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Writer’s Voice is a weekly national radio show and podcast, on the air since 2004. Each week brings in-depth conversation with writers who challenge, inspire and inform. Check out our archives with journalists like James Risen and Jane Mayer, novelists like Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver and Louise Erdrich, poets like Richard Wilbur and Maxine Kumin, and many more notable guests.
Ben Passmore, welcome to Writer's Voice.
Thank you for having me.
This graphic, it's called a graphic novel, but it's really not a novel.
It's more like a graphic history.
It begins with your character, Ben Passmore, reading about Philando Castile, the man who was shot in front of his family in about 2016.
Later in the book, you write that that case broke your sense of hope.
So what inspired you to create Black Arms to Hold You Up?
And just a point of clarity.
Thanks for the question.
But in the comic, I'm watching the video.
And certainly I did read about it.
But I think like a lot of other people, I was pretty transfixed by the video itself.
And the video is terrible.
You know, there's certainly been a lot of footage of Black death over the years, especially featuring police murdering Black people.
But this video felt just hours long between watching him die after we shot on film, listening to his girlfriend, continuing to navigate this terrifying experience that is also just very common to interact with the police and feel afraid.
And also her daughter is there being actively traumatized.
So it was uniquely horrible to watch, I should say.
And certainly not for me.
It brought me to a place that I had been before, where I was asking myself, both how do I as an individual keep this sort of thing from happening to anyone else, let alone myself.
But also it was, I know for a person I wrote about in the comic, Mike Xavier Johnson, it was the thing that was sort of a final straw for him.
And he went out and acted a bunch of retribution on a bunch of police officers in Dallas in 2016.
So it was a catalyst for me and also a catalyst for the people I wrote about.
To answer the question, and sorry, I'm being overly roundabout, but one of the many reasons I wanted to write the book was that I had a personal relationship with the Black radical tradition in that it was responsible for me locating my identity and also giving me a lot of tools for how to deal with my own personal feeling of powerlessness living inside of the United States.
And it's something I've gone back to over and over again at different points in 2015, during the Black Lives Matter movement and in 2020 when there was a lot of optimism and a lot of waves, but I think I also had a lot of nervousness about the direction we might go.
So I made this book to sort of talk about one particular strain of Black liberation history that I think is often sort of sidelined or or misinterpreted.
And I also wanted to present it with all its contradictions because I think there's a lot of ways that people talk about, some of the people I talk about, Asada Shakur being probably the most well-known, who obviously transitioned recently, but they're sort of flattened out.
So I wanted to present people in their contexts with all their contradictions.
Yes, I found that very interesting.
I mean, you're unsparing in talking about the contradictions and I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that because so often one is tempted when talking about people who are so key to struggles for justice.
People are tempted to gloss over those contradictions and feel disloyal if they open them up.
Did you have to struggle with any of that at all?
Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways it's taking an inside conversation outside and, you know, it should be said that the U.S. government has used things like, you know, rumor or maybe even real bad behavior or they'll make up something about political figures, you know, famously, you know, Martin Luther King being one, but certainly not unique.
But they use these things to discredit significant figures or at the very least like make them like an object of ridicule.
I thought about that a lot when there was like a resurgence in Black gun groups.
I'm trying to think of the years, but in the 20-teens there was this mass swell of regional gun groups that would show up and demonstrate behind this one leader named Grandmaster Jay.
And the common response from a lot of people was to laugh at them.
And that felt like a carrying on of a reactionary tendency that you see the state sort of kick off a lot.
So I was pretty cautious that I didn't want to repeat that, but there are ways that we use COINTELPRO's role in repression to gloss over things like misleadership and repressive dynamics within organizations that contribute to these movements falling apart.
I had a conversation recently with Ashanti Alston, who is a former Black Panther and a former Black Liberation Army soldier.
And he talks a lot about how, you know, for instance, like patriarchy contributed to the destruction of the Panther Party, how it fomented disunity.
And I think those lessons are really, really important, because you see those things replicated over and over and over again.
So it's a fine line.
There's certainly things that I didn't talk about.
I tried to pick things that, like, for instance, there's, and this is a really passing mention, but, you know, Ron Karanga, you know, the leader of us back in the day, and probably most famous now for inventing Kwanzaa.
But, you know, he, it's confirmed that he kidnapped two women.
And that, you know, I would feel irresponsible, and not sort of having that be part of it, including us as role in killing a couple panthers in Southern California.
So I think people, you know, won't like that part of it.
But I wanted to do more than just illustrate a bunch of Wikipedia information that feels like that would just be adding to the problem.
Well, even maybe by romanticizing people, because you talk about how the white history of black liberation has been depoliticized by making it a romantic myth.
