Monster-Fear: Why America Became the Homeland of the Titans

This essay was a prizewinning entry at the Rags Drum 2021 Eve Festival.

Foreword: Humans and Giant Beasts, Humans and Monster-Fear

“Monster-fear,” also called “Fear of Monster,” is a pun on the mutual fear between human and beast, a relationship that appears throughout works in many media. From folk legend to the flickering screen, immense, uncontrollable, and misshapen creatures have often stood at the heart of a story. One indisputable homeland of these Titans is the center of the culture industry: the United States. This essay focuses on how giant creatures have been understood and constructed in American history, asking what place “extraordinary” life occupies in American culture and how it has shaped that culture in turn.

I. Vaster Than Empires, and More Slow: Beasts in Environmental and Historical Perspective

My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow. —Andrew Marvell

In her short story “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” Ursula K. Le Guin describes a group of explorers’ encounter with a complex, all-encompassing ecosystem: “sensitive, irrational, immortal, isolated.” Its substance is the only form of life on the entire planet—the planet’s vegetation as a whole. The plants fear the dangerous explorers just as the dangerous explorers fear the plants. They fear adventurers capable of ruling and altering them—adventurers who also stand for colonial power in its conventional sense. Yet each individual adventurer, in turn, fears becoming no more than a casualty statistic in the history of exploration.

Against this background, Osden, the team’s scientist, can perceive the relation clearly because of his extraordinary abilities. He says: “I suppose I could feel the roots. Below me in the ground, down under the ground. . . . I felt the fear. . . . I couldn’t stop sending the fear back, and it kept growing. . . .” Le Guin borrows Andrew Marvell’s line to call this “Vegetable Fear.” Extended beyond this sentient yet irrational ecosystem, the idea aptly identifies the subject of the story’s environmental concerns: the global ecosystem, or the “nature” humans inhabit. In Bentham’s view, the crucial distinction between a “thing” and a being that commands moral consideration lies not in reason but in the capacity to suffer—in sentience. Le Guin extends such sentience to an entire ecosystem. Seen from the perspectives of environmental reality and history, “beasts,” as beings that interact more extensively with humans, invite this inference with still greater force.

From deep antiquity until recent times, humans feared the herds that ran across the wilderness. Once the ground beneath our feet became a globe—Globe, that is, the macrocosmic “world” made into a perceptible, tangible sphere—actual herds had long since retreated, yet distinctive impressions of nonhuman life combined with other images and displayed their might through new media. The ferocious dragons and sea monsters of the Chinese classics readily fused with entirely new elements after the advent of modernity. The Monkey Wrench Gang, for instance, likens the face of the multinational corporation to a global kraken, equipped with suckers and tentacles, an open parrot’s beak, a computer data center for its brain, and liquid capital for its blood. Cultural products of this sort repeatedly align themselves with the issues of their age, renewing their lives and sustaining their influence within the culture industry. We must therefore look back, placing the cultural images of the “giant beast” and the “wild beast” in historical perspective. That inquiry cannot do without the United States, the center of the culture industry.

II. The Study of Giant Beasts in Early America: The Claverack Giant

Mild is my behemoth, though large his frame; Smooth is his temper, and represt his flame, While unprovok’d. This native of the flood Lifts his broad foot, and puts ashore for food; Earth sinks beneath him, as he moves along To seek the herbs, and mingle with the throng. —Edward Young, 1719

With this verse about a behemoth as our guide, we must begin with a fact: America once walked beside giant beasts. The claim becomes perfectly literal if by “America” we mean the American landmass. In the summer of 1705, near the Claverack estate in the Hudson River Valley, a tenant farmer discovered a fist-sized tooth on the riverbank. It weighed almost five pounds. Because it resembled a human canine, the remains were immediately identified as “the tooth of a Giant.”

After the Irish archbishop James Ussher successfully “calculated” in 1650 that the earth’s creation conformed exactly to the biblical account, a certain climate of debate took hold: properly interpreted, science would proceed alongside theology, and the Bible would explain human history with precision. Likewise, in the early eighteenth century, religious fervor ran high among Christians in the Thirteen Colonies. This fervor was the foundation sustaining many communities in Massachusetts, the so-called “Bible Commonwealth.” The educated settlers with access to cultural debate—most of them clergymen—hoped and longed for some special sign that would prove the exceptional nature of the land beneath their feet. Religious background and scientific explanation came together quite naturally in this setting, and so the story of the Claverack Giant began. Before proceeding, however, we should remember that these clergymen were no less ardent in their devotion to Enlightenment and reason: “The light of reason is the work of God; the law of reason is the law of God; the voice of reason is the voice of God.”

