s papers at the Library of Congress, said, in part:
“I have just read two of your books—which is more than you can say to me. They were recommended by a friend of mine who fancies he is a radical—but is not—inasmuch as his revolutionary thinking extends no further than the economic systems and social structures of a single extant species. I admire the Joy of Ignorance and Degradation of Science, and respect the mind which went to the trouble of setting them down, and--since admirable books and respectable minds are none too common in my experience—I write to say that you are a Fortean, a practicing Fortean, whether you will or no, and that I should like to have you join us—in spite of your preoccupation with the welfare of the human race.”
Thayer then offered to loan Harding some of his books.
Harding responded quickly, for Thayer’s next letter came two weeks later, on the 11th of September. It must have been a positive response from the USDA editor because Thayer sent him the first issue of the magazine, welcomed him to the Society, enjoined him to recruit further members, and offered to start promoting Harding’s next book—whatever it might be—in the magazine’s pages. There followed a correspondence that, in Harding’s peers at least, lasted until the middle of 1938. At the time, Harding was trying to convert an article he had written for Dreiser’s “American Spectator”—called “Fictions Men Live By”—into a book, but having no success at finding a publisher. Thayer tried to get his own publisher, Julian Messner, to take it on, but Messner rejected it as too technical, to Thayer’s chagrin. As far as I know, the book never came out. Harding was also shopping something called “The Prostitute’s Notebook,” (which may have had something to do with sexually transmitted diseases, a subject Harding covered in three Little Blue Books I have not seen.) Thayer discussed the manuscript with the Fortean and sex researcher Harry Benjamin, but it, too, apparently never found a publisher.
The relationship during this first year seems to have been friendly. Thayer admitted to Harding—as he did to Ezra Pound—that he didn’t really understand what George Vierick was doing in his writing, but found the poems interesting enough to publish in Doubt. They swapped phone numbers, and may have met up in person. Thayer had his friend—and fellow Fortean—Aaron Sussman, who was also in the book business—work on getting some of Harding’s stuff published, but apparently that also failed. Thayer joked with Harding—“Oh, Swann, God damn it,” he opened one letter, and concluded another: “Consistent application to what I esteem to be the work of the Secretary of the Fortean Society has got me in such a state that I do not trust my own mother. Are you sure that you are not a spy?”—while Harding sent him a barrage of unanswered letters in late 1937 and (seemingly) chastised Thayer for not putting out the magazine regularly. Thayer said he was working up a report that he hoped would be a stand in for the magazine: he had not yet fully committed to the publication, its regularity, or its shape.
Harding, like Don Bloch after him, also provided Thayer with a vast amount of material for early issues of the magazine. In September 1937, Thayer told Harding he would cull the batch of material for a column on natural wonders; at the time, he said, he was avoiding advertising, politics, and economics. (This strategy would change in the next few years.) By March of 1938, Harding was asking for the material back, but Thayer was putting him off: he still had not finished sorting through it all. Meanwhile, they talked about other places to publish, including a new magazine being put out by Arnold Gingrich, who had co-founded “Esquire.” Thayer was upset because two pieces he had sent there had been editorially mangled—worse yet, though, was the magazine’s jingoism.
Harding’s name first appeared in the third issue of the “Fortean Society Magazine,” June 1940—so that’s three years for three issues. The column was titled “Forteana” and credited to Harding. Included was a rather typical menagerie of Fortean topics: showers of pebbles, weird cancer cures, questions about the number of Jovian moons, a microphone that broadcast without being plugged in, stars closer than they seem, the poor calibration of measuring devices, weird creatures, mysterious fires, and rediscovered animals. It was anomalies with no unifying connection—the natural wonders of which Thayer spoke: proof, therefore, that the world was not as disenchanted as scientists might have us believe, which sounds more like Thayer’s take on Forteanism than Harding’s.
The connection between Harding and the Society seems to have grown thin over the next several years. Harding did not appear in the magazine, and there is no extant correspondence between Harding and Thayer. What I know of the years from 1945 comes from correspondence between Thayer and Don Bloch (which is all represented by letters Thayer sent to Bloch). In January of 1942, when Bloch was still in Washington, D.C., Thayer suggested Bloch meet up with Harding. Two years later, Thayer told Bloch, “Swann is a swell guy if you can keep him serious for ten minutes running.” The two also discussed Swann’s publishing in a magazine called “Frauds,” about medical hoaxes. This was in early 1945, and Thayer had recently had lunch with Harding, so the two were still connected. Thayer noted that Harding appeared in almost every issue of the magazine. Bloch wondered if it paid, and Thayer said it must—or Harding wouldn’t write for it. But Thayer was not very impressed. He thought the editors were “stupid” and unable to “string four good words together.” (This seems to have referred to the little-known magazine “Frauds” or “Answers Magazine” put out by A.G. Stamp in Pasadena starting int he late 1930s.)
