THE FASTEST-GROWING RELIGION IN THE WORLD BY ROBERT ANTON WILSON

from Ralph Ginzburgs fact: Nov-Dec 1964 Volume 1, Issue 6

Despite a history of horrible persecution and despite a theology that makes even the Holy Rollers seem rational, the Jehovahs Witnesses have been so successful theyve got all good Catholics and Protestants worried.

Of the three major religions that have been born in America-Mormonism, Christian Science, and Jehovahs Witnesses-it is the last that has met with the most success. Today, 1,200,000 members of the Jehovahs Witnesses are knocking on doors and distributing literature on all six continents and reaping 5000 new converts a year-in the last 20 years the Witnesses have increased their membership by an amazing 700%. Total circulation of the religions main magazine, The Watchtower, published in 66 languages and in Braille, is 4,300,000 only 10 U.S. magazines have larger circulations. Another Witness magazine, Awake!, is published in 25 languages and has 3,950,000 subscribers. And the religions main textbook, Let God Be True, published in 194 countries, has a circulation second only to that all-time best seller, the Holy Bible. Not only is the Jehovahs Witnesses the fastest growing religion in the world, but a Catholic writer, William J. Whalen, has stated (in Armageddon Around the Corner, 1962), Should the growth of Jehovahs Witnesses continue at anywhere near the pace set during the past 30 years, the cult may very well become a serious threat to organized Christianity .

And there isnt the faintest sign of any let-up. Even now the Witnesses 1,200,000 pioneers (members engaged in door-to-door missionary work) are tirelessly circulating throughout the ten zones into which the world has been divided by strategy planners at the Jehovahs Witnesses International Headquarters in Brooklyn. Each zone has already been covered again, and again, and again. A pioneer has probably been to your own door once or twice already. He will be back, in a month, or a year, or a decade. Meanwhile, a continuous program of conventions goes on in all the major cities of the world. The United States alone had 22 such conventions this summer, everywhere from Yuba City, California, to Austin, Texas, to Brewer, Maine. Each of these conventions averages about 10,000 in attendance; the largest attendance so far has been 253,000 (in New York).

My main task, in writing this article about the Jehovahs Witnesses, was to find out why this particular religion is gaining converts so easily and quickly while Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism are lucky to make even slight gains. What, in short, is the secret of the phenomenal success of the Jehovahs Witnesses?

First off, I betook myself to the Witnesses International Headquarters in Brooklyn, which I found to be a startlingly modern building complex on the East River, with an unsurpassed view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the looming Manhattan skyscrapers. Like all Jehovahs Witnesses enterprises, it has never been segregated. A staff of 400 co-ordinates and organizes the preaching activities of the pioneers throughout the world. A few blocks away, in a somewhat slummier neighborhood, stands the factory where an additional staff of 300 produces the Watch-tower magazine. Every single employee, from Witnesses President Nathan Knorr on down, receives the same compensation: lodging, food, clothing, and $14 a month. Yet the morale in this factory is amazing. In 3 hours of sightseeing, I didnt meet a single bored-looking worker. Everybody, devoutly convinced he is doing Jehovahs work, is happy, enthusiastic, and efficient. Many of the machines were designed by the workers, who put together parts of previously-

existing machines. One contraption, which looked like an illustration for a science-fiction magazine, was made from three other machines. Those three machines had taken ten men to operate, but the new monster needs only three operators. Seven more men, the manager told me, released to return to pioneer work in spreading the Message! Unique among printing plants, nowhere on the floors in this factory will you find a piece of scrap paper. Each department has a chute for scrap paper, and on the second floor one department receives all this waste and wraps it into 1200-pound bales, averaging about 20 bales a day, which are then sold. The factory also generates its own electricity and makes its own ink.

* * *

All this modern technology and wonderful efficiency really jolted me, knowing what I did about the ideology of the Jehovahs Witnesses. If someone sat down and deliberately dreamed up all the most nonsensical clap-trap he could think of, he probably couldnt top what the Jehovahs Witnesses actually believe. Among other things, the Witnesses are opposed to the Roman Catho-lic Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, Protestantism, Judaism, Christmas trees, religious crosses, segregation, the theory of evolution, fishing, hunting, blood sausages, movies, cigarettes, voting (no Witness voted in the recent election), the doctrine of the Trinity, yoga, extrasensory perception, fortune-telling, Communism, Fascism, and saluting national flags all of which they regard, literally, as Devil-inspired plots to lead mankind away from Jehovah God. The battle of Armageddon, foretold in Revelations, has already begun (in 1914) and is drawing to a close. Contrary to the leading Jewish and Christian scholars, Yahweh is not the correct name of the Old Testament God. The correct name is Jehovah (which, according to most historians, wasnt invented until the 11th Century). Scientists who think the earth is 2 billion years old, and Fundamentalists who think it is 6000 years old, are both wrong. It is 42,000 years old. Jehovah, who resides in the constellation Pleiades, is very touchy about his name and cant abide being called any such general noun as Lord, God, or Almighty unless Jehovah is included before or after it; otherwise, for all He knows, you might be invoking some upstart deity of the heathens. Only 144,000 people will be admitted to heaven, and sinners will not go to hell (which doesnt exist) but will merely be annihilated. Millions who are neither saints nor sinners, but who are Jehovahs Witnesses, will happily remain on earth after the Last Judgment. As for the secular world, the Witnesses regard every government on earth as a devilish conspiracy. They firmly believe that Satan himself-a real Fallen Angel dedicated to fighting against Jehovah God-is the hidden ruler of every government based on force. Nor are they internationalists, at least in the secular, liberal sense. When the League of Nations was founded, Jehovahs Witnesses de-nounced it as another clever plot by the Devil; they have the same attitude toward the United Nations. Add to this carnival of eccentric dogma the orthodox Christian repugnance towards physical love, and you have the whole theology of Jehovahs Witnesses.

Despite their theological hodge-podge, the Witnesses themselves are far from being oddballs, as I discovered when I attended a convention at West Springfield, Massachusetts, from July 23 to July 26 of this year. A Jehovahs Witnesses convention is not what you would expect if you identify them with Billy Graham or the Holy Rollers. They make no attempt at Instant Christianity; indeed, they positively avoid quick, emotional conversions. Their speakers may crack a few jokes and shout occasionally, but the basic tone is one of what they call intellectual persuasion. And if you accept their fundamental premises-which are that the Bible contains prophecies and that their readings of controversial Hebrew and Greek words are the correct readings-much of what they say is logical.

* * *

A mass baptism was going on when I arrived early on the morning of the 24th. Like many Protestant sects, the Witnesses believe in, total immersion. The ministers and the candidates all wear bathing suits, and the women are baptized separately from the men. The actual baptism is a striking spectacle. The candidate wades out to a depth of about 4 feet, where the minister is waiting. No words are exchanged (the verbal part of the ceremony has been performed on shore). The candidate holds his hand tightly over his nose, as if smelling a vat of Liederkranz, and the minister, wasting no motion, smartly grabs his shoulders, leans him backward, and dunks him. I watched 300 baptisms, including that of a one-legged woman, and I chatted with a few Witnesses, who explained to me that the ceremony was symbolic only, and not a magic ritual.

The Witnesses like the ones I met in Brooklyn were conspicuously polite and conspicuously middle-class in appearance. (Actually, the appearance is deceptive. A sociological study has clearly demonstrated that the majority of Jehovahs Witnesses belong to the lower-income brackets.) I noticed one interesting pattern when I began asking various Witnesses why they had been converted: A significant number who had lost faith in the religion of their parents investigated several other religions and settled on Jehovahs Witnesses for ethical reasons. Some of the remarks I heard were, Its the only religion that practices what it preaches, Its the only desegregated church in America, and, Every time I met an honest man in business, he was a Jehovahs Witness. One man told me how he had accidentally discovered that his parents church was involved in local business corruption, so he set out to find for himself a church that wasnt corrupt. Jehovahs Witnesses, he said, is the only one I found that isnt up to its neck in political and commercial graft.

One of the factors, I discovered, that helps explain the sky-rocketing growth of the movement is, not the conventions or the pioneers, but the Hydrogen Bomb. All the speakers at the convention eventually got around to paying their respects to the Bomb. It is their boffola, their clincher. It condemns the society which made it, justifies their own withdrawal from that society, and provides a suitably apocalyptical vocabulary for the letting-off of personal anger and pain. If the Bomb didnt exist, they would have had to invent it.

But they dont really need the Bomb to cheer them. In 3 days with the 12,000 Witnesses at this convention, and 2 days with the 700at the Brooklyn headquarters, I never saw an unhappy Witness. Bomb or no Bomb, they are sure the Great Day is coming soon, when Dad can throwaway his truss, and Mothers dental plate will be replaced by newly sprouted real teeth, and Aunt Sallys cancer will be cured, and Junior wont have pimples anymore, and the Lion will lay down with the Lamb.