And it seems to me that when you do provide the entire political and historical context, that sharpens the politics of it.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
I think that there's a lot of people that benefit from imagining someone like Asada as being wholly unique and like unreplicatable.
And I think that the positive side of showing someone warts and all, so to speak, is to remind us that these are people just like us.
And then in a lot of ways, you know, people, you know, I talk about Robert F. Williams, who at one time was the most well-known Black liberation figure in the world and certainly in the country, ironically, when he was in exile in Cuba.
But a lot of what he was able to do in Monroe, North Carolina, was aided by the fact that he had his whole community, specifically Black women, to support him, to get information, to hide supplies, ammunitions and guns.
So I think that that's just very, very important to remember that these are people just like us.
And that I think it's very willful for all sorts of people to make us think of them as sort of like superheroes.
So actually, tell us a little bit about Robert Williams, because I think many of our listeners may not remember who he is, or were born after he was around doing his work.
And then I'm going to go back to just some of the beginnings, where you start with this history.
But first, tell us about Robert Williams.
Yeah, Robert F. Williams was, well, he's an auto worker, and he was a veteran from Monroe, North Carolina, who's part of that generation of World War II veterans that came out of both the experience of war and also experiencing segregation in the army, and also experiencing a bit of what Europe was like, which had a different relationship to black people.
And many people felt like it was better over there for them.
And they come back to the United States, and they bring with them this revolutionary energy.
There was a lot of very contentious conflicts with white supremacy in the army when he was in and when his generation was in.
And they come out, and that's a lot of the generation that's confronting the Klan with arms.
So he gets back into Monroe, and he gets involved with the local NAACP.
And his account or his sort of like recollection of it is that he felt like they were too scared to confront the white power structure for various reasons.
They mostly were upper middle class business owners and religious leaders.
And Robert F. Williams felt like that they had achieved a certain kind of economic standing within the community that relied on white money and were not willing to do things that would benefit black people but threaten their own bank accounts.
So Robert F. Williams got on the scene.
He joined the NAACP.
The leaders thought he was crazy and decided to just hand the NAACP over to him.
And he rebuilt it, him and the Vice President Albert Perry.
And it was a wholly unique chapter in that it was largely working class, working poor people, veterans, day laborers.
He would go to pool halls and get people to sign up.
He would go to street corners and speak to whoever and get them to sign up.
And he also formed what is called a Black Guard.
There's a bit of contention about whether or not it was called the Black Guard or if it was just that was the word he was using to deal with raids of an enormous Klan chapter that would come in and attack the black community when the NAACP would try to integrate, you know, things like the pools and the libraries.
And one big inflection point and something that people talk about a lot is Albert Perry was a doctor.
He was a local doctor and a young white woman came to his office to get an abortion.
Albert Perry, he did perform abortions, but he treated black people.
He agreed to treat this woman.
She later, for reasons that are assumed, but not unclear, claims that something else had happened and that Klan came to attack him and Robert Williams and the Black Guard were there.
And there was a gunfight and the Black Guard chased the Klan out of the city.
And then the city government was so afraid that, you know, one of these black people might manage to kill a white person and they banned the Klan from the city entirely.
And that there's a bit more conflicts back and forth that eventually led to this accusation that Robert Williams had kidnapped two white people and he was forced to flee the country and ended up in Cuba and Vietnam, and then eventually Africa for a little while.
So the civil rights era is overwhelmingly represented by displays of self-sacrifice for legal equality, nonviolence, of course.
But as Robert Williams' example points out, and I think others too during the, you know, Freedom Summer, in the South, it always combined a certain degree of armed self-defense alongside legal campaigns for equal rights.
You know, I think the notion of nonviolence as the only way to do things is belied by the kind of history you talk about in this book.
So talk about the tension between nonviolence and self-defense in this history.
You're absolutely right.
One of the dynamics that many people who came to the South to be involved in the civil rights movement, one of their huge takeaways was that the local community in the South appreciated nonviolence as a strategy as far as it went, but had very little interest in disarming themselves or facing a white mob without a revolver in their purse.
And, you know, we've been done an incredible disservice by making this enormous debate that was going on, as far as I can tell, the entire time, you know, pretty quiet.
Robert F. Williams had a very public debate through the Liberator magazine about this, about the limitations of nonviolence and how foreign it was to the Black Southerner.
And he certainly wasn't alone.
You know, the precursor to the Black Panthers, Muhammad Ahmad, who co-founded the Revolutionary Action Movement, went down to be part of CORE, I believe, and came back.
He was from Philadelphia, came back to the North with this appreciation for armed self-defense.
There's, of course, Kwame Ture, who, you know, helped popularize the term Black Power, you know, went to the South to participate in nonviolent direct action and, you know, came away understanding that, in fact, the Southern Black tradition required guns as a way to keep people alive.
