Liquor-Men to Movie-Men
This post follows from my report on the Tillie Bergsterman murder in Janesville, WI in 1912. Tillie’s death exposed a child-grooming network which extend over a handful of local saloons and hotel-brothels.
Superficially, this post is about how the worst saloon-operators turned to the early film industry to recoup profits extinguished by Prohibition and related social reforms: liquor- to movie-. At a deeper level, this post is about the men, the people, who chose to act in exploitative ways toward children and their vulnerable neighbors.
It’s really the character of these people that is the heart of the problem. As leaders in their respective fields, Austro-Hungarian psychiatrists and criminologists had studied the character of such people for decades by the time Leon Goetz was tapped to run the Princess Theater, etc. Since many figures in the Prohibition-era crime-world came from Austria-Hungary, these old-world criminologists can tell us a lot about the problem at hand.
Unfortunately, American intellectuals are almost universally ignorant of what life was really like under Emperor Franz Joseph and therefore they’re not well equipped to put these “movie-men” in context. The reality of this situation slapped me in the face while listening to a podcast from ConsortiumNews.com on “Twitter Files & the Death of Russiagate” (February 1, 2023).
For those of you who don’t know, federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI have been systematically dismantling avenues where common people can express their ideas and engage politically. The latest revelation comes from Matt Taibbi, who tweets about a company/website called “Hamilton 68” which orchestrated fake news stories, mainly against former President Trump. Trump has just been indicted, in what many believe to be a politically-motivated attempt to prevent him running for office. This sort of sloppy “management” of democracy is what turned Emperor Franz Joseph’s people against him.
In the podcast, Matt Taibbi postulates that a “new person” is being created through the manipulation of online and legacy media. These media partner with “former” CIA-, FBI-, DoD- officials, as well as dedicated “anti-disinformation” consultants such as Yonder (pre-scandal name was “New Knowledge”) and NewsGuard, to create an irresistible, immersive propaganda regimen. From the podcast:
Taibbi (1:03) “They [companies like NewsGuard, Hamilton 68, Yonder a.k.a “New Knowledge”] are going to create narratives before they get to the NYT, the whole fabric of reality is going to be altered, so they have people like the person you [Kiriakou] dated… this is exactly what Orwell wrote about, that you can have somebody with two contradictory thoughts at once and not be bothered by it: the certain conviction that something is untrue and the absolute belief that it is at the same time. That is the new person that is being created by these techniques. It is something we’ve never dealt with before. It’s a new topic that hasn’t really been studied. ”
That was the face-slap: the “new people” who haven’t really been studied. This is not true, but before I explain why, let’s go back to the podcast, wherein Chris Hedges and John Kiriakou explain what exemplifies these “new people”.
Kiriakou: “it’s not that they [“new people”, in this case CIA operations people] are simpletons, it’s that they’ve been exposed to this propaganda for so long, this unrelenting reporting that Donald Trump is a Russian agent, and that the Russians have controlled our elections… People really believe it, they just refuse to look at the evidence that is placed before them… They’ve been duped, they’ve been lead astray.”
According to the podcast, the woman Kiriakou dated, as referenced by Taibbi, is also an example of this kind of “new person”. Other groups identified as mostly consisting of “new people” are intelligence professionals, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and D.C. Beltway intellectuals:
Kiriakou (0:55): “A cousin of mine, who’s very much a DNC [Democrat National Committee] mover-and-shaker, set me up with a woman who is an attorney at the DNC. Lovely, lovely women. And we went out for one date. And through the entire date all she talked about was how the Russians controlled Donald Trump. And I said, “You don’t really believe that, deep down?” At the CIA— if there was one thing I took out of my CIA career at least from the analytic side— if you’re going to say something you absolutely must have the information to back it up. You have to have the facts. And she said to me, “I believe in my heart that Donald Trump does exactly what Vladimir Putin tells him to do.” And I realized there was no sense in carrying on the conversation any longer because they really believed that at the DNC. Maybe not at the top level that had come up with the big lie, but everybody else who was there to implement it— they believed it.”
Hedges makes the point that these “new people” thrive in an anti-truth environment, a “in a climate of pervasive manipulation and pervasive intelligence [espionage]… where people just retreat, you know, it’s a pornified culture, a culture engrossed in spectacle. Cicero writes about this in ancient Rome… where everybody’s emotional life is invested in the arena [violent sports spectacles]. Meanwhile, the Roman Republic is coughing up Nero, Caligula and everyone else.” Hedges goes on to compare “Hamilton 68” tactics to the ‘kayfabe’ of Pro Wrestling. Several times throughout the podcast discussants and presenters compare the Beltway political climate to hysteria, a 19th century mental health term.