During my sojourn in Massachusetts I got a chance to catch up on my reading, and naturally delved a bit into the history of this remarkable religious movement. And I learned that, just as the Witnesses manage to combine Medieval ideology with modern technology, their history is an outrageous combination of buffoonery and bravery. It all began in 1813 when a self-educated seaman named. William Miller, after mulling over some obscure passages in the Bible, decided that the world was coming to an end in 1844. His followers, known as the Millerites, multiplied rapidly and created considerable qualms throughout the country as the year 1844 approached. When 1845 finally arrived and the world went on, the movement fell to pieces. Within a few years, however, new messiahs arrived to put the pieces together again by offering different interpretations of the same Bible passages. One sect decided that the correct date for the end of the world was 1864, and others picked 1866, 1870, and 1889. In 1870, Charles Taze Russell, a self-proclaimed Greek scholar who knew no Greek, attended a meeting of one of these groups, the Second Adventists, who had picked 1889 as their year, and was inspired to go home and search the Scriptures himself for enlightenment. He quickly discovered the theological and mathematical errors of the other groups-especially those who had picked 1844,

1864, 1866, and 1870. He decided, however, that even the Second Adventists were wrong with their choice of 1889, and that the correct year was 1914.

Russell quickly communicated this news to the Second Adventists, but they, probably misled by Satan, refused to listen to him. In 1889 Russell had his first vindication: The world did not end, proving that he was right and they were wrong. By this time he had a few thousand followers who, cheered by his success in not picking another wrong year, enthusiastically went forth to warn the world about the cataclysm of 1914. In those days, his followers called themselves simply Bible Students and were usually mockingly called Millennial Dawners by others. The name Jehovahs Witnesses was not officially adopted until 1931. (The word Witnesses refers to their belief in their God-given command to go forth and testify to the world.)

Some readers will claim that the world did not end in 1914. The Witnesses will quickly explain that the world began to end then and is still in the process. Of course, after 1914 a few minor changes had to be made in Russells books. The 1908 edition of his Millennial Dawn, for instance, states That the deliverance of the saints must take place sometime before 1914 is manifest. Eleven similar changes were incorporated into the 1916 edition, to make Jehovahs plan clearer. Even so, some persons, misled by worldly vanity, dropped out of the movement after 1914.

In the 1920s the Witnesses were among the first groups to denounce Mussolini and the Vatican. This led to widespread attempts by the Catholic Church to prevent the distribution of Jehovahs Witnesses literature. In many American cities, especially in Connecticut and New Jersey, new laws were passed making it a crime to hand out leaflets without first having them approved by local officials. The Witnesses bravely defied these laws, went to court, and fought until all such precensorship regulations were declared unconstitutional. A boycott organized by the Roman Catholic bishop of Philadelphia did, however, force them off the radio there. The battle grew more bitter when Hitler came to power, -signed a pact with the Vatican, and, shortly thereafter, banned the Witnesses in Germany in a statement explicitly attacking them for damaging the Catholic faith. Henceforth, throughout the 30s and 40s, all Jehovahs Witnesses publications carried blistering assaults on what they called the Catholic-Nazi-Fascist plot to destroy them.

* * *

Probably no other religionists of modern times have been persecuted more cruelly than these same Jehovahs Witnesses. Open the official history of the movement at any page and you will find a story like the following; which occurred at the Neuengammer concentration camp outside Nuremberg on Sept. 12, 1943:

Seven Jehovahs Witnesses, newly arrived at the camp, were led into the yard, where an SS officer asked the first of them, How long will you be a Jehovahs Witness? Until my death, the prisoner replied. He was flogged 25 times. The next prisoner was asked the same question. Until my death, came the reply a second time. After all seven had been questioned and flogged, the first prisoner was again asked, And how much longer will you continue to be a Jehovahs Witness? The same level-voiced reply: Until my death.

After all seven prisoners had been questioned three times, and flogged 75 times, they were led, their backs raw and bleeding, into the shower rooms, where alternating jets of freezing-cold and red-hot water were turned on them. They were then paraded into the yard, naked, and forced to do calisthenics until one of them fell dead of a heart attack.

All six survivors were now asked in turn, How much longer will you continue to be Jehovahs Wit-nesses?

Each replied, levelly and firmly, Until my death.

This anecdote is entirely typical of the History of Jehovahs Witnesses in Nazi Germany, where 11,000 of them were incarcerated in similar camps, leading some observers (including an official English government report, Treatment of German Nationals in Germany, by Sir Neville Henderson) to say that they were actually treated worse than the Jews. Old Jews, in most cases, were murdered quickly. Young Jews were forced to work under brutal conditions, then killed. The Jehovahs Witnesses were tortured continuously in a scientific program intended not to exterminate them, but to force them to repudiate their religion. The program failed: Not one .of the 11,000 ever signed the official statement of repudiation prepared for therapy the Nazi government, although 7000 perished. They actually organized and carried through the only successful resistance movement in the concentration camps, refusing to work on the construction of munitions boxes until the Nazis gave up and assigned them to other work. (Many of them became barbers. The Nazis were sufficiently convinced of the Witnesses nonviolent principles to let themselves be shaved by Witnesses without fear of having their throats cut.)

That was Nazi Germany. Here is a story from the democratic United States a few years earlier:

Seven Jehovahs Witnesses drove up to the Town Hall in Richwood, West Virginia, on June 29, 1941, and applied to Martin L. Catlette, deputy sheriff, for a permit to distribute literature. According to subsequent court testimony, Catlette held the Witnesses prisoner and called the local American Legion post, saying, We have the sons of bitches here. Some 1500 American Legion members gathered outside the Town Hall and, under Catlettes leadership, forced the Witnesses to drink 16 ounces of castor oil each. Bound with ropes, the Witnesses were led to the local Post Office where the mob abused and manhandled them in an attempt to force them to salute the American flag, an act that violates their religion. Deputy Sheriff Catlette then read aloud the Constitution of the United States while the Witnesses were led out of town and their car . inscribed with obscene and abusive slogans. They were released and warned never to come back to Richwood.

Similar stories could be collected from any country on earth. Jehovahs Witnesses have suffered worse in totalitarian Germany and Russia than in more democratic countries, but even England and Canada, traditionally the two nations most fair to heretical minorities, have much to be ashamed of in their treatment of this sect. Persecution has befallen the Witnesses in every country they have entered since their founding 94 years ago. In the United States, which is neither the best nor the worst example, the American Civil Liberties Union has reported 335 cases of mob violence against the Witnesses in one typical year, and during the 1930s lower courts pronounced nearly 30,000 convictions against them. These convictions, usually an trumped-up charges of disorderly conduct, were overturned with monotonous regularity because higher courts found palpable bias on the part of the lower-court judges. This did not stop similar convictions from the benches of other lower-court judges. Charles A. Beard, the distinguished historian, has written of the Jehovahs Witnesses in his book The Republic (Viking Press, 1943): They have money to hire lawyers and fight cases through the courts. As a result in recent days they have made more contributions to the development of the constitution allow of religious liberty than any other cult or group.

* * *

In the United States today, the only persecution (if it should, be called that) faced by the Jehovahs Witnesses is connected with their refusal to submit their children to blood trans-

fusions, even in cases where life is at stake. Courts, in several cases, have taken the children into custody and ordered the transfusion to proceed. The Witnesses skilled legal department is fighting every case with its usual vigor, and the most passionate advocates of civil liberties are for once divided. Does religious liberty include the right to sacrifice ones child to ones God? (The whole issue arises out of the well-known text in which God commands his worshippers not to eat meat with blood in it, which Jehovahs Witnesses interpret as a condemnation of taking blood in any form.)

Perhaps all this persecution has helped to make the J.W. movement the success that it is. Call it masochism, call it sympathy for the underdog, call it what you will, people tend to flock into a religion that is being persecuted. When the Witnesses were banned by dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in 1950, there were only 217 of them on that unfortunate island. When the ban was lifted in 1956, there were 469.

* * *

But I still did not, I felt, really have the answer. I did not know why people are drawn into this grandiose carnival in ever-increasing hordes while other churches are lucky to hold onto the members born into them, why no other religionists since the first Christians have made so many converts so quickly. Persecution helps. So does the up-to-date efficiency of the staff at International Headquarters. So does the pioneer program (while other churches sit back and wait for converts to walk in, the J.W.s are out on the street busily hawking the message from door-to-door). Yet the key to the mystery, I had to admit, was missing. That is, until August 11, 1964, when I accompanied a team of pioneers on their door-to-door calls in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn.

The pioneers were an attractive young couple, Dick and Jeanne DeChaine. He is a salesman for World Book encyclopedias and she is a hostess for Trans WorId Airlines, but under Witness rules they must devote 10 hours a week to pioneer preaching. Since the Witnesses never send more than two persons to a door (If they see three of us, Dick DeChaine explains, theyll feel were ganging up on them and wont answer the door), I accompanied only one of them, Mrs. DeChaine.

The first door we tried was answered by a harassed-looking, middle-aged Italian housewife. Mrs. DeChaine informed her we were making door-to-door calls to encourage home Bible reading. Im Catholic, the woman snapped. I got enough religion. The door closed.