Despite the lack of verifiable connections between Harding and Thayer or the Society during this period, Thayer seems to have still held Harding in some esteem. In 1944, Thayer published “The Fortean Society is the Red Cross of the Human Mind,” which laid out the Society’s aims and listed its most prominent members, including its Founders, and Honorary Founders. Thayer would later say that Honorary Founders were meant to replace the original Founders when they died—but there was some problem with that theory, among them that it was unclear who counted as an original Founder. Early on, Thayer had listed the (renegade) historian Harry Elmer Barnes as one. But in 1937, when Thayer re-started the Society, Barnes wrote to protest the use of his name: he had no use for Fort or the Society, and had only lent his name in 1931 to show support for publishing maverick ideas. Thus, in this pamphlet, Thayer made Harding an Honorary Founder, taking Barnes’s place—though Barnes was still alive and well, and would be until 1968.
Harding was back in Doubt 13, published in the winter of 1945—so about the same time as Bloch and Thayer were discussing “Frauds.” Apparently, he didn’t only publish for money. Harding had honed his message by this time, and started with he striking passage, “History is the accepted lie. This is true of scientific as of any other lie; the conventional lie holds. Every history of scientific discovery we read represents a conventionally accepted fiction which some misguidedly regard as true for all time but which the more intelligent realize is a fiction accepted for convenience.” I very well may have been an excerpt from what would have been “Fictions Men Live By.” The article went on to then discuss how science—based as it was on a fiction—could said to progress:
“It can progress only when and because certain patent fictions or lies are universally and conventionally accepted as truth; that temporarily ends controversy in that sector and the synthetic pattern thus create, called scientific truth, does prove useful for many practical purposes. But cessation of controversy usually occurs because the dispute has exhausted the disputants and nobody is left who cares to waster energy calling anyone else a lawyer. There are no final truths; there are even no final facts. There are simply things that appear to be true under certain rigidly controlled conditions and usually some important condition has escaped control. There are only hypotheses, theories, fiction, and conventional lies.”
This passage, too, fit with what Harding had been saying since the early 1930s: it was his version of skepticism, a softer one then Thayer allowed.
The next time Harding’s name came up was more than a year later, in August 1946—nine years after Thayer had introduced himself to Harding. Apparently, there had been some kind of falling out between Thayer and Harding, the nature of which is unknown. In the 8 July 1948 edition of “USDA”—an in-house publication for the Department—Swann had taken an anonymous shot at Thayer. In a column titled “It Rains Fish,” Swann noted that a worker in the Soil Conservation Service received a letter asking if it ever rained fish. The worker—William C. Pryor—said such reports were mostly imaginary (people saw the creatures on the ground and assumed they had been rained), though it might be the case that waterspouts picked up fish and other small animals and rained them down—the argument W. L. McAtee had made, and which had been the government line since the 1910s, but which was then being challenged in the seminal skeptical publication, “Natural History of Nonsense” by Bergan Evans.
Swann cheekily asked, “You don’t believe it?,” then answered: “(It drains our credulity too.) Bill’s authority is a book: George Stimpson’s ‘A Book about a Thousand Things.’ Ask for it at the bookstore or library.” Then he took his shot: “Charles Fort would disagree. He held that anything scientifically impossible could happen, and did right along. Look up his books. There is even a Fortean Society in his memory, a private enterprise of novelist Tiffany Thayer. It gets out a semi-so-often house organ, very cryptic and esoteric. Nobody can read it. But it says horses and blood fall in rainstorms.” Fort—and the Fortean Society—were too adrift from science for his taste, too much enthralled int he wonderful, maybe even the mystic: the ideas were atavistic, illiberal, and out of touch with the times.
That August, Bloch noted the article to Thayer, who dismissed it casually: “Swann is a dimple-brained and vindictive son of a bitch who has a childish mad on me. That’s why he wrote that piece. Since it has no circulation outside the Bureau I’m ignoring it. Ten days later he’ll do something wonderful for us. He sat as a model for the first cock weather-vane.” If Harding did do anything nice for the Society—ten minutes later, or ten years later—it is not clear from the available record. Thayer plugged his history of the USDA—“Two Blades of Grass”—when it came out in the summer of 1947 (gently mocking him for being with the Department since the Civil War, though he was only thirteen years older than Thayer—and in 1951 noted to Bloch that Harding had retired from government service. That implied the two were talking again, at least, and Thayer was still ribbing Harding about his age— “He and Abe Lincoln went into the government at the same time”—but Harding was still not in the magazine.
