We tend to believe what we’re told.
This is probably how my aunt Betty managed to convince my father to waste several days searching every record store in or near Pittsburgh for “Mozart’s Italian Symphony” when everyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with classical music knows that the Italian Symphony was actually written by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Betty had studied piano for close to a decade and had a thick stack of sheet music to show for it, so my father simply assumed that she knew what she was talking about. It never occurred to him that she had made a mistake (or possibly was pranking him, this being my aunt we’re talking about), and so he bewildered several shop owners with his insistence that no, Mozart wrote it, they were wrong and he’d take his custom elsewhere. Whether he apologized to the person who eventually sold him a copy of Mozart’s Mendelssohn’s symphonic memoir of a wonderful vacation I have no idea, but I sure hope he did.
I’m equally guilty of believing what I’m told, even when I should know better. I’d always been interested in archaeology and paleontology — I first expressed an interest in becoming a paleontologist when I was about five, much to my teacher’s surprise and my parents’ delight — but that didn’t prevent me from falling violently in love with the idea of prehistoric aliens after I saw the 1973 documentary In Search of Ancient Astronauts. Even though I’d first picked up a copy of National Geographic when I was in elementary school, even though I’d read all about Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans and Roy Chapman Andrews before I hit middle school, even though I had met science writer Willy Ley when I was seven, ISOAA still had me utterly convinced that Strange Visitors From Other Planets had built the ziggurat of Ur, the city of Tiahuanaco, and plenty of other ruins created by brown people from areas that were not Europe. It took me a couple of years to recover, and how my parents kept from laughing themselves sick/beating their heads against the wall in despair I have no idea.
It just goes to show you what slick production values, an authoritative tone, and narration by Rod Serling (or Leonard Nimoy, or pretty much anyone else associated with Star Trek) can do to overcome common sense, prior knowledge, or actual scientific fact.
It also shows how so many hoaxes succeeds: the average person believes what they are told, especially if it doesn’t directly impact their lives or the lives of their families/friends.
Think about it. How many times have you picked up a newspaper, seen an article about something that happened in Upper Slobbovia, shrugged/laughed/frowned, and then gone on with your life? Flipped through a new book by a promising young author, decided it wasn’t for you, and picked up the latest airport novel/romance/mystery? Heard a story about some weird tech innovation/scientific discovery and promptly forgotten about it? Watched a documentary, nodded sagely, and then hit the DVR to finish binging Dog Cops or Cat Wranglers of East Chipton-in-le-Bogge?
That Upper Slobbovia might not be a real place doesn’t once enter your mind, nor that the promising scientific innovation was based on a single study that can’t be replicated. Ditto that anyone with a laptop and a camera can make a plausible but ridiculous film, or that statistics can be (and all too often are) manipulated to prove almost anything.
You’ve done it. You know you have. There aren’t enough hours in the day to research every story, question every film or shibboleth. If it sounds plausible, if it looks professional, if it’s endorsed by someone vaguely familiar, that’s usually good enough. Even the sharpest among us falls for the occasional falsehood, or finds it hard to believe that a cherished belief is flat-out wrong, even when they’re corrected by an actual expert in a field; I once had a woman tell me to my face that she didn’t believe me when I casually mentioned that no, Amish quilts only date from the 19th century, and never mind I’m a quilt historian and she didn’t even own a quilt. Amish quilts, with their simple shapes, dark colors, and quaint makers, look very old, and that was good enough for her.
Yes. Really.
Tonight I’m continuing my exploration of what hoaxes are and why otherwise intelligent people believe them, based on Curtis D. MacDougall’s book Hoaxes. MacDougall’s first chapter is about the first reason people fall for hoaxes, what he called “indifference”: the tendency of humans to believe what they’re told (especially if something looks or sounds plausible), especially if it’s something that happens to other people, in another country, or in a field/area of interest that they don’t know all that much about. MacDougall illustrated this with several examples of fake newspaper stories used as column filler:
- A hen that laid a red, white, and blue egg on July 4th, a tree that produced pre-baked apples, a cow so naturally modest she wouldn’t let anyone but her spinster owners milk her, and a cat that could whistle “Yankee Doodle” (all courtesy of Louis T. Stone, aka “The Winsted Liar,” who made himself and his little town famous);
- Poet Eugene Field taking a break from writing “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” to claim that a retired military man had actually written Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “Solitude” even though he knew better;
- A Utah girl named Della DeHaven who made up a story about being scared by a murderer to avoid being punished for coming home late, but only after a posse had wasted a whole day looking for the non-existent corpse; and
- My personal favorite, the allegedly true tale of a suicidal young man who decided to make very sure that he was very dead by tying a rope around his neck, taking poison, and shooting at his head while jumping off a cliff into the ocean, only to survive after he missed his head, shot the rope in half, and vomited up the poison after swallowing salt water.