And on top of that, there's the Deacons for Defense, there's the Spirit, you know, there's a deep tradition of armed self-defense.
Akinyele Emoja in his book, We Will Shoot Back, does an amazing job of covering this, not to plug an entirely different book.
But that is all to say that it's a huge part of why Black people still exist in this country.
And we certainly clip our wings and lie to ourselves by pretending that it was marginal, if not non-existent.
You know, I can't help but think about this period of time now where Trump openly says, in a fight between the left and the right, basically says, well, the left is weak, the right is armed, they're more powerful, they're going to win.
And, you know, he seems to be promoting that kind of violence.
And then there are others, you know, people who are writing about fighting against fascism who say that it is non-violent movements that are the most successful against this kind of authoritarianism.
So, not to jump the gun, normally I'd ask this at the end of an interview, but what do you think this history teaches us about these tactics or strategies of violence and non-violence?
Yeah, and it is a bit of a complicated question.
I think people sort of approach this insistence that non-violence is the only thing that has worked and is the only thing that will work in a couple of different ways.
Something that I thought was interesting, and Robert Williams talked about this himself, is in that time during the civil rights era, to the degree that things worked, it wasn't necessarily working because of the empathy of the powerful.
It was that Black people were successfully embarrassing the United States on the world stage.
I'm sure certain people will argue with me about that, but that is my understanding of the perspective of that time, and it's just a different...
To think that this current fascist government can feel embarrassed about anything is ridiculous.
What I think the history teaches us, I think we have to...
And this is the general feeling that I have just sort of walking around.
There's this consistent thing I hear from some people that Trump and his movement doesn't represent the United States.
I think this is false.
He is the beneficiary of a long tradition of white supremacy that has held power before.
And I think we're really neglecting, in a lot of ways, to accept what is actually happening, that what we're dealing with is a fascist state that wants to murder and control basically everyone in the country, and that we can't just wait until the next election to think that he doesn't want to prevent an election in the future is ridiculous.
So for me, the reason I wanted to make this book, or part of the way I represented this history and the way that I did, was that these figures are part of a war of liberation.
Many of these people that I wrote about, ones that were incarcerated, consider themselves prisoners of war.
And I think that I would love people to have that understanding of this moment, that what we're dealing with is not some disagreements that like, oh, maybe we need to make some concessions.
It's like, no, we're in a life or death struggle, and I think we need to accept that.
The book also is an important contribution at a time when Trump's government, white nationalist government, is seeking to erase Black history.
Talk a little bit about, you know, the format that you use, the personal story you use also in the book.
Your father is a kind of guy to you, someone who one gets the sense you had a complicated relationship with when you were younger.
So talk about preserving and passing on Black history at a time when there's so much suppression.
Something that I think anyone that's had the benefit of researching this history is that you come to understand really quickly how decentralized, in my opinion, more often than not, outside of academia, the preservation of this history has been.
One of the most important books about Malcolm X, who killed Malcolm X, was made by a non-academic someone in the community.
That being said, I very much value research skills and the standards of research.
But something that was true for me is that I learned a lot of these things out of order through word of mouth and someone trying to put me onto information.
And that's a complicated, imperfect way to learn things.
But I wanted people to share my appreciation with that.
The father in my book is not really the father in real life in the same way that the me in the book is not really the me in real life.
Our relationship individually is based on something.
But I think mostly I wanted people to develop this appreciation for the kind of person that my father in the book sort of is.
I live in Philadelphia.
Someone who is just very, very recognizable with his dashiki, his old political pins, his mix of sort of like good ideas and bad ideas.
The derogatory word in a way is like hotep, but not really.
He's sort of like Afrocentric.
But for me in my life, those have always been sort of the arbiters of this information, of this really, really important knowledge.
And something, if I can be optimistic about anything, this attack on Black history, it can only be so effective because the prior tradition never died out.
You know what I mean?
We are really suffering from a younger generation who is seemingly like much more ignorant, you know what I mean, of what came before, of these traditions and ideas.
But people will still continue to share this knowledge and hold it and preserve it outside of institutions, outside of the state.
You very much depict the cost of resistance, exile, death, state repression.
How do you think about the tension between hope and exhaustion in liberation movements?
Yeah, I was watching a bit of the conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein, and they're talking about Ezra Klein's terrible opinions about Charlie Kirk.
But a point that Ta-Nehisi Coates made, that I'll try to remember how he said it, but he was essentially saying that he comes from a tradition that accepts that they won't see the benefits of what they're struggling for.
They're more likely than not, they will die before they ever see the world that they're fighting for.
And that's a reality not wholly unique to Black liberation.
I think that's true for a lot of anti-colonial movements.
