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IT’S A CHAIN LETTER, DON’T BELIEVE IT

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Should we be surprised that chain letters were appearing in mailboxes ‘way back as 1906? Probably not, but it’s interesting that they were still so unusual that the local newspaper deemed them newsworthy and necessary to debunk. If our ancestors were really so gullible, we are fortunate that the heirs of recently deceased Nigerian millionaires hadn’t yet discovered the U.S. mails.

According to a often-cited web article on the history of chain letters (Ex cathedra snopes.com), variations of this sort of “Letter from Heaven” began circulating in the late 1800s, but didn’t really take off until postcards became so popular in the early 20th century. That web page describes this exact message as a luck chain letter that started in 1906 and continued to circulate for a few years.

LOOK OUT! IT MAY REACH HERE
An “Endless Chain of Prayer” Traveling Through the Country is Said to be a Hoax

The endless chain of prayer that originated, according to rumor, with Bishop William Lawrence of the Episcopal Church of Massachusetts, and indignantly repudiated by him with emphatic denial of its authorship, recently struck Sacramento, and is having its run, the Union says.

The prayer is one for mercy to all mankind, followed by a statement that those who rewrite the prayer and sent it on enchain shall experience some great joy. It is added that it has been said at the Holy Feast of Jerusalem that whoever rewrites the prayer shall be delivered from some great calamity. Each recipient of a copy of the written prayer is requested to rewrite and send it to nine or ten friends. It has been traveling about Sacramento the last three weeks very diligently, somewhat enlarging Uncle Sam’s postal receipts. It may reach Santa Rosa.

It is regarded as a hoax, pure and simple. The religious press has denounced it as such and the clergy everywhere has blacked its eye mercilessly. Perhaps no one has spoken more bodly [sic] and incisively upon the subject that the Right Rev. Bishop W. H. Moreland, who says it is merely an appeal to the superstitious; that Bishop Lawrence, who was alleged to have been the author, is a level-headed prelate and a clear thinker, and did not, could not have concocted such a scheme, Bishop Moreland says Bishop Lawrence did everything in his power to deny the statement that he was the author of the letter. The letter, Bishop Moreland says, is not worthy of being called a prayer, as it appeals only to fears and superstitions. He considers it an affront to the hearty instincts of any man.

– Press Democrat, October 26, 1906

The “Prayer Chain” Arrives

Mention was made the other day of the “endless prayer chain,” that would probably reach Santa Rosa before long. It has arrived and quite a number of Santa Rosans have received copies from friends, known and unknown, asking them to rewrite and forward the prayer to their friends. One young lady received the prayer from a friend in Petaluma so it is evident it has reached there also.

– Press Democrat, October 27, 1906

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SAY, AREN’T YOU…

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

It could be a scene from an E. L. Doctorow novel: you encounter someone in need of help on a remote country road, offer assistance and have a nice hour-long chat before everyone goes on their way, you none the wiser that you’d just met one of the most famous and powerful people in the world, William Randolph Hearst.

In 1906, probably no man in America except President Teddy Roosevelt had a more well-known face than Hearst. Two years before, Hearst almost became the Democratic nominee for president, then almost became mayor of New York City, then almost became governor of that state. His large and oddly rectangular head appeared regularly in newspaper and magazine photos, engravings, and editorial page caricatures. Simply put, it was more likely that someone should have recognized Mr. Hearst that year than had experience changing an automobile tire. Except in Sonoma County, apparently.

(RIGHT: William Randolph Hearst in 1906)

HELPED HEARST WITH MACHINE
Don Prentiss of This City “Lends a Hand” to Automobile Party in Distress and Learns Identity Later

While in Sebastopol Sunday, Don Prentiss of this city noticed an automobile party in distress, and as he came up he was asked to “lend a hand” in the somewhat difficult task of replacing a damaged tire with a new one carried in anticipation of just such an emergency.

Mr. Prentiss willingly responded, and after the heavy work had been finished, lingered and talked an hour or more with the members of the party while the chauffeur puts the machine in readiness for resuming the journey.

After the automobilists had climbed in and waved goodbye, Mr. Prentiss learned with some surprise that he had been talking to Mr. and Mrs. William R. Hearst, who with the latter’s younger sister, have been spending several days traveling through this part of the country in Mr. Hearst’s automobile. The party passed through this city last week, going north as far as Ukiah.

– Press Democrat, August 7, 1906

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THAT CAN’T BE TRUE

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Surprise: Some things you read in the old papers ain’t exactly true. Beyond the frequent typos and misspelled names, beyond the stories with hopelessly garbled details, there’s the occasional item that you read twice, three times, before realizing, “why, this is total bullshit.”

Journalism standards were loose in the 19th century (to say the least), and it wasn’t that unusual for a spoof, a satire, or an outright hoax to appear in a newspaper without any cue to the reader that the story wasn’t true. Tall tales were particularly common in wild west papers; a good book on the topic, Red Blood & Black Ink, has an entertaining chapter on the false news story genre.