Harding would be mentioned in later Fortean publications—The International Fortean Organization’s Journal noted he was among the Honorary Founders—but I see no evidence of him connecting to the newer Fortean groups. Rather, from he scant evidence available—including the lack of evidence: him not writing about Fort in his early career—Harding seems to not have been much inclined toward Fort or Forteanism. He was skeptical and shared intellectual inclinations with Fort—and mores, the Fortean Society—but doesn’t seem to have accepted Fort’s more thorough-going anti-science stance. Harding was a skeptic, and skeptical even of Fort. His story—like Lou Alt, Hugh Robert Orr, Edwin H. Wilson, like the rise of Humanism in the 1930s and its association with the Fortean Society—shows how complicated the term “skepticism” was at the time.
“Of religion as a pathological manifestation I can speak as an expert; I have been a psychopath and have been addicted to that kind of religion. In my own case, very singularly too, I emerged from neurosis during the critical period of a very dangerous illness, when suddenly there came to me the strength and the decision of character to accept an agnostic attitude towards problems of the universe too stupendous for human solution, and this returning strength of will naturally marked the return of mental health and, in my case, the subsidence of religion. When actually facing death I found the metaphysical speculations of five neurotic years upon matters philosophical and religious amounted to nothing at all, while a consciousness of the fact that I was fearfully tired and that death meant rest was more than all else on earth. Where death led I cared not at all; of my fate I never thought; the past was irrevocable and I was ready to leave it without whimper and without apology; I was tired and merely wanted rest.”
The family continued to rent in Prince George county in 1910, and Thomas the elder continued his work as a salesman. The family home had grown by one addition, though. They had taken on an elderly boarder, Mrs. Julia Slater, herself born in Maryland, but from an English family. Anna Wilson was still there, still teaching. The younger Thomas did not have an occupation listed in the census. Maryland Agricultural College yearbook, though, has him as a senior. He would have been twenty, suggesting he may have skipped a year. According to the Washington Post, he graduated with a bachelor’s of science in June. (Again it was a small class, only seventeen graduating.)
Part of his religious journey landed him at Unitarianism—whether that was when he considered himself “pathological,” or afterwards, when he embraced agnosticism, is not clear from what I have read. By the time he was in college, though, he was making trouble with his new-found infidelity, poking fun at the day’s conventional morality. He said he often wrote letters to the “Baltimore American,” stirring the shit. As an example, he said, one missive recommended that America should welcome Buddhist missionaries as warmly as Americans wanted other countries to accept Christian ones—and should be willing to do at the wrong-end of a warships battlements, if that warmth wasn’t otherwise forthcoming. The writing continued, and there are examples of his (sarcastic) poetry and (sardonic) political commentary—he was especially irritated by the War, and its attendant material restrictions—in the “Washington Herald” and “Australian Argus.”
Some time after graduating, Harding became a chemist for the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA’s science services were at the time growing at an almost exponential rate, and given Harding’s proximity to the nation’s capital, it’s not a surprise he ended up in government service. On 23 September 1912, Harding married Lenora L. Fairall, a Maryland woman only a few weeks his senior, in Washington, D.C. He filled out a draft card for the Great War—which is how it is possible to know his career. He claimed an exemption, reporting that he had suffered a nervous breakdown at some point, and did not serve. (Though he translated a letter from a Belgian for the Washington Herald.) The draft card, in the vague way of reporting associated with the first world war, listed him as tall and slender, and without any obvious physical defect. Sometime shortly thereafter, he moved to Detroit, where he worked for Difco, the Digestive Ferments Company, which produced media for bacteria culture. It was also when he met fellow future Fortean, and fellow curmudgeon, Frederick S. Hammett.
In 1918, on the 19th of October, Lennora died. She had contracted the flu—1918 was the year of the pandemic, though I don’t know if that was the strain which infected her—and then developed pneumonia. It was, reportedly, a brief but intense illness. (Harding himself had been ill with influenza, too, and lost his hair, though he later was skeptical of his disease’s etiology.) Lenore’s body was returned to Maryland, where it was interred. The death came not even a month after their sixth anniversary—and after Harding had already suffered on nervous breakdown. So it’s probably not a surprise that, according to eh 1920 census, his family was living in the same Detroit boarding house as him, his father, his mother, and his sister. The elder Thomas was selling jewelry. Neither his wife nor his daughter were employed, according to the census.
The younger Harding was not only doing chemical work, but thinking hard, and writing, too. And, he was pushing against the dying Victorian proprieties. Hammett remembered Harding as dirty, uncouth, rough-hewn, and obsessed wth sex, looking at pornography, reading smutty books. The two apparently cruised for women a lot, and paid for sex on more than one occasion. In a letter written in the mid-1920s,, by which time they had both left Difco, Hammett said,
“Conditions at Detroit were quite entirely different with us. We were both in the beaker of experience being assayed from the impurities of mind engendered by our natural emotional reactions to disillusionment. We both of us said and did what we thought without regard to the proprieties at times and at other times attempted to cover over the stink-hole of the past by showing we could be perfect gentlemen if we wished. We were whisked hither and thither willy-nilly by the fire of our turbulent emotions and we had a bully time of it at that. Pathetic, lonely, but withal having a bully time of it.”