Something that I have reflected on quite a bit, specifically because I come from the tradition of anarchism, there's a lot of anarchist movements that have reflected and accepted this.
There's the Russian nihilists that talked about how they're not fighting for a fixed utopia in the future.
They're fighting for a utopia in the act of refusal.
And, you know, I think fatigue is a real thing when we're talking about the repression of the Black liberation movement.
Specifically, you know, many people ended up in solitary confinement for decades.
Many of them died in prison.
Some, like Assata, were able to live in exile, but that itself is not freedom.
It's just freedom from imprisonment.
And, you know, like people who try to support figures like Mumia, they spend years and years and years and all this money trying to battle through the legal system to get people out.
And all of this is purposely designed to drain people's energy, to destroy the morale.
I think something that I have reflected on more and more as I've spoken with, you know, family members of political prisoners and, you know, ex-Panthers themselves, is that a lot of this battle is not wholly material.
A lot of it's spiritual.
And in the sort of the spiritual realm, you can maybe locate a kind of rejuvenation.
I think something that we have the advantage of that the white supremacists don't is that we have a culture and a way of life that exists outside of systems of domination.
You know, it shouldn't be lost on anyone that that American soft power is largely appropriated Black culture.
So we have, we have this, we have, you know, the ways that we interact with each other and celebrate each other and find joy and creativity.
These things, in a lot of ways, get sort of like put to the wayside when people are trying to be like real serious revolutionaries.
But the more elders I talk to, the more they help me understand that engaging in both is really, really important.
If you want to live something like a long and satisfied life, the beloved community, right?
Well, it's just really a terrific book, Black Arms to Hold You Up. And we can interpret that in both ways.
It's just been great to talk with you, Ben Passmore, about it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
David Baron, welcome to Writer's Voice.
Thank you, Francesca.
This book, The Martians, what initially drew you to the story of the Mars craze at the turn of the 20th century and Percival Lowell, who was so instrumental in it?
Well, it really all started with my childhood.
You know, I grew up in the 1960s and it seemed that I was kind of surrounded by Martians when I was a kid.
On Saturday morning cartoons with Bugs Bunny, there was Marvin the Martian trying to destroy the Earth.
There was a very popular sitcom in the 1960s called My Favorite Martian.
There were Martians in comic books, Martians in science fiction.
And having grown up and become a science writer who focuses on astronomy and looking for another book to write about eight years ago, I reflected on my childhood and was kind of wondering, well, what is it about Mars that makes it so prominent in our culture?
I mean, Mars has a special place.
So I started to investigate where this idea of Martians came from.
And as soon as I started looking at newspapers from the early 20th century, I was just absolutely flabbergasted to find that before Martians were staples of science fiction, they were really thought to be scientific fact.
And that just seemed like a fascinating little-told story.
And you're talking at the turn of the 20th century.
So talk about this period of time and how the era's fascination with science, evolution, exotic lands that, of course, came about because of, on the one hand, Charles Darwin, and on the other hand, the imperialist enterprise by Western civilization.
How did all that lead to the Mars craze?
It's this amazing confluence of science and culture and exploration and ideas.
And that's part of what made it such a rich topic for me to explore in a book.
So, yeah, it was a lot of things.
We can talk later, perhaps, about what was being seen on Mars, but what was happening on Earth that made us interested in Mars and the possibility of a civilization on Mars.
First, there was this fascination with exotic cultures, which were called alien cultures at the time.
And with Darwin having come along and this idea of evolution being a natural process that occurred on Earth, perhaps it occurred on other planets as well.
So talk about exotic life forms.
If for Westerners, thinking about Asian cultures was considered exotic, how much more exotic would it be to find a civilization on Mars?
But also, there was a real pining for looking for a better world elsewhere.
Things on Earth at that time, in the late 1800s, what we think about it as the Gilded Age, this kind of glamorous period, it was a time of great unrest.
There was a lot of violent turmoil in terms of labor unrest.
There were attacks by anarchists in Europe, terrorist attacks.
Anarchists were assassinating heads of state, including William McKinley in the United States in 1901.
And so the idea that maybe Earth was clearly turning out not to be a very perfect place, and when this idea came along of a civilization that was better than us on the planet next door, it really captured the public's imagination.
We're in a new Gilded Age right now, as a matter of fact, and that Gilded Age was a time of extreme inequality.
We're even more unequal now.
Do you think there's a connection between the Mars craze and the UFO sightings that seem to, you know, we have hearings in Congress about them, and that's not to say they're not real, but it's just to talk about how people think about it?
I do think there are a lot of parallels to what was going on back then and what's going on now, partly with the craze around UFOs or UAPs, as now they're popularly called, but also the current excitement about Mars.
We are in another Gilded Age.