The master of the art was probably Mark Twain’s pal, Dan De Quille. One of his “quaints” (as he called them) was about an air-conditioned helmet that would allow a man to walk across Death Valley in the hottest part of summer. The inventor supposedly took his invention out for a test stroll, but alas, it worked too well, and he was later found frozen stiff in the broiling-hot desert. His most infamous hoax was the report about the “Traveling Stones of Pahranagat Valley,” which he claimed were mysterious magnetic rocks that were attracted to others of their own kind — scatter a bunch of them over a tabletop and they would supposedly roll towards a center point and form themselves into a little pile. German scientists wrote to “Herr Dan De Quille, the eminent physicist of Virginiastadt, Nevada” for more details about the phenomena, and De Quille admitted it was a joke — but the Germans were incensed, thinking that he was instead being secretive about a great discovery. The story took on a life of its own, and requests for samples came in for years. De Quille took to replying that he was fresh out of the stones, and they should instead contact Samuel Clemens, “who probably has still on hand fifteen or twenty bushels of assorted sizes.”

Press Democrat editor Ernest L. Finley had presented Santa Rosa with (at least) three obviously fake items in 1905, starting with a pair of parody ads for the rival Santa Rosa Republican, which were intended to ridicule the new owners as clueless outsiders who didn’t fit in an agricultural community, “people from the big town, who never saw a pumpkin in their lives.” The other example was over-the-top silliness that had our own James W. Oates and his neighbor launching a skyship, complete with “wireless telegraph apparatus.”

But the story below was more in the league with De Quille’s fantastic quaints. A reprint from an uncredited East Coast paper, it claimed that some dairy farmers were bypassing cows to create milk and butter directly from hay. Without a single hint that it was a joke, the story burrowed down into tedious cost analysis benefits of using such artificial dairy products.

Question #1 is whether Finley himself was bamboozled. That’s doubtful, but possible; the story was actually a parody of the 1905 discovery of hydrogenation, where oil from vegetables could be chemically transformed into a substitute for margarine or lard. With that background, is it really so outlandish that someone in that era might also believe a process using “certain chemicals” could create a passable fake milk from plant matter?

At least one newspaper was outraged by the hoax and sought to debunk it. The weekly Florida Agriculturist called it “a sample of the outrageous stories that some writers will palm off upon an unexpecting and credulous public,” reprinting the exact same story that appeared in the PD, but tracing it back to an article in the Oswego Times.

The Dec. 31, 1905 edition of the Florida paper quoted a reader who supposedly lived near the Massachussetts location of the hay-to-butter plant: “We do not know of the slightest foundation for this yarn. We believe it to be a canard pure and simple. We do not have a daily paper regularly, but we have one occasionally and lately I have been almost shocked to see the way the reporter lies to make a sensation…It is strange that a reputable paper should print such awful nonsense without labeling it ‘A Joke.'”

CREAMERY BUTTER FROM HAY
New Process That Promises to Put Cows Out of Business

In the town of New Braintree Massachussetts, there is a factory in which butter is made direct from hay. The following description of the factory and the process followed will doubtless prove of interest:

The plant covers about five acres of ground; the building alone covers about two acres and is two stories height. It is constructed on the latest improved plans, being build of concrete and then smoothed up with cement. This plant is for the making of butter from hay without the use of cows. It uses some 10,000 tons of hay per year and arrangements are being made to more than double the capacity within the next year or so.

These people buy the hay as soon as it is thoroughly cured paying as high as $15 per ton for good clover, and from that down to $8 for the poorer grades. The hay is then cut up fine, about one-half inch in length and put in very large, strong vats or tanks, which are so made that they are capable of standing great pressure. About five tons of hay are put in each vat and certain chemicals are sprayed on the hay. Then steam is forced into the vats until all the hay is thoroughly softened. The vats is then hermetically sealed and left for twenty-seven hours, after which time immense pressure is put on and every particle of juice is pressed from the hay.

This juice is run through a separator and the butter fat comes out just the same as the cream from milk. This is kept at a temperature of 60 degrees for twenty hours and then churned. Butter produced in this manner is now selling in New York and Boston markets for 40 and 50 cents per pound, and the average amount of butter taken from a ton of hay is 100 pounds, a good clover hay making as high as 150 pounds per ton, while hay of a poorer quality will seldom run below 75 pounds per ton.

The juice after the butter fat is extracted is mixed with buckwheat middlings and baked into cakes, and is being used by dealers in fancy poultry for feeding young chickens, it having been demonstrated that 20 per cent more chickens can be raised from this food than any other food known.

Then again, the hay, after having been pressed, is put to a dry kiln and dried and then ground as fine as cornmeal and sold for horsefeed, it being claimed that this, mixed with oats half and half, givers better results than clear oats, and is worth about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cents per pound. This feed is sold for about $20 per ton, so that altogether it is a very profitable business. Experiments are now going on by which the manufacturers are expecting to bring out new products making it still better.

– Press Democrat, February 4, 1906

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