The slow trickle of newspaper pieces continued, prelude to a deluge. Clearly, he was working through his wife’s death, as well as trying to find a soft place to fall, philosophically. In June 1919, he published a couple of essays in the “Detroit Free Press”—on the women’s page, predecessor of the later lifestyle sections—concerning loneliness. Apparently, this was a topic of some moment in Detroit at the time, the city struggling against a reputation as unfriendly. Harding affirmed that Detroit was a difficult place: it had not developed the culture central to East Coast cities; he admitted, too, that loneliness was part of the human condition (a fact that must have seemed especially stark to him at the time: a war just ended, his love cruelly taken from him, living in a distant city), but it could be ameliorated, through friends, to an extent, but especially through reading.
As best I can tell, Harding broke out of newspapers by finding a niche in “The Open Court.” This was a Chicago-Based periodical, started in the late 1800s, that was supposed to be a place where writers could consider philosophy, science, religion—and their various interrelations—without concern for censorship. (Motto: “Devoted to the science of religion, the religion of science, and the extension of the religious parliament of idea.’) The Open Court was, broadly, associated with the free-thought movement and was part-and-parcel of what secularization looked like on the ground, as opposed to high-falutin’ theories of the death of religion and God: secularism was about the loosening of tradition, the waning power of religious institutions—but by no means their end—and the rising freedom to choose among different religious options. In essence, Harding was sorting through a pack of cards, looking for the one that appealed to him most. And he was not the only person to be doing so. “The Open Court” featured the writings of a number of Forteans before the founding of his eponymous Society: Roy Petran Lingle, Maximilian Rudwin, Hereward Carrington, Frederick Hammett, and T. Swann Harding.
I count eleven articles by him for the publication between 1919 and 1922. These were amateur efforts—as Hammett would point out, Harding sending them to him for commentary—jumping from idea to idea, never quite precise, calling attention to their own erudition. They are also way too long, each of them. But they show him grappling with real ideas: his first, published the year after Lennora’s passing, discussed how the proximity of death can clarify one’s thinking. He was also dealing with the after-effects of the war: he hated the war, was inclined toward Pacifism, but especially hated the hypocrisy and lack of thought it exposed in Americans: how quickly they could be taught to hate some new monster that was once a friend. He feared that there was little place for intellectuals in America, that the country was too hidebound, too conventional, too conservative, too focused on commerce: he variously explained it as “retarded evolution,” “conventional virtue,” conservatism, psychosis, and convention. What he wanted were liberals—people who expanded the universe of categories about which one could think, rather than conservatives who opposed anything that wasn’t traditional. Harding praised the work of Dreiser—even if he was skeptical of him as a writer—and Cabell and Veblen in challenging the old order.
By the end of his (first) run in “The Open Court,” Harding still hadn’t essayed a positive view of what was needed: only what needed to be cleared out, dogmatism of all sorts, not only religious and social, but scientific and atheistic. (He said he was no fan of the free-thought magazine “Truth Seeker” because of its hard-line against religion.) It’s clear from the correspondence with Hammett—although only Hammett’s letters survive—that Harding was still unsure of himself, too. He seems to have asked several times if Hammett thought what they had done in Detroit was all right. (Hammett reassured him that they both had gone through intense experiences and needed the release all that sex brought them; it was fine.) He was struggling, too, because he wanted to be an author—he wrote at least three novels in the early 1920s, none of which were published, as far as I can tell, though seemingly at least one of his poems was—and also seems to have been disenchanted with his own work. Hammett chided him for mocking those with doctorate degrees, which was becoming increasingly common in government science, seeing in it Harding’s own insecurity about only having a bachelor’s degree. And it is true that at some point during the 1920s, while he remained with the USDA, he switched over to editing its scientific publications.
During the mid-1920s, Harding continued to write, though it would be a couple of years before he returned to The Open Court, and I haven’t found any of his material from about 1922 to 1928, save for two articles in “The Nation.” He does seem to have fit some traveling into this period, and also a marriage—when his writing career was just taking off, and after his wild years, which covered a relatively short span of time on 18 September 1920 (five days before the eight anniversary of his first marriage), Harding married a Mrs. May Morrison Meyers, aged 29, in Chicago, Illinois. I do not know much about her, though other records have her first name as Mary—the same as Harding’s mother’s name, just as he had his father’s name. She was born in the early 1890s (1891, 1892, variously) and emigrated from Scotland, naturalizing around 1916. (This is from the census; I have not found immigration papers.) She married first when she was 24—and may have also married in 1919, as there is a record from Detroit of a Mary Morrison, born in Scotland in 1892, wedding a man with the surname Meyers.
