Tarzana of the Apes
The symbolic succession of Burroughs to the seat of the arch-reactionary Otis signified a profound shift in the sources of political power in Los Angeles, the United States, and eventually the world. Burroughs, along with many other culture producers on the right, would insert his racial Darwinian, antidemocratic vision into the Hollywood culture industry, shifting the work of political repression into the sphere of spectacular entertainment.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was born and raised in Chicago while that city organized the conquest of the American West. [1] Son of an affluent Union soldier, Burroughs was educated in the classical curriculum at Andover Phillips Academy in the 1880s and then at the Michigan Military Academy in Orchard Lake, Michigan during the 1890s. There Cadet Burroughs became the pupil of the veteran Sioux, Apache, and Nez Percé fighter Capt. Charles King. Known as “America’s Kipling,” King was a role model for Burroughs. The author of sixty romantic books about the European conquest of the “savage” tribes who ruled the Great Plains, King showed Burroughs how actual race wars could become profitable raw material for popular fiction. Burroughs was eventually posted with the late George Custer’s 7th Cavalry in Arizona, a miserable assignment that fulfilled his hopes of military glory only in a fruitless chase of an alleged bandit known as “The Apache Kid.” “I chased Apaches but never caught up with them,” Burroughs remembered.[2] But Burroughs loved the military regardless and made its virtues a major theme of his life’s work as a novelist and nationalist ideologue.
In fiction he did catch up with those Apaches, whose legendary ferocity he transposed into the Tharks, green men of Mars, the “anthropoid” apes of Africa, and scores of other invented races. His first product, serialized in 1912 in the New York pulp magazine The All-Story, was a tale called “Under the Moons of Mars” earned him $400.[3] Burroughs retitled the story The Princess of Mars for book publication in the same year, and that novel became the cornerstone of a series that eventually totaled 25 books. The plot of the Martian cycle revolves around a Civil War veteran named John Carter who is mysteriously transported to Mars in the midst of a desperate battle with Apaches in remote Arizona. Carter’s human qualities (and strength enhanced by the weaker gravity of Mars) establish him as a master of various Martian races, eventually emerging as the supreme leader, the “Warlord of Mars” in the third novel.
The Mars series is a tour-de-force of the racial imagination. A once-mighty seafaring “white-skinned, blond or auburn haired race” called the Orovars had ruled the red planet for a half a million years, creating imperial, technologically advanced cities. “As the seas dried up, most of the Orovars entered into a cooperation with the black and yellow races, and their interbreeding over ages produced the modern red race.”[4] This cooperation was necessary to fight the horrifically savage “green men,” or Tharks. Tharks stand 13-15 feet high (10-12 feet for the females), have “two legs and two arms, with an intermediary pair of limbs which could be used at will either as arms or legs.”[5] With eyes set in the sides of their heads so that they can see backward and forward, a pair of sharp tusks, and blood-red eyes, the green men are a nightmare picture of uncivilized ferocity. Their children, hatched from eggs, are raised utterly without love. Their culture is brutal: laughter among them only signifies the appreciation of “torture, suffering, death.”[6] Organized as “hordes,” this race is obviously modeled on the Apaches, a comparison John Carter makes almost immediately.
Burrough’s Martian allegory for the race wars of his own Age of Empire is obvious enough, but the stories also allegorize his intense hostility toward socialism, whose popularity in the United States had peaked in 1912 with the Socialist presidential candidacy of Eugene V. Debs. The Tharks had once been a civilized race, but they had lost all humane sentiments, “the victims of eons of the horrible community idea,” in which all is held as common property—including the women and children. They had degraded themselves into “a people without written language, without art, without homes, without love.”[7] The readers of these science-fiction novels were mostly boys like the young Ray Bradbury, another Midwest migrant Angeleno, who credits Burroughs with inspiring his own literary career. After gaining advice at a carnival in his hometown from Mr. Electrico, Bradbury sat down to write his first story, “Burroughs’s ‘The Gods of Mars’ A Sequel by Ray Bradbury.” As Bradbury observes, “Burroughs’s forte is not stylistic but romantic.”[8] His two most successful series each star a superman protagonist (Carter, Tarzan) who rescues fair maidens from dark savages; each episode being an opportunity to demonstrate the superior manhood of Whites in terms of civility, courage, refinement, and physique. “We all loved him,” the opening narrator of the book’s original “Foreword” writes, of the hero Virginian John Carter, “and our slaves fairly worshipped the ground he trod.”[9] What better heroic image for a white supremacist than an Antebellum Virginia slave owner?