Cheerfully, Mrs. DeChaine tried the next door. Another middle-aged Italian housewife, who also looked harassed. Mrs. DeChaine got further along with her spiel this time, but the woman hastily resorted to the Great Housewifes Ploy that every salesman knows and dreads. The babys crying, she said, I-gotta run-upstairs-sorry-good-bye.

Next was an elderly woman so gushingly feminine that she reminded me of a homo in drag (but, of course, a great many women of that generation are exaggeratedly feminine in that way). She cut into Mrs. DeChaines spiel immediately: Oh, darling, you dont need to tell me. I know my Lord, I know my God. I talk to Him all day long. I have lived with His companionship for 20 years now, darling, and I grow closer to Him every day. Mrs. DeChaine complimented her and commented on how few there are these days who have this treasure. The old woman fluttered her hands excitedly, Oh, darling, they dont know what theyre missing, she cried. Mrs. DeChaine sold both magazines and left an advertisement of the next Watchtower lecture. Amid a shower of Bless yous we made our way down the stairs.

The next three calls were brief. Busy. Not interested. The baby is crying. Next was an adorable blonde creature in white shorts and halter who broke my heart by using the crying-baby ploy just when I thought we were going to get in.

The next door was opened by a tall, good-looking Negro who listened politely for a few moments and invited us in. Like most Negro apartments in white neighborhoods, his was conspicuously clean and neat (Cant have em thinking Im running down their real-estate values). When Mrs. DeChaine, rather intuitively, asked about his health, he poured out a wretched story: After years of hard work as a longshoreman, he finally achieved a salary high enough to move into this nice neighborhood, and then, 2 months ago, he suffered a heart attack, and the doctors told him he couldnt do hard work anymore. But what other kind of work is anybody going to offer me? he told us bitterly. He had only one consolation, he told us: the Bible. Ive been reading it a lot since I got home from the hospital, he said, and its the only comfort in this whole world. Mrs. DeChaine asked if he was familiar with the following passage from Revelations 21:4:

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for all the former things are passed away.

And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write, for i these words are true and faithful.

Isnt that a wonderful promise? Mrs. DeChaine exclaimed, her eyes shining. And, look, it tells you deliberately that it isnt a symbolic passage or an allegory. These words I are true and faithful, it says. And its the word I of Jehovah God Himself, who would never deceive us. But the really exciting thing is this: Do you know when all this will happen? It tells you: When Babylon the Great has fallen. Now what is Babylon the Great? And she went on into the usual Witnesses line-Babylon is our whole cruel civilization that is obviously about to pass away, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, and so on. I watched the man closely as he listened. Skepticism flickered in his eyes, and then a painful longing, and then his mouth turned down in rejection and he unconsciously shook his head-too often he had heard promises that were not fulfilled. But then, as she continued, the longing came back into his eyes, and he looked at the Bible himself to check that the words were really there, and then something frightened and hungry bloomed in his face: He might have been fighting for his life, which in a sense, I suppose, he was. And we can be sure it will be soon, Mrs. DeChaine went on. Ever since 1914 the prophecies have been coming true, year after year. A great determination was coming into his face, washing away the fear, which I now recognized as fear that she might be wrong. I looked away, embarrassed. It is a beautiful, terrible sight to see hope appearing in a face where despair has lived for a long time.

I want to talk to my minister about this on Sunday, he said finally, and I want you to come back again, so I can talk to you some more.

Mrs. DeChaine made an appointment for herself and her husband to drop back the following week for an hour of Bible study. We shook hands, and I muttered, Good luck. They were the first words I had spoken since entering, and my throat was hoarse and my voice cracked.

* * *

And the Heavens were rent asunder and the veils fell from my eyes. And, behold, a voice spoke to me saying, Now it is revealed unto you how Jehovahs Witnesses are made out of the depth of despair that lies in one apartment out of nine on any street. And I knew not whether to laugh or cry, and so I did both, and came home and wrote this article.

THE PASSION OF MADALYN MURRAY BY ROBERT ANTON WILSON

from Ralph Ginzburgs fact: Jan-Feb 1965 Volume 2, Issue 1

(reprinted in Email to the Universe)

Her brother is unemployed, her son has had a mental collapse, and she herself faces a lifetime in jail but Americas No. 1 atheist is still riding at a gallop, high in heart

For 4 years, Baltimore endured an atheist in its midst. Not just any atheist, mind you, but the most famous atheist in America: Madalyn Murray, the woman who filed a lawsuit and got the Supreme Court to kick religious prayers out of the public schools. Ever since the lawsuit brought her to their attention, the good people of Baltimore strove to get rid of Madalyn Murray, and in June, 1964, they finally did it. As a result of the methods they used, Madalyn is now in exile in Hawaii, her arm is partly paralyzed, her hair is almost white at 44, her organization -the Freethought Society of America-has been wrested away from her, her brother is unemployed, and her son is under a psychiatrists care. The worst victim of all, however, has been the U.S. Constitution, which has emerged from the affair even more battered than the Murray family.

Those people traditionally concerned about civil liberties have not protested much about the Madalyn Murray case, probably be-cause they find it simply incredible. When I visited Hawaii and spoke to Madalyn Murrays present-day lawyer, Hyman Greenstein, he frankly told me that he himself did not completely believe Madalyns story when he first agreed to represent her. She was a human being in trouble, he said. That was obvious. But I was sure she was exaggerating and dramatizing what had happened. I just didnt believe these things could happen in the United States. Then I went to Baltimore and investigated the facts. Believe me, Jack Ruby didnt face worse prejudgment in Dallas than Madalyn Murray has faced in Baltimore.

In fact, to understand the Madalyn Murray story one must first understand the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland, and nothing in America prepares a person for such an understanding, Imagine Spain, in the days of the Inquisition, transferred within our borders. Maryland is named for the Virgin Mary; it was founded by Catholics; it is still predominantly Catholic; 17% of all property in the State be-longs to the Catholic Church, which pays no taxes on it. Maryland is the only state in the Union that demands a religious qualification for judges; the only state that demands a religious qualification for jurors; the only state that demands a religious qualification for witnesses. Madalyn Murray literally could not testify in her own behalf in any trial there, nor could any other atheist testify for her. In addition, the legal code has not been substantially revised since 1789, and it perpetuates many old English common-law punishments that have been abolished elsewhere. Particularly crucial to Madalyn Murray, who is under indictment on eight counts of assault against policemen (she charges that the police actually assaulted her), the Maryland laws do not fix a maximum sentence for the crime of assault. The judge can make the prison term as long as he wishes-and Baltimore judges are not noted for their partiality to Madalyn Murray.

If Marylands laws are Medieval, its folk culture, with its persistent violence, deserves to be called Fascist. It is part of the South: The stink of hatred permeates the air like smog in Los Angeles and filth in New York. Negro homes have been bombed in the past year. Talk to a cabdriver in Baltimore about the color problem and hate sprays from him like odor from a skunk-in 3 minutes he will improvise 90% of the tortures it took de Sade years to dream up, with Martin

Luther Coon as the principal victim and Earl Warren next in line. A celebrated Iynching in Baltimore not so long ago ended with the hanged mans toes and ears being hacked off by a member of the mob. The ears and toes are probably on somebodys mantelpiece today, and the owner is probably proud of them. Bet on it. He shows them to guests: Got these babies fighting Communists.

* * *

In this little pocket of 13th-century life, Madalyn Murray stood up and declared herself an atheist, an anarchist-socialist, and an integrationist. Here she started, and fought to a Supreme Court victory, a suit to end prayers in the public schools. Here she took into her home, and into her Freethought Society of America, Mae Mallory, a bitter Negro militant wanted by the authorities in North Carolina, And here, Madalyn Murray, after winning her school-prayer case, started a lawsuit to force the United States government to tax church property the same as any other property.

In the March-April 1964 issue of Fact, I wrote the first profile of Madalyn Murray to appear in a major magazine. In it l described some typical reactions to Madalyns activities:

Day after day the letters pour in. You should be shot! Why dont you go peddle your slop in Russia? YOU WICKID ANAMAL I will KILL you!

The day before Christmas a rock was thrown through the window, causing $67 worth of damage [The phone calls are] a barrage of insult, obscenitythreat, and psychotic rambling

her elder son, Bill, now 17, [has been] beaten up by gangs of Catholic adolescents more than 100 times, her younger son Garth, who is 9, [is] beginning to have nightmares because of frequent assaults by other. boys.

Sifting in her office interviewing her I heard a school bus go by. Every child stuck his head out of the window and shouted, Commie, Commie, Commie!

My article appeared on the newsstands on April 1, 1964. A few weeks later, Madalyn Murray wrote to me to say that reporters from Timeand Life were coming in squads and battalions to interview her, carrying my article and asking their questions from it. (Both Time and Life later swiped my title, The Most Hated Woman in America.) Theyre all trying to find errors in your Fact piece, Madalyn told me. Theyre sore as hell about Facts expose of errors in Time and they want to get even. They never found any errors, although once they thought they had. A Mr. Michael McManus, of Times Washington office, called Madalyn and announced that she had lied to me about her Army career. You werent on Eisenhowers staff, he crowed, you never Ieft North Carolina. Madalyns maiden name was Madalyn Mays, and Time had gotten ahold of the WAC record of a different Madalyn Mays.