Yes, there's a great divide between the rich and the poor.
There's also a great divide politically in this country.
It seems like everything is about stoking outrage.
And yet there's this idea that Elon, not only Elon Musk has, of course, he's the most prominent proponent of this idea of colonizing Mars, but there's a whole group of people.
There's something called the Mars Society that's been around for almost 30 years, promoting this idea of moving our civilization or expanding it to Mars.
And what do they all talk about?
It's about building a better world on Mars, that somehow if we can start over, it'll be a more egalitarian place.
We'll all really pull together there in a way we seem to not be able to on Earth.
So I think Mars does hold that same place, a place we dream of, we aspire to become.
And what happened over 100 years ago was people in the end were kidding themselves, believing that there was this civilization on Mars.
I think there's a bit of that same thing going on today.
I actually very much am in favor of us trying to send astronauts to Mars, but this idea of building a whole new civilization there that will somehow leave the problems of humanity behind, I think we're once again kidding ourselves.
Especially if Elon Musk is at the head of it.
Many people would say that.
Now let's talk about Percival Lowell.
He's a central figure in your book.
Tell us about him and what motivated his intense obsession with the red planet.
Yeah, some people have actually, in reading my book, have seen some slight parallels between Percival Lowell and Elon Musk.
I don't want to push it too far.
But they both, Lowell was, and Musk is, a man who clearly is obsessed with Mars and has dreams of Mars.
And Percival Lowell came from one of the most prominent wealthy families in New England.
The Lowells of Massachusetts were great philanthropists.
They made their money in textiles in the early 1800s.
The city of Lowell, Massachusetts is named after the family.
Basically, all the Lowell men went to Harvard.
Percival Lowell graduated in 1876.
He could do anything he wanted to do with his life because money was not an obstacle.
And what he first did for the first 20 or so years of his adulthood after graduating was he became kind of a roving anthropologist.
He was a writer who spent a lot of time in the Far East, in Japan and in Korea.
And he wrote about these exotic cultures for the Atlantic Monthly, for other publications.
And as he approached the age of 40, he all along had an interest in science.
But he read a book by a French astronomer named Camille Flammarion, who very much believed that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings.
And when Lowell read this book, he decided he was going to devote the rest of his life, in essence, to finding out if there really was a civilization on Mars.
And so he, with his deep pockets, funded the establishment of a new private observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
It's still there, the Lowell Observatory.
He bought one of the finest telescopes of the era.
And he began obsessively studying Mars, mapping its surface.
And he came up with the theory that these strange lines that were seen on Mars, that looked so straight that they almost looked artificial.
In fact, they did look artificial.
It was the kind of cobwebbing Mars.
He had this quite elaborate theory that they were irrigation canals that the Martians had built to survive on a planet that was running out of water.
And this idea was kind of seen as an interesting theory for a while.
But Lowell, being the wealthy, persuasive, articulate man he was, really was able to convince a good portion of the public that he was right by the time he got to 1907-1908.
Talk a little bit more about this idea.
You know, when I grew up, we also, you know, it was still an open question whether, and I grew up around the time that you did, you know, it was still kind of an open question in at least a child's mind that these canals might have been built by intelligent beings.
Say more about the ideas of intelligence and how they're linked to ideas of evolution as well.
So first, just to say this idea of canals on Mars, there's a bit of a generational split.
Folks who are our age, who grew up in the 60s or earlier, often have heard of the canals on Mars, because even then, in the middle of the 20th century, there still was this sense that something mysterious was happening on Mars, and there were these weird lines on Mars that were called canals, even if they weren't canals.
But that really dropped off by the late 60s and 70s when we started sending spacecraft there.
But in terms of evolution, so Charles Darwin, of course, came along in the mid-19th century and really changed the whole way we look at the world.
In essence, he was saying we humans have evolved from what were often termed lower life forms.
Evolution, though, does not suggest an endpoint.
It's a process.
So, okay, if we are at the moment the highest, as many people would have said, the highest life forms on Earth, what will we become in the future?
What about an older planet than Earth?
You can imagine that there might be some kind of beings that are even more evolved, more civilized than we are.
And it was thought that Mars was an older planet.
Mars is a smaller planet than Earth.
And if, as was thought at the time, and is still thought today, the planets all formed out of kind of a swirling mass of gas and dust that eventually solidified in these planets, that the planets started out as these molten blobs that eventually hardened and cooled, Mars being smaller than Earth would have cooled and hardened before Earth.
And therefore Mars became habitable before Earth did.
Then one might reasonably assume Mars had life before Earth.
Mars' life evolved to be civilized before Earth life.
So there was this conceptual idea that there was every reason to think if Mars had life, it was farther along in some kind of progression of civilization, of evolution than Earth was.