Harding, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, but revealingly and patronizingly anyway, described her in a 1929 article as a bit vain, very conscious of class standards, and tremendously put upon keeping up their six-room (two bathroom house), as well as attending to all of his cleaning and feeding. (According the 1930 census, they owned their home.) The family had not yet purchased a modern iron or a wash machine, so indeed her chores were heavy. They were not flush—they wrote up a budget (and actually had it published in a magazine, as an example)—but they did have a radio and an icebox. Harding contributed his bit to the chores—mowing the lawn, cleaning the ashes from the furnace—but most of his time seems to have been spent working, either with the USDA, doing his own writing, or giving lectures on science. Records seem to indicate, though, that the couple—they never had children—moved around a bit, orbiting Washington, D.C: various places in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. itself.
From what I have found, the late 1920s and early 1930s was the period of Harding’s most productive writing. No longer a bench chemist, but an editor of scientific papers, he turned out a whole series of his own works, too, in “The Open Court,” up to the cessation of its publication in 1936; in various magazines; in the Little Blue Book Series which was also a favored outlet of early Forteans (such as Maynard Shipley); in academic journals on philosophy and sociology; and in Theodore Dreiser’s “American Spectator.” By the end of his career, in the early 1950s, his publications must have numbered in the 100s. There were also books, too, such as “The Joy of Ignorance” and “The Popular Practice of Fraud.” He must have been fairly well off, between all of his publications, the steady pay of a government job, and the relatively small expenses incurred by being a childless couple.
Roughly speaking, his writing output can be divided into three streams, with only glancing references to the modernist authors who had influenced him—he turned Hammett on to James Joyce’s Ulysses and the works of James Branch Cabell—such as a brief reference to James Laughlin, who would launch the important publishing house “New Directions.” As the 1930s wore on, these different strands would often overlap, and it is clear that Harding’s writing was facilitated by a constant recurrence to the same examples. (And his books repeated entire articles.) The one which came to be most closely associated with his name was the calling out of medical frauds and hoaxes—the pablums and nostrums that were common then, certainly, but also other “common sense” myths that he thought deserved debunking: that smoking was bad for you—not proven, he said—or that exercise was good for you—probably not if done too vigorously.
A second strand of writing concerned government, and, particularly, agricultural policy. Harding seems to have been influenced strongly by the Progressive movement of the 1910s, particularly the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration, and he thought that government should play a role in the everyday life of people, and in offering scientific suggestions. He was especially keen to point out the way that business and its money could deform and deflect good policy, and sully the practice of science. At the same time, he confronted the limits of government, and through the thirties seems to have grown increasingly conservative. He hated war from an early age—having seen the carnage of the Great War—and among its many other sins numbered the way that war wasted the state’s resources and ate away at democracy by inspiring fear, which in turn led to the rise of totalitarians. He came to see the New Deal as embodying some of these traits, a governmental response to a real crisis that promoted fear and an increasing bureaucratization. Especially problematic, from his perspective, was that science had not kept up with the growth of the state, and so even as agencies multiplied and structured the lives of regular people, there were not enough properly trained administrators to offer good, sound policy.
A third strand of his writing underlay both of the other two, a philosophical one that promoted science but also skepticism. He tried to work out these ideas in a series of articles for “The Open Court” and lay them out in “The Little Blue Books,” but his writing was not always clear on this matter—these were some of the worst essays in his middle period—and he ended up tying himself into some unusual knots. These philosophical musings built on his earlier thoughts about the rise of a modern society, asking what the individual and scientist’s responsibility was in this new world. Interestingly, his ideas about secularism echo very strongly recent developments in historiography on the subject.
Harding’s basic idea was that human’s had two essential faculties, the mystical and materialist. The mystical involved total involvement—participation, as the anthropologist Claude Levy-Bruhl had it—in the world, dissolving the boundary between reality and imagination. Harding argued that this response to the world remained common in children, “primitives,” and the animal world. But that modern society, with the rise of its complicated civilization, had made it impossible for Westerners. He saw the mysticism of his day—Theosophy, Psychical Research—as ridiculous throwbacks, vestiges. (In this way, he was indulging the earlier theories of secularization: the the modern world had been disenchanted, and any continuing enchantments were necessarily atavistic.) What the modern world needed was a proper scientific understanding of the world: that was the only way to rationally proceed.