The Time article appeared on May 15, and Madalyn wrote to tell me that now Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post were doing stories on her. Baltimore, more and more, found itself spotlighted as the nations atheism capital, and Baltimore did not like it. Madalyns cat was strangled. A series of letters, postmarked Baltimore, became progressively uglier:

You had better read this carefully! It may be the last one you read. Somebody is going to put a bullet through your fat ass, you scum, you masculine lesbian bitch!

You will be killed before too long. Or maybe your pretty little baby boy. The queer looking bastard. You are a bitch and your son is a bastard.

Slut! Slut! Slut! Bitch slut from the devil!

Madalyn files all such letters in a folder which she someday hopes to publish under the title, Letters from Christians. But the growingmurderousness of the correspondence, as national publicity about her increased, began to get under her skin, and she bought Tsar, a large German shepherd, and trained him to attack on command.

Meanwhile, somebody in the Baltimore Post Office began systematically underlining the first three letters in her name, so that all of her mail reached her insultingly addressed, Madalyn Murray. MadaIyn complained to the Baltimore Postmaster and was told that an investigation had failed to unearth the culprit, although her mail continued to arrive disfigured. Then, suddenly, all mail stopped. Madalyn complained to the Baltimore Postmaster and to the Postmaster General in Washington, with no immediate results. Then an unidentified Communist called and told her that her mail was being delivered to the Communist Party of Maryland. The C.P. leaders, having a long-standing grudge against MadaIyn (All Communists have a long-standing grudge against all anarchists, Madalyn says), had not bothered to notify her that they were receiving her mail. Madalyn again complained to the Postmaster General and soon began to receive her mail anew. Not long after, the Madalyn Murray underlinings were resumed.

The good people of Baltimore devised other harassments. The garbage cans at Madalyns office were dumped onto the ground every day, before they could be collected. Her son Bill received traffic tickets almost every time he went out driving. Somebody entered the back yard of her home at night, was attacked by Tsar, and rammed a piece of wood down the dogs throat. Coming into her office one morning, she found two officials of the City zoning board going through her correspondence, and when she tried to have them arrested for trespassing, no judge would issue a warrant.

Each of Madalyns efforts to cope with these harassments brought on further difficulties. To handle the garbage problem, she boned up on Baltimore law and found that a business firm could use its own incinerator if the incinerator was a specific legal size. She bought an incinerator that met the requirements, but the first time she used it several fire trucks rushed to the scene with sirens blaring and extinguished the blaze. When MadaIyn quoted the law to the fire chief, he informed her that in his judgment the incinerator was unsafe.

Madalyn picked the most flagrant of Bill Murrays traffic indictments and fought it in court. Although two witnesses, one a policemans son, testified that Bill had not committed the violation (driving through a red light), the court found him guilty.

* * *

Madalyn Murray continued to fight back. Her lawyer at that time, Leonard Kerpelman, found in his Iaw books that a citizen unable to obtain redress from a judge could appeal directly to a grand jury. Madalyn persuaded him to make this Iast attempt to register charges against the zoning-board inspectors who had been caught in her office. A few hours later, Madalyn received a desperate phone call. Kerpelman was in jail. He had knocked on the office door of the grand jury and was immediately arrested for contempt of court. Rushed before Judge T. Bar-ton Harrington, Kerpelman was quickly convicted and fined $25. Having only $24.78 in his pockets, Kerpelman was taken to jail. MadaIyn paid his fine and got him out, but he was shaken by the experience and began to show increasing disinclination to represent her further. He also was worried that Madalyns enemies might use the contempt conviction to try to have him disbarred. To head this off, he appealed his case. Strangely, he was represented by William L. Marbury and Marvin Braiterman. Marbury is the attorney for the Roman Catholic Church in Madalyns tax the

churches suit, and Braiterman is the attorney for the Episcopal Church in the same suit. They appeared before Judge Michael J. Manley and persuaded him to drop the case against Kerpelman. This was the first, and only, case ever won in the City of Baltimore by anyone associated with Madalyn Murray. Kerpelman subsequently broke with Madalyn and is now publicly working against her.

* * *

The next act of the melodrama began, like the Fall of Troy, with a runaway girl. The fair Helen in this case was I7-year-old Susan Abramowitz, who met Bill Murray in high school. Bespectacled, shy, and intellectual, Susan soon became emotionally involved with Madalyns elder son. What happened after that is subject to dispute. Susans parents, Leonard and Jeanne Abramowitz, charge that the Murrays induced Susan to abandon her Jewish faith and to move into the Murray household. Susan claims that her parents beat her cruelly for associating with Bill, broke her glasses, cracked her teeth, and blackened her eyes, and that she sought refuge in the Murray home only after her own parents threw her out of theirs. The Baltimore papers printed all of the charges made by Mr. and Mrs. Abramowitz, but not a single word of the countercharges by Susan and the Murrays. When Madalyn complained, an editor told her that her charges were libelous and that he could be sued for printing them. (Actually, the charges against Mr. and Mrs. Abramowitz are legally protected against libel action, being contained in a brief filed by Susan Abramowitz, William Murray, and Madalyn Murray in the Criminal Court of Baltimore, under Article 26, Sections 91-101 of the Baltimore Code. Among other complaints of cruelty, this document charges, on Susans testimony, that her father struck her on one occasion so hard that he fractured a bone in his own hand.)

The Abramowitzes obtained an order from Judge James Cullen on June 2 placing Susan in custody of an aunt and uncle. Susan immediately fled to New York City and took refuge with a friend. Two weeks later, she and Bill re-turned to Maryland and were secretly married. Then they returned to the Murray household on June 20. A neighbor recognized Susan and called the police. Youd think it was Dillinger they were after, Madalyn says. A whole fleet of squad cars came racing to our house. In their haste, the police forgot to obtain a warrant for Susans arrest, so the Murrays refused to open the door. The police tore open a screen door and rushed in.

What happened next is again a matter of dispute. The Murrays charge that they were brutally beaten by the police. According to the police version, Madalyn Murray single-handedly assaulted eight policemen. (The next day, only five policemen claimed to have been assaulted by her, but two days later three additional policemen pressed charges.) Madalyns mother, Leddie Mays, an elderly woman suffering from arthritis, is accused of assaulting still another policeman. Mrs. Mays admits touching a policeman. He had Bill on the ground and kept clubbing him, so I grabbed his shoulders from behind and yelled at him to stop. `Youre killing the boy! I said. For her crime, 73-year-old Mrs. Mays was promptly knocked unconscious by the club of another guardian of the peace.

When I asked the plump 44-year-old Madalyn how in the world she managed to assault eight armed policemen, she grinned. You didnt know I was such an Amazon. did you? More seriously, she said, I bet every hood in the country will migrate to Baltimore when word gets out that eight of their policemen can be assaulted by one overweight, middle-aged housewife.

Madalyn was taken to University Hospital for injuries, her mother was taken to Union Memorial Hospital, and Bill was taken to jail, where he claims the police beat him all night long while one of them read the Bible aloud to him. Well make a Christian out of you yet, you cock-sucker, he quotes one of his tormentors as saying.

The next day the Murrays were released, and they carefully hid a tape-recording that Bill had made of the tussle, in which Sgt. Charles Kelly is clearly heard admitting that the police had no search warrant. The matter of the war-rant apparently began worrying the authorities at this point, for State Attorney W. J. ODonnell suddenly called a press conference to explain that the police do not need to have a warrant in their possession when entering a house if they have reason to believe a warrant has been issued.

This legal theory appears to be new. I called the Attorney Generals office in Washington to inquire about this and was told, I never heard of such a doctrine. When I asked if I could quote this, my informant hastily added that the Attorney Generals office does not officially utter opinions on the law for the press and suggested that I call the American Civil Liberties Union. At the A.C.L.U., Mr. Alan Reitman, a lawyer, stated flatly, There is no such doctrine in American law. If a search is to be made, the police must have a warrant. Madalyns Hawaiian lawyer, Hyman Greenstein, says bluntly, ODonnells doctrine wouldnt last as long as a snowball in hell in any court outside Mary-land. Even in Maryland, it wouldnt stand up against anybody but Madalyn Murray.

Madalyn and her family held.a conference. Considering her 100% record of defeat in all Baltimore courts, they decided that if she remained in Baltimore she would undoubtedly be convicted on assault charges. They recalled that the prison sentence for assault, in Maryland, can be as high as the judge chooses to make it. That night the Murrays, with Bills new wife, Susan, drove to Washington and took a plane to Hawaii. Baltimore was at last rid of its atheist.

The good people of Baltimore were not satisfied yet. Leo Murphy, a Baltimore artist who had done a drawing for the cover of Madalyns magazine, American Atheist, began to receive phone calls from people threatening to kill him or to throw acid in his face and blind him. An Ida D. Collins wrote gleefully to the Baltimore Sun, Madalyn Murray took the wrong route when she left us this week. Instead of Hawaii, she should have taken a `slow boat to China and do us all a favor and stay there. The insurance company cancelled the insurance on her house and, although the mortgage payments were up-to-date, the bank began court action to foreclose because the house no longer was insured. And in Hawaii, Madalyn watched her son Bill begin to slip into a mental breakdown.