So when Lowell started to see these lines on Mars and attributed them to an advanced civilization, it fit with at least this general idea that there could be on Mars a civilization more advanced than Earth's.
And if you've just joined Writer's Voice, we're talking with David Barron about his book The Martians, the true story of an alien craze that captured turn-of-the-century America.
Now in 1892, the newspapers, the yellow journalism, like the Hearst Papers, got in on the idea here.
They reported three strange lights in a triangle that had been seen through a different telescope, the Lick Telescope.
Talk about this.
It's, by the way, strikingly like some of the more contemporary UAP sightings of triangular objects.
So I wonder if there's a connection.
But talk a little bit about the role of the yellow journalism in promoting the Mars craze.
Yeah.
So again, it was a whole collection of interesting things that came together to just propel this idea of life on Mars to become a craze.
And much of it was the way that the press was reporting on it regarding those lights on Mars.
So Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer who inspired Percival Lowell to study Mars, he had previously, before 1892, been writing about hypothetically how humans might communicate with the Martians if, in fact, there were beings on Mars, intelligent beings on Mars.
And he said, well, one simple way would be if, let's say, the Martians decided to draw some giant geometrical shape on their planet, like a triangle with, you know, an enormous array of electrical lights, and they would show it to us, and then we in turn would show them a triangle, and then they would show us a square, and we would show a square, and they'd show a circle, and so forth.
It would be a very simple way just to say hello.
It's not communicating much, but it's communicating something huge, which is, hello, we're here, and we're an intelligent civilization.
So he had already said that, and then in 1892, when Mars made an especially close approach to Earth, astronomers at the Lick Observatory, which was the largest telescope at the time, they noticed these three strange lights on the very rim of Mars, and it formed into a triangle.
So, of course, the press took that as a sign that it was the Martians trying to reach us.
Now, the scientists themselves said they didn't think it was a signal from Mars.
They thought it was light reflecting off either high snow-capped mountains or high clouds on Mars, but the press just took off.
And this was a time when first Pulitzer and then Hearst, who were both promoting very sensationalistic news, were just starting out.
And it was particularly the Pulitzer papers then, and then later, a few years later, the Hearst papers came along too.
Whenever there was news about Mars that was sensationalistic, you could count on them to really promote it.
So when Percival Lowell came along with his theory about canal-building Martians, the press just lapped it up, and that really pushed it out into the public even more.
Now, so talking more about the realm of culture, H.G. Wells' novel, The War of the Worlds, played a crucial role in shaping the public's perception of Martians.
He came from a very different place.
He was influenced by the theory of evolution.
He critiqued the anthropomorphic views of Martians and had a very different idea of what they were like.
How did his kind of terrifying depiction of alien invaders resonate with the culture at the time?
Right.
So The War of the Worlds came directly out of this era.
H.G. Wells first published the book in serial form in magazines in 1897.
It was published as a book in 1898.
So H.G. Wells was coming directly out of this period when Lowell was saying there's a civilization on Mars, when scientists were seeing strange lights on Mars like that triangle.
In fact, there's a, in the book, The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells says, well, his narrator in the book says, we should have foreseen this invasion of Earth when scientists in 1894 saw strange lights on the edge of Mars, which in hindsight were the Martians casting their great guns that they would use to shoot their spaceships to Earth.
So Wells was writing directly out of what was in the scientific journals at the time.
So H.G. Wells' Martians.
Now probably many of you, many of your listeners know the story from the Orson Welles adaptation for the radio in 1938, which has been heard many times since, or the movie that was made later.
The Martians we think of as these marching around the Earth in these giant tripods, but the Martians themselves inside their machines were these hideous creatures that looked sort of like a cross between a jellyfish and an octopus.
They were basically just a brain in a sack of flesh with these tentacles that they would use to control their machines.
So where did that come from?
Well, that came directly out of, again, this scientific idea about Mars being an older world than the Earth.
H.G. Wells thought, well, if the Martians are a million years in advance of us, which at the time was thought to be a long time, basically what will come of us a million years from now?
If the Martians are what we will become in a million years, what might we become?
And so he had this thought experiment of, well, as we're becoming more dependent on our technology, and in essence we don't need our muscles anymore, it's just our brains to control our technology, well, we will become essentially just brains with tentacles to control our machines.
And so his Martians really were humans projected a million years into the future.
But one thing that interested me was, the War of the Worlds is probably the most famous piece of fiction to come out of that era.
And so I imagined that people at the time would have been afraid of the Martians, because after all, here's this piece of fiction suggesting they're going to come to Earth and invade our planet and start preying on human beings.
But that was not the widespread view of the Martians.
The so-called real Martians were thought to be peaceful, moral beings that, in fact, we should emulate rather than to fear.