Here, though, Harding departed with a lot of his contemporaries, and, indeed, the main historiographical tradition of the era, which followed Max Weber in seeing the world as disenchanted. For Harding had a very particular notion of science. Harding continued to have no tolerance for rabid materialists and atheists, nor of scientists who preached that science had all the answers to the world’s problems. (Indeed, one of his problems with the Society for Psychical Research was that it was too positive in its announcements.) Eighteen years at the bench had taught him he needed to be very careful in what he admitted was true, and take any scientific result as provisional. The problem, as he saw it—especially in his research on fakes and frauds—was that “science” was being used to see the world a bill of goods, to bilk, to defraud, and to pervert the government. (In this he anticipated the “dialectical” view of secularism that would be most forcefully put forth by the Marxists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer int he 1940s: that wha we called modernism was actually a kind of totalitarianism in disguise, that there was a false sense of wonder being used to pervert true rationality.)
In the late 1920s, Harding thought of science in terms of “organized common sense” and he was leery of modern physics, which departed so far from lived experience, was too abstruse and based in mathematics. Later, after more and more experimental verification of modern physical notions, he would be more accepting, but also have a more refined notion of what science was doing. It was not organizing common sense, but creating fictions: the fiction of the atom, of gravity, of vitamins, of evolution. These fictions structured scientific research, as scientists attempted to verify them through more and more testing. But they always remained fictions, and could be discarded: they were to be lightly held. This was not mysticism; it was materialism, but of an ironic stripe. He wanted everyone to understand that even within science there was a great deal of ignorance.
But here is where Harding twisted himself around and around. For Harding, every human lived by fictions, according to unsupported beliefs. Scientist pushed against these, testing them, but could only do so a little at a time. How, then, could science make government work better? Or people live better? One way was to understand that all science—social and natural—followed the same procedures; another was to make clear definitions. (He was increasingly irritated by the balkanization of science.) But there was no way to cure humanity’s ignorance totally. So, on the one hand, he suggested people embrace it—to either recognize their fictions as fictions and enjoy them, or just recognize they were ignorant and not care. He doubted seriously that most people could be scientists or enjoy a proper scientific outlook: he was elitist that way. Which led him to propose that scientists needed to establish a metaphysical religion—science itself was too abstract and cold to be properly religious, too provisional to be a foundation of ethics—that lay people could subscribe to, while scientist sweet about their business of figuring out the proper laws of ethics. His skepticism, thus, led him to a very odd place, where scientists were left alone to figure out the laws of the universe, while the rest of the world remained deluded.
Which, in a strange way, presages the current view on secularization and modernity, which sees it as mixing the wondrous and the scientific, which emphasizes the ironic use of imagination—while still ultimately privileging science and technology as drivers of social change. Fort instance, it’s hard not to read the following as in the spirit of postmodernism, which would develop much later: “The scientist deals constantly with provisional constructs of the imagination, with out-and-out fictions, and with partly verified hypotheses.”
Harding continued to work for the USDA until 1951, when he finally retired. Through this period, he continued to write, including a history of the USDA, and articles on the importance of agriculture for a true democracy—as well as on medical and scientific frauds.
I do not know what he did after his retirement. I cannot find many writings after that time. He did take a trip to the Caribbean at what seems to be shortly after his retirement.
Thomas Swann Harding, Jr., died in the month of his birth—May—1973, in Rehoboth Delaware. He was 82 or 83.
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I do not know when Harding came across the writings of Charles Fort. His skeptical philosophy was obviously compatible with Fort’s thought, though not congruent: Harding gave more credit to scientists that Fort would, and did not share Fort’s monism. But in none of his early writings did I find a reference to Fort—this despite Harding’s wide reading, and early interest in Theodore Dreiser. He came to Thayer and the Society relatively early after Thayer relaunched it, and was an important contributor, though his own persnicketiness, matched with Thayer’s meant that they had a love-hate relationship, one that reflected Harding’s relationship to the Society, as well, if not to Fort. Indeed, it’s hard to say what Harding though about Fort at all from his writings: his Forteanism must be inferred from the elective affinity between his ideas and the Bronx’s scientific gadfly.
The first connection I can draw between Harding and Fort, the Fortean Society, and came in August 1937, which was after Thayer had announced the renaissance of the Society, but before the first issue of its magazine appeared. Thayer had just discovered Hardin’g writings and wanted him in the Society. The letter, preserved in Harding’s papers at the Library of Congress, said, in part:
“I have just read two of your books—which is more than you can say to me. They were recommended by a friend of mine who fancies he is a radical—but is not—inasmuch as his revolutionary thinking extends no further than the economic systems and social structures of a single extant species. I admire the Joy of Ignorance and Degradation of Science, and respect the mind which went to the trouble of setting them down, and--since admirable books and respectable minds are none too common in my experience—I write to say that you are a Fortean, a practicing Fortean, whether you will or no, and that I should like to have you join us—in spite of your preoccupation with the welfare of the human race.”
Thayer then offered to loan Harding some of his books.