Bill had taken his share of punishment during the previous 4 years with Spartan solidarity. After his night in the Baltimore jail, however, he suddenly broke into screams before Judge Joseph G. Finnerty and shouted, You Christian, you Catholic, I wont go back to that cell and be worked over again! In Hawaii, Bill began to sit for long periods in his room, utterly silent. Occasionally, he would come out of his stupor and attack his mother verbally, saying she had ruined his life by getting him mixed up in the school-prayers case. Then he locked him-self in his room and refused to talk to anyone for nearly a week. He is now under the care of psychiatrist Linus Pauling Jr. He has come out of his silent depression, but retains a violent hatred of his mother, whom he blames for all his troubles.

* * *

Back in Baltimore, Madalyn was tried in absentia for contempt of court and sentenced to I year in jail. The Baltimore authorities also got busy and created a new law that fifed a minimum 20-year sentence for each count of assault against a policeman. Madalyn Murray, the Baltimore Sunannounced, now faces at least 160 years imprisonment if she ever returns to Baltimore. I asked Madalyns lawyer, Hyman Greenstein, about this: Doesnt the Constitution prohibit such ex post facto punishments? Yes, he said, but the Constitution also prohibits trials in absentia, and Baltimore has already done that to her. He added: Assault, you know, is a

misdemeanor. If they get away with it, shell be the first American ever to serve life for eight misdemeanors.

Meanwhile, a gang of people moved into Madalyns business office, announced that they were the Freethought Society of America, and tried to use the bank account Madalyn kept under the societys name. Madalyns fight against the coup detat has followed the traditional pattern in Baltimore courts: She has lost every single hearing.

Heading the group occupying Madalyns office is Lemoin Cree, a 26-year-old biologist who works at Fort Detrick, where the U.S. Army carries on research in the creation of artificial bubonic-plague epidemics and other methods of biological warfare. Mr. Cree and his associates insist they were appointed by the board of directors of the Freethought Society. Madalyn Murray insists there is no board of directors of the Freethought Society, and showed me the by-laws to prove it.

Madalyn is convinced that Cree and his group are Catholic agents. A friend of mine, who knows the atheist movement the way Clark Kent knows the inside of the phone booth at the Daily Planet, laughed at this. Madalyn is breaking under the strain, he said. The Church has given her such a hard time, shes be-ginning to see priests everywhere. According to this informant, Lemoin Cree and his associates are actually atheists, but atheists whose politics are Right-wing and who are embittered by the fact that Madalyn Murray, the only atheist to achieve national publicity, is conspicuously Left-wing.

Since the office contained several hundred dollars worth of furniture belonging, not to the Freethought Society of America, but to Madalyns mother, Leddie Mays, Madalyn sold this furniture to her friend, Mae Mallory, who thereupon tried to obtain a robbery warrant against the group in the office. A Baltimore judge ruled that the bill of sale was not legal. The bill of sale had been witnessed by a notary public in Hawaii, and the judge declared that, under Maryland law, it had to have been witnessed by a clerk of a Hawaiian court, not by a notary public. Lawyer Joseph Wase, representing Mae Mallory in this matter, insists there is no such Maryland law. According to Miss Mallory, however, the judge involved had said of Madalyn, That atheist doesnt have any rights in this State.

Yes, all this is happening in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States of America, in the Year of Our Lord 1965.

* * *

Going from Baltimore to Honolulu must be Iike ascending from the nethermost circle of hell to the pinnacle of paradise. In every way, Hawaii is the antithesis of Baltimore. It is the most cosmopolitan of American states, and the most tolerant. Racial harmony is so good that even the year-long parade of tourists-with its high percentage of Legionnaires, werewolves, warlocks, Storm Troopers, monsters, and miscellaneous Ugly Americans-does not under-mine it.

Shortly after her well-publicized arrival in Hawaii, Madalyn telephoned lawyer Greenstein and asked to see him. Hyman Greenstein is a legend throughout Hawaii. Everybody knows that he was the model for Lieutenant Greenwald in Herman Wouks The Caine Mutiny, that he is a fanatical devotee of sports-car racing, that he loves impossible cases, and that during World War II he won so many impossible court-martials that Admiral Halsey personally intervened to have him transferred out of the Pacific area. In one notorious court-martial, the president of the court lost his head and called Green-stein a son of a bitch. Greenstein calmly turned to the court clerk and asked, Did you get that down? Court was immediately adjourned. It reconvened a few minutes later to dismiss the charges against Greensteins clients.

A short, soft-spoken man, Greenstein a ways wears green bow ties and his office is decorated in shades of green. Madalyn warned me, The green is some kind of personal symbol to him. He is not amused when somebody says, `Oh, are you Irish, Mr. Greenstein?'

When it became known that Madalyn had called for an appointment, Greensteins staff was dismayed. His secretary told the lawyer, Everybody wants to know if youre going to take that awful womans case. Greenstein called the entire staff into his office and left the door open. That door is always open to people in trouble, whatever their beliefs, he said. Does anybody want to quit? Nobody did.

Mr. Greenstein has prepared a blockbuster of a brief against Madalyns extradition. He charges that No court in the State of Maryland is legally constituted because of that States religious qualifications for judges, juries, and witnesses, and that, therefore, The entire judicial system of Maryland is in violation of and repugnant to the Constitution of the United States. He further argues that Marylands failure to prescribe maximum penalties for assault is barbaric, outmoded, and repugnant to the Constitutional guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment.

Not only has Madalyn found a conscientious and capable lawyer in Hawaii, but she has also come upon some truly good Christians. Eighteen Hawaiian clergymen, including a Catholic priest, signed a petition urging Governor John A. Burns not to approve the extradition of Madalyn back to religious persecution in Maryland. In fact, as soon as she landed on the island she was offered help-by a church. The Rev. Gene Bridges, of the Unitarian Church, called her on the phone to ask if she had found a home yet. When he learned that she hadnt, he invited her whole family to spend the night in the backroom of his church. Mr. Bridges immediately thereafter started calling the board of directors of his church for approval. The board has 15 members. After calling 8 and receiving 7 approvals, he invited the Murrays to stay until they found a home. They remained in the church for 2 weeks.

Madalyn has mellowed a lot, due to the Unitarian Church, one Unitarian told me. Madalyn now attends the Unitarian services every Sunday and sends her son Garth, 10, to the churchs Sunday School. I attended services with Madalyn at Mr. Bridgess church one Sunday. It began with some recorded music by Dizzy Gillespie, then Mr. Bridges read selections from Anne Morrow Lindberghs Gift From the Sea and E. E. Cummingss I: 6 non-lectures. Madalyn listened enthralled and said to me as we came out, Isnt he wonderful?

That afternoon, Madalyn and I visited the largest Buddhist church in Honolulu and she picked up several free pamphlets of Buddhist sermons. Youre not getting religious, are you? I joked. Hell, no, she said. Im just curious.

* * *

For Madalyn Murray remains unshakable-and unsinkable. Sitting on the veranda of her little rented house at 1060 Spencer Street on the side of Punchbowl Volcano, with the panorama of Honolulu and the looming whalelike hump of Diamond Head spread before us, she told me eagerly of her plans in the tax the churches suit. Were going to subpoena the Archbishop of Baltimore, Lawrence Sheehan, she said, and make him tell how much money the church collects from its property in Baltimore, how much of that remains in Baltimore, how much remains in the United States, and how much goes to Rome. That information has never been available before, but it will be now. People can add and subtract; you know. Wait til the American public starts figuring out how low its taxes would be if all that untaxed money werent flowing out of the country. Madalyn is also planning to run for Governor of Hawaii, on a

platform in which a fourth branch of government-the economic-would be added to the executive, legislative, and judicial. She is broke, in debt to the chin, the Baltimore courts wont let her use her bank account, and she is still riding at a gallop, high in heart.

The other victims are less buoyant. Bill Murray is still under psychiatric care. Garth, Madalyns other son, has frequent nightmares about seven-foot tall cops beating his Mommy. Old Mrs. Mays is subdued and anxious. Madalyns brother Irving, 48, gave up a good factory job, not wanting to be the only Murray in Baltimore and a standing target for the remaining hatred, and he has not found a new job yet. As for the victim that has suffered most-the U.S. Constitution-it is not flesh-and-blood and, hence, doesnt feel its wounds, but if it could speak it would probably whimper softly.

THE MESSIAH OF MADISON AVENUE BY ROBERT ANTON WILSON

from Ralph Ginzburgs fact: Mar-Apr 1965 Volume 2, Issue 2

The battle rages over Dr. Ernest Dichters use-or misuse-of motivational research to ply consumers with goods that are often worthless, if not downright harmful

A woman walked into a supermarket somewhere in America today and bought $20 worth of magic potions-love charms, amulets against old age, talismans of status, totems and icons against all the ills of the flesh. The woman was not a witch, and she did not know that she was purchasing the implements of sorcery. She thought she was buying cigarettes, detergents, cosmetics, and food. The denizens of the Avenue of the Mad Madison Avenue in New York City, where the advertising industry is clustered know better. They know better because the advertising industry is now working hand-in-glove with- another industry known as Motivational Research, and Motivational Research is the new witchcraft, the science and art of reducing modern, educated populations to the fear-ridden and fetish-worshipping status 6f the savages of the Old Stone Age.