And isn't this interesting, because I think there is a kind of bifurcated view of aliens.
Either they are going to come and take us over, and this is a terrifying thought, and it is, you know, I think very much connected to the kind of xenophobia that we see today, the people's fear of the other.
And on the other hand, the idea that, you know, we are so hopelessly morally bankrupt that other people are going to be more evolved than us, I know, and I have to confess, I have this secret, totally irrational feeling in myself of like, oh, please, aliens from the other planet, come and save us.
You know, there are these really two ideas of saviors versus invaders, enemies.
Right.
They're either demons or they're angels.
And in fact, it's really interesting.
H.G. Wells, who, again, in 1897, War of the Worlds came out, and his Martians were really devils.
A decade later, in 1908, he wrote another piece that was published in Cosmopolitan magazine called The Things That Live on Mars, where he was asked to revisit.
Now, 10 years later, what did he think that the beings were like on Mars?
And he had completely changed his view.
Now he was looking at what the Martians would be like based on what was known about the Martian environment.
And for that magazine article, a famous illustrator was hired to actually show what H.G. Wells was writing about.
And now the Martians looked like angels.
In fact, they were these winged beings, these winged peaceful beings in H.G. Wells' imagination a decade later.
So even he had shifted from the demon view to the angel view.
But yeah, there does seem to be this bifurcation that continues.
There are a lot of famous names in this book, in The Martians, The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.
And we are talking with the author, David Barron.
Nikola Tesla was another one who claimed to have received signals from Mars.
What did he supposedly hear?
And what was the reaction of the scientific community to his pronouncements?
Right.
Well, the reaction of the public was enormous.
When Tesla said he picked up radio signals from Mars, it was front page news all over the place.
And it really propelled the Mars craze that had begun with Percival Lowell to a whole new level.
The scientific establishment was much more skeptical.
But to say a few words about Nikola Tesla.
So Tesla, of course, he was a genius inventor.
I mean, he really transformed the way we use electricity.
Our modern system of electrical power generation and distribution is based on Tesla's ideas of alternating current versus Thomas Edison's direct current, which is what he was promoting.
So Tesla, by the 1890s, was a celebrity.
He was widely praised.
He was in the papers all the time.
And after his work on sending electricity through wires, he got interested in what at the time was called wireless.
Today we would call it radio.
But he was one of the pioneers of radio along with Marconi.
And in 1899, Nikola Tesla, who had been working in New York, traveled to Colorado and set up an experimental laboratory in Colorado Springs to study how electrical signals are transmitted through the atmosphere.
And again, this was before anyone was actually sending out signals, but he would listen for natural signals like lightning in the distance will cause, if you have a radio receiver, you'll hear little clicks and pops that are the electromagnetic pulse from the lightning.
And he would listen to these things.
And one night he was alone in his laboratory and he picked up this very faint, strange signal that repeated in triplets.
And it came over like as if someone were telegraphing him.
It was like a click, click, click, click, click, click, over and over again, these triplets.
And he didn't know what it was.
It didn't seem natural.
He couldn't figure out any natural explanation for it.
And he pondered this for quite a while, for a good year and a half.
But knowing about Percival Lowell's theory about Mars, he convinced himself that this was a signal from Mars, just as in 1892, the Martians had supposedly sent us a triangle of lights, these three lights to say hello.
Now it was these three signals in time repeated over and over.
That again, even Tesla had suggested beforehand that if you wanted to send a radio signal between the planets, this is what you might do.
You'd send out a series of dots like that repeated over and over again.
And so when he announced this to the world again, the Martian craze just completely took off.
By 1901, the Martians were on the Broadway stage and in vaudeville and in Tin Pan Alley songs.
You could see them in advertising.
They just completely infiltrated our culture in a way they hadn't before.
Now, the scientific community eventually did push back against the idea that there was a civilization on Mars, intelligent beings.
They pushed back against Lowell's ideas.
The Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America rebuked his ideas.
What were the key arguments that ultimately led to the debunking of this notion?
So, you know, basically, Lowell had devised this elaborate, fascinating theory based on observations of a planet more than 35 million miles away through an Earth-bound telescope.
That means you have to look through the Earth's atmosphere.
And even if you have the best telescope in the world, you have to look through our atmosphere, which distorts what you see.
You know, looking at Mars through a telescope, it doesn't just sit there.
It's constantly, it's kind of rippling and going in and out of focus because of warm and cold currents of air between you and outer space.
So observing Mars is not easy.
And yes, one could make out dark areas and light areas, but the supposed lines on Mars, these canals, were not easy to spot.
And Lowell drew hundreds of them.
He had these elaborate maps showing all these straight line canals and where they intersected, there were these strange dots.