The podcast is fabulous and I encourage everybody to watch it. There’s just one problem: this “new person” Taibbi identifies isn’t new. Fin-de-siècle Austrian criminologists identified precisely the personality characteristics described above as those typical for prostitutes and con-men. At that time mental health terminology labeled the above character traits as “pathological lying” and “moral insanity”; these days you’re more likely to hear “narcissism” and “psychopathy” used. The mental health landscape of the 19th century saloon has become the mental landscape of our modern ‘Beltway elite’.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone, given our history of taking the worst criminals to lead our government: the owners of Janesville’s European Hotel did well for themselves in national politics, as did the beneficiaries of Lincoln’s counterfeiting network in Monore, WI. The heirs of the Roosevelts’ favorite pimps now control public perception out of Hollywood. As I will detail more thoroughly in future posts, modern Western intelligence communities exist because 1860-1945 warring parties adopted sex trade informant networks and made them ‘legitimate government’. That the psychology of the bordello has overtaken Washington D.C.— and the rest of the ‘free world’— is only to be expected.
Now, neither Kiriakou, Taibbi nor Hedges knows the criminological history I’m going to detail briefly below, but ironically Hedges comes very near to the mark at (0:56):
Hedges: “The problem is you have a bunch of analysts at the CIA sitting around dreaming up a bunch of garbage… you know when they drag out the cardinal in Prague who has been sleep deprived for three weeks and he looks like a zombie, the CIA suddenly decides the Soviets have figured out forms of mind control and then sends Stanley Gottlieb off, along with hundreds of ex-Nazis, to Black Sites and then they’re giving LSD to even their own agents, who are jumping out of windows…these [CIA] guys get these theories.”
I have respect for Hedges, I think he represents the best type of journalist that US media is capable of producing. However, he blithely casts about the term “Nazi” as though National Socialists were in power for more than twelve years and that nothing came before them.
Hitler and the Nazis inherited the law enforcement, academic, mental health and criminological apparatus that was set up over the course of sixty years by Franz Joseph. The “ex-Nazis” were Austro-Hungarian bureaucrats and state-sponsored researchers in whose work Hitler saw intelligence value and therefore allowed to continue. The CIA benefited from Franz Joseph’s experts, not Hitler’s.
What did Franz Joseph’s experts say about the “new people” they studied in their criminal court system? Prepare for déjà vu: con-men and prostitutes were accustomed to holding two contradictory thoughts at once. They certainly knew they were scamming (acting in order to deceive), but they also convinced themselves with absolute certainty they were not scamming. They had an over-developed ability to believe in their own lies, which made the lies more convincing to marks/johns, but this belief only lasted until the scam no longer served their own interests. (Wanna call it ‘compartmentalizing’?!) They existed in a highly-charged emotional state, i.e. “hysterical”, while exhibiting paranoia and obsessive thoughts. They sought distraction in spectacle, intoxicants and sex. Selfishness and materialism characterized their attitudes toward sex in general.
[See Paul Näcke, Über Die Sogenannte "Moral Insanity." (1902); R. Hennenberg “Zur Forensischen und klinischen Beurtheilung der Pseudologia phantastica” in the 25th Berlin Charité Yearbook, 1900; Stanislawa Paleolog, The Women Police of Poland, 1925-1939 (London: Association for Moral & Social Hygiene, 1957)]
It was the work of men like Hennenberg, as well as that of contemporary criminologists/intelligence community dons Hans Gross and Paul Näcke, which identified the psychological characteristics that Freud repackaged as “narcissism”. Freud linked ‘narcissism’ with self-centered sexual perversions like homosexuality; modern professionals relate narcissism to pedophilia. Sound like Washington D.C. yet?
"At the Bar", Watercolor on Paper by A. J. Kristians, 1920's. This scene was painted in Paris.
In the 1910s, the saloon was the place, beyond any other, where this “new person”/Austro-Hungarian criminal found their home. In the USA things were much the same: historian David R. Johnson in his book Illegal Tender identifies saloons as the physical locus of wider pimping, forgery, and extortion networks. Highly-cohesive, cult-like networks.
[Want an example of these con men and their psychology? Check out Leon Goetz’s pornography partner and international spy, Sint Millard.]
Fin-de-siècle militaries and law enforcement were interested in understanding this “new person” psychology not just in order to prevent crime, but because they saw the devotion prostitutes had toward their pimps and the charisma of con-men as being useful in a military/intelligence setting. A “Theban Sacred Band” of group-thinkers, if you will. Näcke made the most explicit public reference to this in Über Die Sogenannte "Moral Insanity." (1902):
... individual symptoms may emerge that are not harmful in certain circumstances. [Moral Insanity] Sufferers may still be fairly adaptable, they can make themselves useful when they are guided in the right direction. In former times such guidance was easier than now, and there could even be the aura of heroism around the person concerned. During the time of the conquistadors such morally defective persons were presented as heroes, e.g. Pizarro. Only an accurate knowledge of their whole personality allows them to appear to us in a different light than before, but one must always to take the time and prevailing culture into consideration. Examples from recent times might be Cecil Rhodes, Chamberlain, Kitchener and even some American billionaires could be counted among their number. Anyway, Napoleon forms a very remarkable variant, but perhaps his case was of a secondary moral insanity, because he is well known to have been epileptic. His admirers certainly want to know nothing of moral insanity.