According to the dictionary, fetish has two meanings. In anthropology, a fetish is an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or demon. A charm, a lucky piece, a rabbits foot are all fetishes in this sense. In psychiatry, on the other hand, a fetish is an inanimate object used in attaining sexual gratification, and typical examples collected by those persons having this compulsion are shoes, locks of hair, stockings, underclothes, and necklaces.

Motivational Research has discovered and, to some extent, created-a new kind of fetishism somewhere between those two. MR (as it is called by the ad-men) is a technique that enables manufacturers to persuade consumers to buy products-not because of any physical property they possess-but because of psychological gratifications they provide. Virtually all advertising in America today is under the influence of MR. You cant leaf through a magazine, look at TV, listen to radio, or even ride a bus without being in sight-or-sound range of an MR inspired attempt to imprint the new fetishism on your nervous system.

The high priest and original inventor of MR, Dr. Ernest Dichter of the Institute for Motivational Research, is well aware of the roots of his science in primitive black magic. In his Handbook of Consumer Motivations, he tells us bluntly:

This book is a sort of contemporary cultural anthropology of modern man. His customs, motivations, desires and hopes are often not too far removed from the rituals and fetishes of the New Guineans. He buys his fetishes in the department store, and the New Guineans carve theirs out of the skulls of their enemies.

And this black magic is now big business. Dr. Dichter lists 72 different advertising agencies as regular clients. Among them are such leaders as Young & Rubicam; J. Walter Thompson; and Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. In addition, he has done special MR studies for such companies as Allstate Insurance, The Borden Co., Chrysler Corporation, Dow Chemical Co., Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clark Corp., Lane Bryant, Mars Company, The Nestle Co., Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats Co., Reynolds Metals Co., Socony Mobil Oil Co., Time magazine, and Hiram Walker. All in all, Dr. Dichter has

performed 2500 MR studies to date, and many of his clients have come back again and again, such as the Colgate-Palmolive Co. (8 times), Ford Motor Co. (20 times), Esso (13 times), and Nationwide Mutual Insurance (24 times).

To be sure, Dr. Dichter is not alone in this field. Louis Cheskins deliberately misnamed Color Research Institute is also an MR outfit, with the special advantage that its subjects believe they are being interviewed about the psychology of color and do not know that their consumer habits are also being psychoanalyzed. James M. Vicary Company is another leading MR firm. Edward H. Weiss & Company made a unique contribution to MR a few years ago by performing a massive study of how womens purchasing habits vary at each stage of their menstrual cycle. There are more than 90 other firms engaged in motivational research in America today, staffed by fully qualified psychologists, sociologists, and other behavioral scientists. In addition, many of the top ad agencies now have their own MR departments. McCann-Erickson of New York, for example, employ five full-time psychologists whose main function is to work in consultation with the agencys copywriters.

* * *

There are several techniques used in MR, but the most popular, created by Dr. Dichter, is the depth interview. A depth interview is a sort of instant psychoanalysis, except that psycho-analysis aims to cure neurosis while MR exploits it. The subject-any average consumer -is interviewed, on the surface, in the manner of traditional market research: Why do you like, or dislike, this product? What would you like to see improved about it? What do you like, or dislike, about its commercials?

Beneath this surface, the real depth interview is going on. The interviewer is a trained psychologist or other social scientist. Classic psychological tests such as the Thematic Apper-ception Test or Rorschach Inkblot Test are brought out. Or the subject is shown photos of 12 men and asked to pick out the 6 he likes best (he will, inevitably, pick out the 6 most like himself, psychologically. Latent homosexuals, for example, will pick out a homosexual who is also latent). Or the subject is asked, frankly, to daydream out loud about the product. Sometimes a group of subjects are given blindfold tests to see if they can identify the product by taste (if it is a food or cigarette). Naturally, if the subjects cannot identify it by taste-a very frequent occurrence-the MR men know at once that the products entire appeal is psychological and fetishistic. This is true, for instance, of cigarettes. The MR men have never found a consumer who can identify his favorite smoke when blindfolded. They are smoking an image completely, Dr. Dichter has written. .

An average MR study involves 500 to 2000 depth interviews. When summarized, these interviews reveal to the clinical eye of the MR men the fetishistic associations which the product already has in the public mind. Future advertising then emphasizes these fetishistic associations in every indirect and subliminal way that the imaginative copywriters can dream up.

Typical is the first-and, perhaps, still the most influential-MR study performed by Dr. Dichter. This was the study of the Plymouth car, performed by Dr. Dichter in 1940. The study determined that the car is simultaneously a sex symbol, a mother symbol, and a status symbol-a phallus, a womb, and a badge of distinction all in one package. Chrysler scored so big by exploiting these fetishistic associations in their ads for the Plymouth that soon the whole industry followed suit and began to imitate the ads. Today, 25 years later, it is impossible to find an automobile ad that doesnt have leering sexual innuendoes. Indeed, MR has infiltrated automobile design as well as automobile advertising, arid each year the manufacturers strive to create an ambiguous chromium beast that looks at once like a penis and a womb, and also glitters like a childs toy.

Safety experts-as pointed out in Fact, May-June 1964-are convinced that these gimcracks have made the American car ten times more lethal than it need be.

* * *

A study performed by the Institute for Motivational Research for the Pharmaceutical Advertising Club offers an example of a more specialized use of MR. Physicians were shown a cartoon of a man telling his doctor, Doctor, Ive been wondering about antibiotics for my condition. The doctors were asked to guess what the doctor in the cartoon was thinking. Typical responses were: These wonder drugs have been oversold, Let me be the doctor, Ill do what I think best, How the hell would you know what to suggest; self-diagnosticians are a pain in the gluteus maximus. From these responses (together with other interview techniques), the MR men were able to conclude, unknown to the doctors themselves, that:

While, on the surface, the physician claims that he just wants factual scientific information [in pharmaceutical ads], our depth interviews and ad tests made clear that a cold black-and-white rational presentation of objective facts is most often simply ignored. Similarly, highly technical copy-featuring complicated charts and chemical formulae-tends to be rejected because he cannot understand it and because it serves as an unpleasant reminder of his lack of knowledge in this area.

MR not only discovers fetishistic associations; it also creates them. Have you ever wondered why the Marlboro Man looks so much like the Neanderthal Man and the Piltdown Man? Some years ago, filter-cigarette makers discovered, through MR, that their sales were lower than those of the nonfilter brands because they were not functioning as virility fetishes. The male population, it was found, regarded filter cigarettes as sissified, upper-class, effeminate, and almost swishy. The Marlboro Man and all the deep-sea divers, truck drivers, and cowboys in the ads for other filter cigarettes represented an attempt to create rugged associations. The sales of filter cigarettes have been rising ever since this campaign began. Similar techniques are now being used to peddle perfume to men, and would probably work with any other previously feminine product, with the possible exception of tampons.

Besides inducing us to butcher one another in unsafe cars and poison our lungs with coal-tar, MR also deserves part of the credit for alcoholism having become Americas No.3 health problem, right behind heart disease and cancer.

We are not concerned with the moral values involved, Dr. Dichter royally declares in the section of his Handbook on booze. With this refreshingly frank admission, he proceeds to probe the fetishistic associations of beer, bourbon, scotch, rum, vodka, and wine, each of which appeals to a different personality type. The beer drinker wants to be a regular guy, but the scotch drinker is consciously seeking a superior status. The bourbon drinker is an individualist: He says that scotch tastes like medicine and is aware (without the MR boys telling him) that its fans drink it for status. Rum is very masculine and almost makes one an honorary pirate it is the drink for fantasy, escape, swashbuckling, and building a true male image. Vodka is glamorous and exotic and creates a feeling of superiority: I dare to be different.

Wine, however, has a connotation of snobbery and aristocracy. Most Americans are still afraid to serve it because they are not sure what type of meat or fish goes with what type of wine. Dr. Dichter suggests that the wine sellers should emphasize that any kind of wine is the right kind of wine as long as the consumer likes it.

The chief reason for drinking any liquor, however, is to escape from oneself. Dr. Dichter writes:

Our studies have shown that drinking permits the discovery of a different personality within oneself. The person who is drunk really says, Is this me, I did not know that I had these other sides, these ot_er potentialitie,s. . . . It is a dynamic psychological remedy.

The dynamic psychological remedy, for many people, is an endless curse. For most of us, MR -type ads, intended to subliminally hypnotize us into taking a drink, are no problem, but for the five million alcoholics in America and for their families-these ads are psychological poison. Albert Camus, symbolizing all the neuroses of man as one allegorical plague, once asked, Are we on the side of the plague or against it? MR, undeniably, is on the side of the plague.

