Good morning, fuzzies :3 I hope that you’ve had a good weekend! And that you have a good week, too! Take care of yourselves, take care of those around you, and just generally keep being lovely people <3
I have so much space here, it’s wild. It’s not worth a lengthy writeup, but something that consumed a lot of my weekend is that it’s very hard for me to judge how credulous people in the past really were. I talked about it a little in the second Balto piece. Looking back on the era of patent medicines and petrified men, it’s tempting to think that people believed those stories, because printed refutations are often pretty uncommon.
In one of the Constant’s episodes about patent medicines, Mark Chrisler makes the case that people attending medicine shows weren’t idiots who genuinely believed in the curative power of snake oil—that “real” medicine at the time was liable to at best do nothing and at worst make you sicker, and if you’d gone to a medicine show, hey, at least you got some entertainment out of it—right?
It wasn’t until Adam Selzer’s 2017 HH Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil that the story of HH Holmes and his “murder castle” became understood as largely a myth, a creation contemporary yellow press. But, the question of “what did the contemporary press say?” and “what did contemporary readers believe?” and “what did contemporary readers believe the press believed?” are sort of separate.
Because one possibility is that everyone at the time knew that Holmes was just a conman with an unremarkable hotel, and it was so obvious that it didn’t need someone to say “c’mon, guys,” but as the decades wore on, that unpreserved common knowledge fell away. It’s tempting to read into the negative space. Leonhard Seppala calling the Nome Serum Run “hokum” was reported on contemporaneously, but it wasn’t a big deal and it’s tempting to read into that a sort of: “…yeah, and?”
“Oh, what. You’re telling me the 8th- or 9th-biggest town in the Alaska Territory wasn’t saved from obliteration by literal dogs like we all thought? How did you manage to rain so effectively on my parade? Wait—do you have one of those ‘cloud-busters,’ a thing I also totally believe in?”
But that kind of context, something so obvious it didn’t need to be written down, is the exact kind most easily lost. Then again, I don’t know whether anyone today believes that Hans Niemann cheated at chess via sex toy. And if they don’t, if we all know it’s a big joke, I definitely have no idea what people will think we believed in 30 or 40 years.
Anyway, have a very good dog who would definitely save Nome all on his own if he had to.