Harding responded quickly, for Thayer’s next letter came two weeks later, on the 11th of September. It must have been a positive response from the USDA editor because Thayer sent him the first issue of the magazine, welcomed him to the Society, enjoined him to recruit further members, and offered to start promoting Harding’s next book—whatever it might be—in the magazine’s pages. There followed a correspondence that, in Harding’s peers at least, lasted until the middle of 1938. At the time, Harding was trying to convert an article he had written for Dreiser’s “American Spectator”—called “Fictions Men Live By”—into a book, but having no success at finding a publisher. Thayer tried to get his own publisher, Julian Messner, to take it on, but Messner rejected it as too technical, to Thayer’s chagrin. As far as I know, the book never came out. Harding was also shopping something called “The Prostitute’s Notebook,” (which may have had something to do with sexually transmitted diseases, a subject Harding covered in three Little Blue Books I have not seen.) Thayer discussed the manuscript with the Fortean and sex researcher Harry Benjamin, but it, too, apparently never found a publisher.
The relationship during this first year seems to have been friendly. Thayer admitted to Harding—as he did to Ezra Pound—that he didn’t really understand what George Vierick was doing in his writing, but found the poems interesting enough to publish in Doubt. They swapped phone numbers, and may have met up in person. Thayer had his friend—and fellow Fortean—Aaron Sussman, who was also in the book business—work on getting some of Harding’s stuff published, but apparently that also failed. Thayer joked with Harding—“Oh, Swann, God damn it,” he opened one letter, and concluded another: “Consistent application to what I esteem to be the work of the Secretary of the Fortean Society has got me in such a state that I do not trust my own mother. Are you sure that you are not a spy?”—while Harding sent him a barrage of unanswered letters in late 1937 and (seemingly) chastised Thayer for not putting out the magazine regularly. Thayer said he was working up a report that he hoped would be a stand in for the magazine: he had not yet fully committed to the publication, its regularity, or its shape.
Harding, like Don Bloch after him, also provided Thayer with a vast amount of material for early issues of the magazine. In September 1937, Thayer told Harding he would cull the batch of material for a column on natural wonders; at the time, he said, he was avoiding advertising, politics, and economics. (This strategy would change in the next few years.) By March of 1938, Harding was asking for the material back, but Thayer was putting him off: he still had not finished sorting through it all. Meanwhile, they talked about other places to publish, including a new magazine being put out by Arnold Gingrich, who had co-founded “Esquire.” Thayer was upset because two pieces he had sent there had been editorially mangled—worse yet, though, was the magazine’s jingoism.
Harding’s name first appeared in the third issue of the “Fortean Society Magazine,” June 1940—so that’s three years for three issues. The column was titled “Forteana” and credited to Harding. Included was a rather typical menagerie of Fortean topics: showers of pebbles, weird cancer cures, questions about the number of Jovian moons, a microphone that broadcast without being plugged in, stars closer than they seem, the poor calibration of measuring devices, weird creatures, mysterious fires, and rediscovered animals. It was anomalies with no unifying connection—the natural wonders of which Thayer spoke: proof, therefore, that the world was not as disenchanted as scientists might have us believe, which sounds more like Thayer’s take on Forteanism than Harding’s.
The connection between Harding and the Society seems to have grown thin over the next several years. Harding did not appear in the magazine, and there is no extant correspondence between Harding and Thayer. What I know of the years from 1945 comes from correspondence between Thayer and Don Bloch (which is all represented by letters Thayer sent to Bloch). In January of 1942, when Bloch was still in Washington, D.C., Thayer suggested Bloch meet up with Harding. Two years later, Thayer told Bloch, “Swann is a swell guy if you can keep him serious for ten minutes running.” The two also discussed Swann’s publishing in a magazine called “Frauds,” about medical hoaxes. This was in early 1945, and Thayer had recently had lunch with Harding, so the two were still connected. Thayer noted that Harding appeared in almost every issue of the magazine. Bloch wondered if it paid, and Thayer said it must—or Harding wouldn’t write for it. But Thayer was not very impressed. He thought the editors were “stupid” and unable to “string four good words together.” (This seems to have referred to the little-known magazine “Frauds” or “Answers Magazine” put out by A.G. Stamp in Pasadena starting int he late 1930s.)
Despite the lack of verifiable connections between Harding and Thayer or the Society during this period, Thayer seems to have still held Harding in some esteem. In 1944, Thayer published “The Fortean Society is the Red Cross of the Human Mind,” which laid out the Society’s aims and listed its most prominent members, including its Founders, and Honorary Founders. Thayer would later say that Honorary Founders were meant to replace the original Founders when they died—but there was some problem with that theory, among them that it was unclear who counted as an original Founder. Early on, Thayer had listed the (renegade) historian Harry Elmer Barnes as one. But in 1937, when Thayer re-started the Society, Barnes wrote to protest the use of his name: he had no use for Fort or the Society, and had only lent his name in 1931 to show support for publishing maverick ideas. Thus, in this pamphlet, Thayer made Harding an Honorary Founder, taking Barnes’s place—though Barnes was still alive and well, and would be until 1968.