Dr. Dichter has recently published a summary of the results of the 2500 motivational studies he has conducted over the past 25 years. Here, in alphabetical order, you can learn all about the fetishistic meaning of everything from apples to yoghurt. The apple, for instance, is a symbol of immortality, an amulet against death. The Greeks, Dr. Dichter reminds us, presented an apple to the winner of the Olympics; the apple in the Garden of Eden promised immortality; and we have all heard that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Yoghurt, strangely enough, is also a symbol of immortality, and many people believe you can live to 120 years on a yoghurt diet. Most everything else, however, is either a mother symbol or a sex symbol. Cotton is sexy and feminine; wool is sexy and masculine. Meat is very sexy, and so is the butcher because he handles it. He is the only merchant allowed to flirt with his female customers. Steak is more sexy than chicken, because bulls are virile and chickens are-well, chicken. Most of us still believe, unconsciously, that we will acquire the bulls bravery by eating him and fear that we will acquire the chickens cowardice by eating her. Soup is motherly, and we want it when we are ill, because mother gave it to us when we were jll as children: It is almost identical with mothers milk in the unconscious. The sexiest and most enticing product of all is silk, and Dr. Dichter is delighted to report that silk worship is, in fact, a surprisingly frequent secret vice in our society, and is found in a great many otherwise well-adjusted people. Many, many children are ardent silk fetishists and cannot go to sleep without a piece of silk to hold and rub between their fingers.

When he is not writing books, Dr. Dichter publishes a newsletter, called Findings. Its January 1965 issue declares:

1965 promises to be a year when advertisers will discuss the sexual implications of their products with less restraint, more freedom. Toothpaste manufacturers will not only show beautiful teeth, but also that they can be used to bite, to express passion. Cars will increasingly become symbols of strength, vitality, conquest. The advertising of candy, cigarettes, and perfume will embody stronger connotations of love and compassion.

Sex in advertising will be used with less inhibition, with less double-entendre. Advertisers will begin calling a spade a spade. . . .

I couldnt believe that when I read it. After all, how much more blatant can you get than Come all the way up with Kools?

* * *

It isnt only manufactured commodities that have become fetishes in modern America. So have political candidates. Perhaps the first conscious use of MR in politics was by William Benton of Benton & Bowles advertising agency, who ran for the U.S. Senate in 1946 using motivational research, and got elected. (Ironically, Benton subsequently tussled with the late Joe McCarthy, who intuited a few things about MR that even Dr. Dichter hasnt discovered yet, and Benton was soundly defeated in the next election.)

The big breakthrough in MR came in 1952, when Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn Advertising Agency employed it in politics. BBD&O managed the Eisenhower campaign, using the full arsenal of the new fetishism to establish Ike as the Big Daddy symbol of all time. This campaign was so effective that, even today, many people who violently criticize Eisenhower as President, still retain a deep filial affection for the man himself. In every election since 1952, Democrats and Republicans alike have employed MR, and there is a continuous search for new gimmicks.

Even the Church is resorting to MR. The slogan, Take a friend to church next Sunday, was inspired by an MR study which quoted David Riesmans sociological classic, The Lonely Crowd, to demonstrate that Americans are becoming increasingly other-directed. Church attendance increased markedly after this slogan was introduced.

Dr. Dichter has even performed a study, for the Air Force, on how to induce more young men to enter military service. Perhaps someday, as a crowning achievement, MR will banish peace-mongering except in such ironic contexts as the Air Forces celebrated motto, Peace is our profession.

* * *

However, voices of protest are beginning to rise against the mass mesmerism of MR. As long ago as 1942, Philip Wylie castigated Freud-derived advertising in an unforgettable chapter of his Generation of Vipers, and many still remember his blunt paraphrase of the basic question asked in all ads directed at women: Madam, are you a good lay? (Alas, the same question is still being asked, and the ads for men are more and more explicitly enquiring, Brother, does your wand come all the way up?)

Author Marshall McLuhan writes bitterly, Ours is the first age in which many of the best trained individuals make it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind to manipulate and exploit it, to generate heat, not light. And semanticist, S. I. Hayakawa, bitterly castigates MR men as harlot scientists. Social scientist Kenneth Boulding sums up the fears of many, writing that through MR a world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government. And psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, insists that MR men do not discover needs, they create them. But the basically retrogressive and paleolithic nature of the new fetishism was perhaps best described by Judge Learned Hand, who called it simply a black art.

Interested to find out how he feels about these criticisms, I recently got on the phone to see if I could make an appointment with Dr. Dichter himself. To my surprise and delight, the big mans secretary immediately gave me an appointment to see him the next day, in his combination office-and-home in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

When I arrived I found the Institute for Motivational Research located in a mansion perched boldly atop the tallest mountain in the area, commanding a baronial view of the Hudson River far below. The mansion has 26 rooms and, during the day, houses 60 employees who supervise and coordinate the activities of 1200 interviewers scattered throughout every metropolitan, suburban, and rural area in the United States. (Most of these interviewers are graduate students in psychology or sociology, and some are teachers or social workers.) It is a miles drive from the entrance gate to the castle, and you are going uphill all the way, a factor which is probably calculated by Dr. Dichter to establish his eminence and authority, subliminally. It is rather like paying a visit to the Wizard of Oz.

A receptionist showed me into a waiting room and told me, regretfully, that Dr. Dichter was running 10 minutes behind schedule today, so there would be a short wait. I sat down, wondering if this was just another psychological gimmick to put me in my place. Then I noticed a bookcase full of bound motivational studies, and, since they were in the waiting room, I eagerly began to sample them.

The first report I picked up was done for the Commission for Intergroup Relations and dealt with landlords objections to the New York City Fair Housing Law. Its conclusion was that landlords are willing to integrate, but want pressure to be put on them by the government so that they can justify themselves by saying, that they were forced into it.

Doctor Dichter has argued, in his book The Strategy of Desire, that MR is often used for far loftier goals than selling soap and cigarettes. I began to wonder if this sample shelf was deliberately stacked to reinforce that claim, so I grabbed another report at random. This one was written for a pharmaceutical company and concerned the unwillingness of doctors to prescribe hormones made by the company for female disorders. Depth interviews revealed that the doctors were afraid the hormones might be cancer-producing. The company was advised to counteract that fear in their future advertising in medical journals.

I picked out another report, for Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation. This was a study of the failure of Viceroy Cigarettes advertising campaign, The man who thinks. for himself smokes Viceroys. Depth interviews revealed, according to the report, that Too much thought tends to stir up anxieties and to interfere with the emotional pleasure people seek in smoking. Viceroy was advised to give up rationality and to combine basic promises of pleasure with reassurances of health anxieties. Viceroys latest campaign reflects this advice.

Just as I began to peruse a study for the Consolidated Cigar Corporation-which contained the not-very-original observations that cigars are phallic and connote status-the receptionist told me that Dr. Dichter would see me now.

* * *

The Messiah of Motivation, I found to my surprise, was a jaunty, merry-eyed, debonair, little man, looking considerably younger than his 58 years, and with no notable resemblance to either Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Strangelove. After the initial amenities, I aimed for blood with my first question: The Surgeon-General is trying to get people to stop smoking cigarettes because they cause cancer. Part of your work is selling cigarettes by psychological gimmicks. How do you justify yourself?

To my surprise, Dr. Dichter answered cheerfully, The Surgeon-General is probably correct, but Im not convinced people would live longer if they gave up smoking. They would probably be frustrated and get other diseases.

Stunned, I mumbled something about heroin pushers being able to use the same rationalization. Unruffled, Dr., Dichter replied, Well, Im not smart enough to answer the ultimate questions of philosophical right and wrong. No matter what companies I work for, somebody will object. Cars are dangerous, too. Should I stop working for Detroit? Or should I listen to the vegetarians and stop working for the meat industry? Im just not smart enough to answer the ultimate questions that philosophers have been debating since the dawn of history.

Well, I asked, is there anybody you wouldnt do MR for?

The Catholic Church, he answered at once. I would hesitate to work for them.

I asked why Dr. Dichter had given up his psychoanalytical practice to create MR.

I practiced psychoanalysis for 2 years, in Vienna, he said, but I was frustrated at not being able to help more than 20 people a year. Most of the patients were just suffering from a wrong environment anyway. I wanted to get into mass psychology. Advertising was the natural direction. He went on to talk of his first attempts to sell MR, in Paris, in 1937, and the failure of French businessmen to appreciate his approach. Then, in 1938, he arrived in America and sent out six letters, outlining the MR services he was prepared to offer. He received four replies, and two of them led to his first two MR projects-a study of Ivory soap and a study of reader reactions to Esquire magazine. This led immediately to the epoch-making study of Plymouth cars, and MR had fully arrived on the American scene. .

When I asked about his connection, if any, with Freud, Dr. Dichtedaughed and said, The University of Vienna discouraged students in the psychology department from studying psy-choanalysis. Naturally, that made us curious, and we all studied it, just as the taboo on social- I ism drove us toward that.

Were you a socialist? I asked.