All of these stories were eventually debunked — I mean, seriously, red white and blue eggs? — and deservedly so, but like bad pennies, a surprisingly large number keep turning up. Pieces by the Winsted Liar in particular still appear in Sunday supplements, trivia books, and assorted Fortean knockoffs, and never mind that the Liar himself died in 1933.
And then there are the Books So Bad They’re Good that are still believed despite blatant errors, ridiculous premises, and outright lies on the part of the authors, exposure by multiple experts, and tons of bad press.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of handsome, well-reviewed, and utterly worthless books that end up on the remainder tables of the local Sheds & Gentry Bookshoppe & Hipster Urban Cafes. A handful are self-published, but the overwhelming majority issue forth from reputable imprints like Doubleday, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and even the uber-literary Knopf. I’ve discussed plenty of them over the years, many of which I’ll be touching on again in this series. However, the BSGTG that really stick in the mind are the ones where something that should have been easily detected not only wasn’t, but was hailed as a masterpiece largely because the author was assumed to be telling the truth.
Tonight I bring you only one such book, but oh my goodness, it is a whopper. It’s a prime example of a hoax that succeeded at least in part because of indifference despite an alleged back story that should have crumbled the second the author’s photograph became public:
The Education of Little Tree, by “Forrest Carter” (tn Asa Earl Carter, aka “George Wallace’s favorite speechwriter) — Forrest Carter seemed to be done of those authors who appears out of nowhere in midlife, fully formed and with a distinct literary voice. His first book, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, was published to excellent reviews for its portrayal of a disillusioned Confederate veteran hiding out after the Civil War, then adapted by Clint Eastwood into an antiwar Western that was a critical and box office smash. The sequel, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, wasn’t filmed for another decade, but it was a solid (albeit violent) continuation of the titular character’s story. Carter, who kept a low public profile but whose work clearly spoke for itself, seemed well on his way to joining Larry McMurtry, Louis L’Amour, and Annie Proulx as contemporary Western writers whose work elevated the form well above the usual oater.
Then Carter’s third book, The Education of Little Tree, was published in 1976, and established itself as a modern classic. Advertised as a memoir of the author’s childhood living with moonshining Cherokee relatives after the death of his parents, The Education of Little Tree was a sensitively written tale brimming with environmentalism, homespun Native American wisdom, and warm family values that was a perfect fit for the back-to-nature zeitgeist of the 70’s. Its popularity rose after the University of New Mexico published a paperback edition in the 1980’s, and within a few years The Education of Little Tree had sold over half a million copies and become a popular YA choice.
The book was also used as a supplemental text by several colleges in Native American studies courses, and even won the ABBY Award from the American Booksellers Association in 1991, after it hit the New York Times bestseller list. Despite criticism from the Cherokee Nation that the book’s depiction of Cherokee life and customs was wrong, and that the plot and characters were little more than warmed-over Noble Savage stereotyping, The Education of Little Tree seemed well on its way to becoming a cult classic.
Then historian Dan T. Carter, wondering if Forrest Carter was a distant cousin, decided to dig into the author’s background.
The fruits of his research were published in the New York Times in October of 1991, and to say that the article was a bombshell is rather like claiming that an aircraft carrier is a large ocean-going vessel. For it seems that far from being the scion of wise, nature-loving Cherokee moonshiners from the backwoods, “Forrest Carter” was the pen name of a former Alabama political hack named “Asa Earl Carter” who’d given up on politics after a failed run for governor, moved to Texas, and begun writing fiction.
If that weren’t bad enough, here are but some of the facts about Asa Earl Carter that Dr. Dan Carter’s unearthed for “The Transformation of a Klansman,” and no, I am not making any of this up:
- Asa Earl Carter was not only a member of one of the notorious White Citizens’ Councils of the 1950’s, he’d hosted a syndicated radio show that was cancelled for anti-Semitism. He then pushed to have white jukebox owners remove “immoral” black music like roll ‘n roll from their machines because the NAACP had used the popularity of this hideous noise pollution to “infiltrate” white teenagers and promote race mixing.