And he believed those were the Martian cities.
But other astronomers would look at Mars and they wouldn't see that.
Now, it was very easy for Lowell to say, well, of course you don't see it.
You don't have as good a telescope as I do, or your telescope isn't in a place like Flagstaff, Arizona with wonderfully clear skies.
You've got worse observing conditions, or you're not looking at Mars carefully enough.
You know, Lowell was studying Mars night after night after night.
So he was waiting for those times when he had clear vision.
Or he would say, my eyes are better than yours.
So it's kind of hard for others who were not studying Mars on a regular basis.
If they looked at Mars once in a while and they didn't see the canals, well, who are you going to believe?
The man who's devoted his life to it or to the one who's just dabbling in it?
So it was hard for other astronomers to really bring him down.
And it wasn't just Lowell who was seeing the canals.
Camille Flammarion in France, whom I mentioned.
Giovanni Schiaparelli in Italy, who was a very well-regarded astronomer, who was in fact the first person to report these lines on Mars in 1877.
So it wasn't just Lowell.
But the question did arise, do these lines even exist?
Or if you're looking at an object so far away through such an imperfect mechanism as a telescope through our atmosphere, plus the eye is highly imperfect.
We all have seen optical illusions and we're convinced that, you know, one line is longer than the other or two things are parallel and they're not.
It's very easy to trick the eye.
So the idea came along that, well, maybe the lines aren't there at all.
And there were some studies that were done during this period showing that you could trick someone into seeing lines on a map of Mars that weren't really drawn there if you held it far enough away that the eye was starting to try to piece together things it couldn't see very clearly and was inferring lines that weren't there.
But that didn't prove that there weren't lines on Mars.
It really took another astronomer who had studied Mars in detail, who in fact had believed in the canals, who had mapped the canals, who later on had a much better view of Mars and saw the canals just vanish when he saw the planet with even better clarity.
And that started to erode the idea that the lines were there at all.
And so if there aren't these straight lines on Mars, you've just completely undermined Percival Lowell's theory about the Martian civilization.
And yet just about a week or two ago, there were reports in the news that there are indeed real signs of life on Mars.
Yeah, NASA has come out with what it says is the best evidence yet that there was life on Mars.
Now, NASA has been very careful to say this is not proof, but this is the most suggestive evidence yet.
And in this case, it's a rock that was found by the Perseverance rover that's up there on Mars, drilling into rocks in an area of Mars that was known to have been wet several billion years ago.
So it's a place where if life ever did evolve on Mars, one might find traces of it.
Yeah, and these rocks have these strange so-called leopard spots of minerals that if they were found on Earth would pretty clearly be signs of life.
And, you know, there may be some other explanation, but there's every reason to think there may have been life on Mars early on in its history.
But we have to be very careful.
That's one of the lessons of my book and of the Canals on Mars.
We can very easily get ahead of the evidence in believing things we wish were true.
We have to make sure that we don't kid ourselves and get ahead of the evidence.
A very important lesson for these times in which anti-science is in such ascendance.
I agree completely.
When I started to write the book, I originally planned it as kind of a cautionary tale about how easy it is to just go down a rabbit hole of belief and convince yourself that something is true when it's just all fantasy.
And that is one of the lessons of my book.
But I found just as powerful kind of the opposite lesson in some ways.
And that is the power of imagination and the positive power of imagination, if one can keep it in some constraint, which Lowell unfortunately didn't do.
But that excitement about Mars, while of course, in the end, it was all a fantasy, there was no civilization on Mars.
Nikola Tesla clearly did not pick up radio signals from Mars.
We know that now.
But there was so much excitement about it, the public started to really dream of outer space and imagine ourselves not just as human beings, but as earthlings as part of some larger community of our solar system and universe.
And it was that excitement that inspired science fiction through the 20th century.
The early pioneers in science fiction said it was because they were kids growing up in that era that they got excited about outer space.
And in fact, it was the early rocket scientists who devised our ability to go to outer space because they grew up on the Mars fiction of that era as well.
Robert H.
Goddard, the father of American rocketry, said it was reading H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds when he was a teen that made him decide he was going to devote his life to rocketry.
And Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who built rockets for the Nazis before he came to the United States and built them for NASA, similarly, growing up in Germany, he was excited by German science fiction that also was based on Percival Lowell's ideas about Mars.
So there was a lot of positive stuff to come out of that.
I think that having these imaginative ideas and exploring them is great.
But when the evidence starts to come in that really shows that as wonderful as it is as an idea, it's just not holding up to reality, one has to then be willing to grow up and give up those ideas and move on to new mysteries to solve.
Well, the book is The Martians, the True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.
David Barron, it's just been great to talk with you.
That was a lot of fun, and I appreciate your inviting me on.