Ninety-five percent of the people in I Vienna were, in the 30s, he answered evasively. Actually, if he were a socialist in those I days, he had good reason. Poverty forced him I to leave school and take a job at 15, and he was I only able to enter the University of Vienna later I under a ruling which admitted impecunious students who could pass a special examination. He worked his way through the University of Vienna, and the Sorbonne in Paris, as a tailors assistant, a window decorator, a translator, and in other odd jobs.

Again aiming for blood, I asked him if MR were not reinforcing the very neuroses which psychoanalysis originally aimed to cure. I believe in constructive discontent, he replied. Im not here to make people happy. If such a being as Homo sapiens actually existed, he would be miserably unhappy. He went on to point out that he didnt keep his work secret, having published two books on the discoveries of MR. However, when I asked if knowing about MR techniques makes one invulnerable to them, he smiled ironically and said, Nobody is invulnerable. Ninety-nine percent of human actions are irrationa1. I buy more useless things than the rest of my family put together.

When I asked about the totalitarian implications of motivational research in politics, Dr. Dichter repeated, Im not smart enough to answer the ultimate questions of right and wrong. He went on to say that he was a registered Democrat and a libera1. He added that he did not share the sentimentality of most liberals. When I was in Haiti, he said, I admitted to myself that seeing all those Negroes got on my nerves.

When I asked Dr. Dichter about Fredric Wertham and other psychiatrists who charge that MR creates frustration, he replied that many other things besides MR create frustration in our civilization. He went on to reiterate his concept of creative discontent, which he holds to be the fountainhead of all progress. By teaching people to want more than they ever wanted before, he said, modern advertising is freeing us from Puritanism.

I do care about people, he said. I am trying to teach them to recognize their own irrationality and to demand more desirable goals. He proceeded to point out that organized religion has traditionally brainwashed helpless children, indoctrinating them in dogmas which they cannot intellectually evaluate. They force children into a church when theyre too young to think rationally, he said, blithely ignoring the lions share of MR that is directed at children these days.

* * *

It is obvious that Dr. Dichter thinks of himself as a creative rebel. He told me, with glee, how he had shocked a Catholic priest by saying that our high divorce rate indicates an increase in public morality. It is immoral for a marriage to stay together if it is bad for the people involved, he pronounced sternly. Then he grinned again and repeated, The priest was awfully shocked.

When I asked if 1 could take a few MR studies home to read at leisure, Dr. Dichter graciously complied, and I had a weird moment of deja vu, feeling that I had lived this scene before. Then I realized that Dr. Dichter reminded me of another jaunty, co-operative, strangely likeable man I had interviewed only a few months before: Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The quality that both men share is innocence, guiltlessness. Both I realized are co-operative and friendly because they are convinced that their critics are misguided men, and are eager to explain themselves and set the record straight. And both men look younger than their years precisely because of this boyish innocence.

Before leaving, I asked Dr. Dichter about one of his recent critics, psychologist Betty Friedan, whose best-seller, The Feminine Mystique, holds him largely responsible for creating a false ideal of femininity which is driving, American women into nervous breakdowns. She reminds me, Dr. Dichter snapped, of the kind of girl who accuses a guy of raping her, after she led him on. He insisted that MR only mirrors the drives of consumers and does not create drives. But then, inevitably, he cheered up. Books like hers and Vance Packards The Hidden Persuaders are, after all, good publicity, he concluded happily.

And that, undoubtedly, will be his final verdict on this article also. Criticism cannot hurt him. One year after the Surgeon-Generals report, 90% of the cigarette smokers in America are still puffing their way to an early grave, myself included. Nobody is immune, I can still hear Dr. Dichter saying, with a cheerful smile, 99% of all human acts are irrational. . .

The Religion of Kerista and Its 69 Positions By Robert Anton Wilson

from Ralph Ginzburgs fact: July-Aug 1965 Volume 2, Issue 4

Beatniks, swingers, and hippies all over the world are banding together to create a society where anything but anything goes

Eight years ago, an ex-Air Force officer named John Presmont was sitting in his room on East 31st Street in New York City when a voice spoke to him and told him he would be the founder of the next great world religion. Presmont, after leaving the Air Force with an honor-able discharge, had become, by the age of 38, what nice people call a bohemian or beatnik. At the time the Voice spoke to him, he had been reading the Koran and smoking marijuana rather heavily for 6 weeks. For several months before that, he had been laboriously plowing through all the scriptures of the great religions-Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist, and so forth. Earlier still, he had chewed and digested a great deal of modern psychology and sociology. Like most of us, he was concerned with the growing horror of this age and, like a few of us, he had felt this concern grow within him until it overmastered and all but obliterated all his other interests. Nonetheless, he was abashed by the Voice.

Why does it have to be me? he cried.

BECAUSE YOURE SO GULLIBLE, the Voice answered solemnly.

But what should I do? Presmont continued to object. I dont know anything about founding a religion.

PEOPLE WILL COME TO GIVE YOU STRENGTH, said the Voice unperturbed.

THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO PREVENT THIS THING FROM HAPPENING. HAVE A BALL, ENJOY YOURSELF TO THE UTMOST. FIND THE MOUNTAIN BESIDE THE SEA. THE PIED PIPER WILL PULL OUT THE SWINGING PEOPLE.

Today, a chubby and cherubic 44, John Presmont has become Jud the Prophet to a few thousand followers scattered in such odd places as London, Berlin, Tangier, New York City, San Francisco, and Passaic, New Jersey. For the first 5 years, his religion was called our thing by its adherents because the Voice had said that THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO PREVENT THIS THING FROM HAPPENING. Three years ago, however, the word got out that the Mafia is called our thing (cosa nostra) by its members, and Jud soon had another vision, seeing a colony of Buddhas (Enlightened ones) living on an island with a huge mountain by the sea, and it was revealed to him that the island would be called Kerista (derivation unknown). His followers now call themselves Keristans, and the religion is called Kerista.

The rule of the religion of Kerista is the rule of Rabelaiss abbey of Theleme: Do What You Will. Kerista is a religion of joy and freedom, a religion without dogma or restriction, and a religion of ecstasy, for the Voice had told Jud the Prophet, HAVE A BALL, ENJOY YOURSELF TO THE UTMOST. The Keristansuninhibitedly follow this injunction, and Kerista is, therefore, utterly unlike the dominant forms of religion .in Judaeo-Christian cultures. The New York police have been harassing the New York Keristans for quite a while, and on October 16, 1964, they arrested Jud the Prophet and 1I. others for possession of marijuana. The police, obviously, dont

believe that anybody who is having a ball is really religious. Jud the Prophet, like Jesus and Mohammed before him, will have to endure the persecution of the infidels.

* * *

A few weeks ago, I journeyed down to the eastern part of Greenwich Village where the bohemians now hang out to meet nine members of Kerista and learn about the essence of their faith. Do you know the East Village? You can walk for 10 blocks and never see a building that doesnt look as if it should have been condemned during the reign of Warren Gamaliel Harding. Puerto Rican kids, sleepy from marijuana, lounge in windows watching you with insect eyes of indifference or brush past you angrily on the sidewalk and the message Screw white America comes off them like garlic from an Italian kitchen. Negroes loiter about with no more hope of the future or despair for the present than a rock has. The smell of poverty comes back to you, and if you havent smelled it in 20 years you still recognize it it is a blend of cooking that is too spicy (to hide the fact that the food is too little) and the reek of the dying bodies of old men who have known despair for too many years and the odor from the always-slightly-plugged-up hall toilets and you see teams of cops pacing nervously around and they look at you with mean cop eyes wondering if youve got $100,000 worth of Heroin in your attach case and what you are doing here in your uptown clothes anyway. Yes, this is a good place for a religion to be born; in such squat hutches Peter and Paul and Matthew must have preached.

My appointment was with a 24-year-old C.C.N.Y. graduate who called himself Dau. When I found his apartment, a good-looking brunette who said her name was Tre let me in and said Dau would be back shortly. (Most of the Keristans eventually take these new names, which, like the Black Muslim X or the Catholic confirmation-name, symbolize a new identity.) The apartment consisted of just two rooms. A monument-sized American flag acted as a room divider-, another American flag hung over the window in lieu of curtains. There were no lights.

Dau suddenly charged in behind me, a hyperactive boy with a short, neat beard, and announced that the vibrations were better in the nursery, so we would conduct the interview there. We tramped down the stairs into the building next door and went to another apartment where seven other members of Kerista were waiting.

Im E.Z., said a giant of a man who re-minded me vaguely of the illustrations to Paul Bunyan stories. He was wearing trousers, but nothing above the waist and no shoes or socks. His thick black hair hadnt been inside a barbershop for at least a year and his curly black beard was as wild as Rex Barneys pitching the season the Dodgers retired him. Three naked babies, all less than a year old, were playing on the floor. (The Keristans share everything, including the care of babies.) A blonde young lady wearing nothing but a pair of black panties came out of the kitchen, nodded at me, and went into another room, from which she soon emerged in a bathrobe and joined the discussion.

You see? Dau said. Arent the Vibrations better here? Everybody agreed that the vibrations were better.

I asked if Jud was