- One of his anti-integration speeches was so inflammatory that it ended in a race riot that nearly led to the angry white mob storming the local mayor’s house.
- He co-founded a KKK paramilitary group that, among other things, castrated a black handyman and poured turpentine on his wounds before leaving him for dead. The same KKK group, the grandly named “Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy” attacked Nat King Cole during a performance in Birmingham.
- He’d run for Birmingham police commissioner against Bull Connor (spoiler: he lost), then run for lieutenant governor of Alabama (ditto).
- He’d shot two members of the Original KKK of the Confederacy in a dispute over money and was charged with attempted murder (charges were dropped, God knows why).
- All of this took place before Carter was hired as a speechwriter for George Wallace during Wallace’s 1960’s run for government on the Segregationist-Bigot Ticker, including being one of the scribes responsible for Wallace’s famous "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" inaugural address. Carter then challenged Wallace for governor in the late 1960’s after Wallace, in a rare display of good sense, decided that hiring a Klansman with a police record for his national campaign in 1968 was a poor idea (spoiler: he went three for three in the loss column)
And oh yeah, he was most definitely not related to Dr. Dan Carter, which was probably a huge relief to Dr. Carter and his family.
As it turns out, though, neither was Asa Earl “Forrest” Carter related to a kindly Cherokee moonshiner who’d raised him after he was orphaned at age five. His parents, Ralph and Hermione, had lived until well into Asa’s adulthood, and despite a couple of relatives claiming otherwise, there’s no hard evidence that the Carters had come closer to actual Native Americans than the customary cigar store statuary found in backwoods general stores. He’d never been called “Little Tree,” had chosen his pen name to honor Nathan Bedford Forrest (founder of the true original KKK), and had never even gone near a white-run “Indian school” let alone boarded at one.
If anything, Asa Carter used “Forrest Carter” as a way to escape his unsavory past as a white supremacist, and if his books hadn’t become popular he might well have succeeded. As it was, he grew out his hair and sideburns to change his appearance, affected a fine Stetson that covered much of his face for publicity shots, and even told Barbara Walters during the press junket for ’The Outlaw Josey Wales that oh no no no, he wasn’t that nasty segregationist, not he! He was just a simple Westerner with a suspiciously Alabaman accent, not a former Klansman who’d worked for the most bigoted presidential candidate in American history (at least until 2016). The resemblance was purely coincidental, and can we talk about the book and Mr. Eastwood’s splendid film, pretty please with a cherry on top?
Fortunately (or unfortunately), Asa Forrest Earl Little Tree Carter died in 1979, so didn’t have to face the controversy that splattered his true name and biography all across the front pages in 1991. His publishers, not so lucky, promptly relabeled The Education of Little Tree as a novel instead of a memoir, and it was quietly purged from classrooms because, well, it wasn’t actually by a Native American. The Cherokee elders who’d originally criticized the book probably rolled their eyes at another White man appropriating their identity (and not being exposed until yet another White man got involved). And despite the occasional supporter (Henry Louis Gates, of all people, has defended it on the grounds of literary quality), The Education of Little Tree has been eternally tainted by its author’s truly horrendous past.
As for why this particular book about Native American life was such a hit, well, think back to what Curtis MacDougall said. Most people accept what they’re told at face value, without the time, ability, or inclination to question what they consume. That includes books that promote stereotypes about nature-loving, wise, compassionate Native Americans living a simple life in the mountains, and never mind that the book fit all the cliches about Noble Natives and Evil Whites almost too well.
And as for why a former Klansman would write a book that portrays non-whites so sympathetically...Asa Carter died long before anyone could ask him. He may have simply wanted to tell a good story — he was working on a sequel when he died — and didn’t much care about cultural appropriation or stereotypes. He might have had a genuine change of heart, just like George Wallace in his later years. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Or perhaps, as Native American author Sherman Alexie put it,
[Little Tree] is a lovely little book, and I sometimes wonder if it is an act of romantic atonement by a guilt-ridden White supremacist, but ultimately I think it is the racial hypocrisy of a White supremacist.
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Have you ever read The Education of Little Tree? Seen a Clint Eastwood movie? Fallen for an amusing newspaper story about clever animals? It’s confession time, so wade across the icy waters of the Manhan River and share….
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