But Burroughs was only sharpening his knives with John Carter. His enduring popular masterpiece will undoubtedly remain Tarzan of the Apes, also published in The All-Story, in 1912, on the heels of the first Mars story. Burroughs was to write another 25 Tarzan novels and license his invention to comic-strip serials, then to National Picture Corporation, who produced a series of silent films starring Elmo Lincoln (One of D. W. Griffith's favorite actors), and then an even more profitable license to M-G-M for twelve Johnny Weismuller movies produced from 1932 to 1948. [10] In Tarzan Burroughs created an original hero for the 20th century, the Century of Race, one that combines the deepest elements of European folk narrative with the deepest anxieties of imperial America’s racial Darwinism.[11]
Burroughs eventually admitted that Kipling’s Mowgli in Jungle Book was a model for Tarzan (and Kipling believed that Tarzan was the best of hundreds of rip-offs). But Burroughs was not merely rewriting Mowgli; he was tapping the same well as Kipling: the mythic story of feral man, the recurrent leitmotif of urban civilization. Romulus and Remus were suckled by wolves. Burroughs chose apes as Tarzan’s parents according to the theory of racist Darwinism, in which the English are supposedly the most highly-evolved humans, and the British aristocracy the most highly-evolved of these. Burroughs created a refined British Lord and Lady, the Greystokes, and orphans their heir in the deepest, most primeval jungle, so that their baby would be nurtured by the lowest species of proto-humans—a fictional ape tribe that has language. These speaking apes are promoted on the evolutionary scale better to fit the racist scale between beasts and the African humans, who play only a wicked role in the novel. Tarzan, whose name means “white skin” in the language of this ape tribe, emerges from the jungle as a perfect Nietzschean ubermensch. He is master of huge beasts and of all men, physically and mentally superior in every way. Setting aside the playboy image of Johnny Weismuller, the original Tarzan is a complex mix of savagery and civilization: he is stronger than a tiger, loves to kill, but he speaks French and English and has impeccable, inbred aristocratic manners.
Writing from Tarzana in 1922, on the occasion of the novel’s tenth anniversary re-issue, Burroughs succinctly stated his core ideology: "[T]he life of Tarzan of the Apes is symbolic of the evolution of man and the rise of civilization, during which mankind gained much in its never-ending search for luxury; but not without the sacrifice of many desirable characteristics, as well as the greater part of its liberty."[12] It can hardly be an accident that this 1922 passage almost perfectly expresses a central tenet of European fascism. The Burroughs-Tarzan opus continuously extols a master-race savagery. The lust for the hunt and joy of killing overwhelms Tarzan in many scenes. After he defeats lions, tigers, and giant apes with his bare hands and a very phallic knife (his father’s sole heirloom and symbol of Tarzan’s true human family), Tarzan always shouts his bloodcurdling triumph-cry. An African man killed Tarzan’s beloved ape foster-mother, so Tarzan hunts African humans simply for revenge. Burroughs offers no other justification nor any apology for Tarzan’s many gratuitous murders. Given Burroughs’ tireless exaltation of refined humanitarian sentiments, Tarzan’s massacre of Africans can only signify that they do not merit human sympathies. Neither did the Jews of Europe, in the contemporary ideology of Germany’s National Socialists.
Burroughs had created an instant pop-culture icon for the self-proclaimed “white” race. It is no exaggeration to say that Tarzan was a proto-fascist hero for the mass consumers of North American racialized capitalism. The masses who raised their children on Tarzan and Tom Carter were evidently unperturbed by dehumanizing, genocidal romances. But then, neither were countless generations of Europeans, for Burroughs’s singular achievement was to update antique warrior heroes: Ireland’s Cúchulainn, England’s King Arthur, Spain’s Amadis de Gaula, and his son, the Esplandían who conquered California itself and helped drive Alfonso Quijana to Quixotic madness. Those heroes also improbably slew horrific giant monsters, vanquished fierce foes by the thousands in battles of impossible odds, and behaved politely toward fair maidens.