Harding was back in Doubt 13, published in the winter of 1945—so about the same time as Bloch and Thayer were discussing “Frauds.” Apparently, he didn’t only publish for money. Harding had honed his message by this time, and started with he striking passage, “History is the accepted lie. This is true of scientific as of any other lie; the conventional lie holds. Every history of scientific discovery we read represents a conventionally accepted fiction which some misguidedly regard as true for all time but which the more intelligent realize is a fiction accepted for convenience.” I very well may have been an excerpt from what would have been “Fictions Men Live By.” The article went on to then discuss how science—based as it was on a fiction—could said to progress:
“It can progress only when and because certain patent fictions or lies are universally and conventionally accepted as truth; that temporarily ends controversy in that sector and the synthetic pattern thus create, called scientific truth, does prove useful for many practical purposes. But cessation of controversy usually occurs because the dispute has exhausted the disputants and nobody is left who cares to waster energy calling anyone else a lawyer. There are no final truths; there are even no final facts. There are simply things that appear to be true under certain rigidly controlled conditions and usually some important condition has escaped control. There are only hypotheses, theories, fiction, and conventional lies.”
This passage, too, fit with what Harding had been saying since the early 1930s: it was his version of skepticism, a softer one then Thayer allowed.
The next time Harding’s name came up was more than a year later, in August 1946—nine years after Thayer had introduced himself to Harding. Apparently, there had been some kind of falling out between Thayer and Harding, the nature of which is unknown. In the 8 July 1948 edition of “USDA”—an in-house publication for the Department—Swann had taken an anonymous shot at Thayer. In a column titled “It Rains Fish,” Swann noted that a worker in the Soil Conservation Service received a letter asking if it ever rained fish. The worker—William C. Pryor—said such reports were mostly imaginary (people saw the creatures on the ground and assumed they had been rained), though it might be the case that waterspouts picked up fish and other small animals and rained them down—the argument W. L. McAtee had made, and which had been the government line since the 1910s, but which was then being challenged in the seminal skeptical publication, “Natural History of Nonsense” by Bergan Evans.
Swann cheekily asked, “You don’t believe it?,” then answered: “(It drains our credulity too.) Bill’s authority is a book: George Stimpson’s ‘A Book about a Thousand Things.’ Ask for it at the bookstore or library.” Then he took his shot: “Charles Fort would disagree. He held that anything scientifically impossible could happen, and did right along. Look up his books. There is even a Fortean Society in his memory, a private enterprise of novelist Tiffany Thayer. It gets out a semi-so-often house organ, very cryptic and esoteric. Nobody can read it. But it says horses and blood fall in rainstorms.” Fort—and the Fortean Society—were too adrift from science for his taste, too much enthralled int he wonderful, maybe even the mystic: the ideas were atavistic, illiberal, and out of touch with the times.
That August, Bloch noted the article to Thayer, who dismissed it casually: “Swann is a dimple-brained and vindictive son of a bitch who has a childish mad on me. That’s why he wrote that piece. Since it has no circulation outside the Bureau I’m ignoring it. Ten days later he’ll do something wonderful for us. He sat as a model for the first cock weather-vane.” If Harding did do anything nice for the Society—ten minutes later, or ten years later—it is not clear from the available record. Thayer plugged his history of the USDA—“Two Blades of Grass”—when it came out in the summer of 1947 (gently mocking him for being with the Department since the Civil War, though he was only thirteen years older than Thayer—and in 1951 noted to Bloch that Harding had retired from government service. That implied the two were talking again, at least, and Thayer was still ribbing Harding about his age— “He and Abe Lincoln went into the government at the same time”—but Harding was still not in the magazine.
Harding would be mentioned in later Fortean publications—The International Fortean Organization’s Journal noted he was among the Honorary Founders—but I see no evidence of him connecting to the newer Fortean groups. Rather, from he scant evidence available—including the lack of evidence: him not writing about Fort in his early career—Harding seems to not have been much inclined toward Fort or Forteanism. He was skeptical and shared intellectual inclinations with Fort—and mores, the Fortean Society—but doesn’t seem to have accepted Fort’s more thorough-going anti-science stance. Harding was a skeptic, and skeptical even of Fort. His story—like Lou Alt, Hugh Robert Orr, Edwin H. Wilson, like the rise of Humanism in the 1930s and its association with the Fortean Society—shows how complicated the term “skepticism” was at the time.