This all should be hair-raising to the American public, given the federal support movie-men received from the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Josephus Daniels, John R. Freuler and William A. Brady. Early cinema aficionados will be interested to know how this weaponization of mental illness played out through bringing liquor-men into the WWI war effort via film.
Before the USA entered WWI, the movie industry was open about liquor-men’s flight to film. Here’s an example from trade journal Motion Picture News in 1916. (Europe was fighting then, but the US had not yet entered the fray.) If you’re interested in how the worst contemporary saloons targeted children for the sex-trade, read my post on the Tillie Bergsterman Murder. (You may also be interested in Cigarettes and the White Slave Trade.)
Motion Picture News, October 14, 1916.
WWI saw the first mobilization of cinema on the home front. Creeps like Charles Urban were keen to sell their film-making ability to the British military, I’ve written about that in KINOGRAMS. On the American front, political families like the Roosevelts were busy making sure whomever controlled the film industry was on their side, see WWI and the Paramount Takeover. One-time pornographers like Monroe-native John R. Freuler were busy partnering with military and presidential interests in a bid to use federal power to combat a grass-roots call for film censorship. The pornographers of early film did well getting themselves appointed to influential war-work positions:
Motion Picture Herald, March 28th 1942.
William A. Brady, of the Committee of Public Information, was an NYC prize-fight promoter (an entertainment often linked with pimping) as well as an early investor in Flo Ziegfeld’s girlie shows. He understood better than most how the preceived pornographic nature of American films harmed the WWI war effort: see my post Organized International Prostitution and Early Film’s “Porn Problem”. The excerpt below is from a 1919 article by Brady inveighing against the very pornography that made him and his colleagues wealthy men:
Excerpt from “How The Motion Picture Saved the World” by William A. Brady in Photoplay Magazine, January 1919. Photoplay editors were behind Edith May’s National Salesgirl’s Beauty Contest; regularly featured the work of Alfred Cheney Johnston; and made celebrity stories about Flo Ziegfeld and his wife Billie Burke a recurring feature of their content. Note a well-established distribution system for American pornography in Europe.
While the federal government could protect film interests, it could also harm them. Benjamin B. Hampton, of the American Tobacco Company and its film investments, was a veteran lobbyist who understood how to maneuver behind the scenes in Washington D.C. He saved American Tobacco from being destroyed as the Edison Trust was by Teddy Roosevelt.
It won’t surprise readers therefore to hear that William A. Brady and Benjamin B. Hampton were at the head of the pack after 1917 warning the ex-liquor-men not to make the same mistakes in their film undertakings!
Moving Picture World, February 5, 1921.
Here’s the relevant excerpt from the article above:
Moving Picture World, February 5, 1921.
Moving Picture World, February 5, 1921.
Film trade press after WWI is full of references to what Prohibition did to the liquor industry, and particularly how the liquor industry was fractured between “retail” suppliers, hard liquor manufacturers, and brewing lines. Film men warned repeatedly that the same mistakes should not be made again: pornographers should not be allowed to spoil the gig for everybody else. (The trouble was, of course, that everybody engaged in pornography!)
Moving Picture World, February 5, 1921.
And the relevant part from Brady’s screed above:
Moving Picture World, February 5, 1921.
Moving Picture World, February 5, 1921.
The brightest lobbyists and promotion men in NYC and D.C. saw the “liquor-men to movie-men” phenomenon as one of the most dangerous truths associated with the nascient film industry. The reality of the “new people”— sex trade people— who gained control of the film industry after the destruction of the Edison Trust had to be buried. Ben Hampton, Will Brady and later Bill Hays would play key roles in this white-washing over the decade that followed the Great War.
According to commentators like Hughes, Kiriakou and Taibbi we are now in a new war: a war for our personal integrity, maybe even our personality integrity. While these three missed the historical development of this “new person”, they certainly hit the mark with regard to the danger the “new person” poses to society, as well as the prevalence of the “new person” in America’s second and fourth estates. As I mentioned before, the podcast is worth a listen.
What Goetz fans have over everybody else is insight to the psychology of these “new people”. The suffering of Edith May, Leon and Chester Goetz, Tillie Bergsterman, Marjorie Howe and so many others wasn’t in vain, at least that far.
[Header image: Child labor, newsie selling in a saloon on Washington Street at 10 P.M. Tony Tomasula, 9 years old, Buffalo, New York, photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1910.]