In the twentieth century, mythic heroes were to fight, not only Muslim Moors, but all the world’s nonwhites. The appeal of this formula is proven by the speed with which the story of Tarzan spread through the European diaspora. Significantly, one of the Europeans touched by the Tarzan legends was an Scottish ivory trader living deep in the jungles of the Belgian Congo, one Alfred Aloysius Horn, who spun a yarn conflating Tarzan and other white captive stories with his own experiences among the African tribesmen. That tale, written in collaboration with the South African novelist Ethrelda Lewis, became the bestseller Trader Horn in 1927. And that, in turn, was the basis for M-G-M’s Africa/Tarzan productions of the 1930s.
The 1914 outbreak of war in Europe also encouraged Burroughs to pursue nationalist propaganda. By 1918 he was not only a wealthy author of the Tarzan and Mars fantasies; he was the aggressive public foe of Huns, Communists, Bolshevists, Anarchists, and pacifists. His Darwinian worldview was inextricable now from his political expression. Burroughs denounced Germans and pacifists as “anthropoid creatures,” a phrase he had invented for the advanced apes the first Tarzan novel. "It is very possible that we shall see loosed upon the community a raft of street-corner orators of the I.W.W and Bolshevik types....We have thrashed the trouble makers of Europe and it is within the range of possibilities that we may have to deal with similar cattle here."[13] In 1918, the year of the Armistice and the onslaught of the Red Scare, the budding movie industry produced its first adaptation of Tarzan, and the business opportunities of Hollywood, along with the congenial climate, beckoned. Burroughs pulled up all his Chicago roots and purchased the 570-acre “Las Flores” estate of Harrison Gray Otis. “The world was combed for the greenery on this knoll,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “hundreds of the plants coming from Asia and Africa.”[14] Burroughs renamed the estate “Tarzana” and rapidly conceived plans for an entire residential community by that name.
Once he had settled himself and his family on the Tarzana estate, Burroughs of course resumed Tarzan production. Tarzan the Terrible (1921: manuscript finished in December 1920) is entirely about black and white races in a new fantasyland he invented called “Pal-ul-don”. His preparatory notes make the premise clear enough: “Atden – (Tall-Tree) White, hairless warrior, Tarzan’s first acquaintance. Om-at (LongTail) black, hairy warrior, Tarzan's second acquaintance”[15]
Burroughs, now a landed squire with his own Mexican peones, living in the very mansion of the hated foe of the organized working class, had settled in the ideal environment for the production of the cultural hegemony of white supremacy. He followed Tarzan the Terrible with a direct consideration of his new milieu, his only work of social realism. In Girl from Hollywood (1922), Burroughs attacked the moral decadence of the movie colony (already evident to many even in the beginning of the 1920s). Innocent daughters of virtuous ranchers in the suburbs of Los Angeles become ensnared by lecherous directors, lose their virginity and dignity on the casting couch, and become cocaine-addicted sex slaves.[16]
At the same time, Burroughs was now selling residential lots to the ordinary “white” Angeleno, giving them a slice of Tarzana. Metaphorically, this is exactly how he spread the Tarzan myth.[17] Tarzana became the plantation from which the proto-fascist superhero was harvested. Burroughs then joined Thomas Ince as an initial investor in Hollywoodland. Such are the dreams that stuff is made from.
[1] My biographical treatment of Burroughs is based on Porges (1975); Holtzmark (1986); and Lupoff (1965).
[2] Lupoff (1965): 8.
[3] Tucker (1970).
[4] Brady (1996): 249.
[5] Burroughs ([1912] 2003): 16.
[6] Burroughs ([1912] 2003): 58.
[7] Burroughs ([1912] 2003): 42, 60
[8] Bradbury (2003): xv.
[9] Burroughs ([1912] 2003): xxi.
[10] Tarzan the Ape Man (1932); Tarzan and His Mate (1934); Tarzan Escapes (1936); Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939); Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941); Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942); Tarzan Triumphs (1943); Tarzan's Desert Mystery (1943); Tarzan and the Amazons (1945); Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946); Tarzan and the Huntress (1947); Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948).
[11] Holtzmark (1981).
[12] Porges (1975): 359-61.
[13] Quoted in Porges (1975): 299.
[14] Quoted in Porges (1975): 305.
[15] Porges (1975): 345.
[16] Porges (1975): 352.
[17] Schmeltz (1973): 29-35; Jurca, (2001): 20-43.
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