As further remains of the Claverack Giant were excavated in the colonies, its identity as a peerless giant of overwhelming size provoked fierce debate among intellectuals. Their positions differed, yet in practice they led to the same destination. Clergymen who had come to the New World yearned to prove the uniqueness of the Thirteen Colonies, and indeed of the entire American continent—to prove that it constituted a greater “Bible Commonwealth.” They therefore cited the Claverack Giant as a natural wonder of the New World. The Claverack Giant should be compared, then, with the dragon of Northumberland! Europe’s celebrated wonders were Europe’s miracles, manifestations of God’s work. The unprecedented Claverack Giant, as a wonder in its own right, must likewise be revered and set against the giants of the Bible, the Aeneid, Guy of Warwick, and Anatomy of the Earth.

The discovery of America’s incomparable natural wonder concealed a contradiction that some intellectuals overlooked. The clergymen took pride in the Thirteen Colonies’ privilege of possessing the giant’s bones, yet compared the episode to Moses’s slaying of a pagan giant in Galilee. In other words, the giant’s existence proved the power of Christ, while its defeat in no way diminished Christ’s glory. The inner logic of this problem was in fact the logic of colonization. By imagining themselves as owners of the giant, the colonists of the Thirteen Colonies cast themselves as conquerors of dangers familiar from the wilderness of Exodus: above all pagans, which here meant not only giants but Indigenous people, Indigenous gods, or beings imagined as both Indigenous and gigantic. The contradiction therefore presented no real dilemma for the argument.

Elsewhere, closer study of the giant’s bones led members of the Royal Society to regard these remains—already certified as those of a “giant”—with different eyes. Taking a more scientific and logical approach, Dr. John Woodward imagined another fate for this land. For Woodward, the Flood had destroyed the “first earth,” the place Christians called Eden, and this was precisely what contemporary natural science could prove. Noah’s Flood created a wilderness; in a wilderness, science and industry were necessities of human survival, while fossils unearthed from it demonstrated the validity of creation theory.

Woodward dismissed the giant story, yet advanced his own interpretation: the bones excavated at Claverack were the remains of some sea monster. They should therefore be called not a “giant” but the American incognitum. The world Noah saw after the Flood had fallen into chaos, a premise from which Woodward derived his theory of “progress” in the passage from a savage pagan age to a civilized Christian one. This idea became the basis of the secularized Enlightenment embraced by the later Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin and the other American Founders grew up amid tales of the American incognitum. The first theories to shape how they understood the world came not from essays in Paris, but from clergymen in the colonies.

III. “We Possess the Giant Beasts”: The American Spirit and the Legacy of Giant Beasts

But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. —Thomas Jefferson, 1785

While the American colonies struggled westward through the wilderness, Russia’s eastward expansion disclosed an important fact: “Russia is the homeland of elephants,” because fairly complete mammoth remains had been excavated in Siberia. Contrary to the maxim later drilled into generations of students, the subject should properly have been “Siberia”: Siberia is the homeland of elephants. What makes the theory absurd is that it uses a definition not yet a thousand years old to qualify another measured in millennia—the national concept of Russia emerged long after mammoths roamed Siberia. Yet the same logic constitutes the theme of this essay from beginning to end. America, too, is the homeland of giant beasts; during the Revolutionary War, America needed to be their homeland. America needed, in particular, to become the homeland of elephants.

The mammoth remains excavated in Siberia in the early eighteenth century gradually lifted the veil from the American incognitum. Colonial intellectuals came to understand that it was not the remains of a giant, but those of an equally immense and ferocious quadruped. At the same time, the fact that this nonhuman being was a beast could still confirm the preceding logic. Whatever else it was, the American incognitum appeared to be a remnant of the Flood. This left Dr. Woodward’s account intact, and that account was soon put to the test during the Revolutionary War.

As knowledge of the American incognitum deepened, early naturalists analyzed the jaws that had been excavated and the colonists increasingly regarded the creature as an enormous, ferocious carnivore: what else could explain an animal’s sharp teeth and claws? The fact that such a carnivore existed, or had once existed, confirmed America’s identity as wilderness. At the same time, it distinguished the creature’s possessors—the Thirteen Colonies, and later the United States. It represented America’s indisputable sovereignty over the wilderness, while also forging a connection between the existence of the giant beast and the nation’s survival.

Why? Because around the time of the Revolutionary War, a clamorous argument held that America was a degenerate land, a claim enabled by the application of comparative biology to science. A widely circulated claim held that every creature in America was smaller and that even the human spirit was baser and more abject. Certain New World organisms did appear to offer partial confirmation. Generalizing from them, the Old World rationalized its superiority over the New; encyclopedias of the time likewise described the inhabitants of the New World as condemned to live upon diseased soil. Such a negative founding myth was intolerable to a newly created country. Yet the United States was indeed a nation without a history of its own. As a colony, it lacked the old shrines and monuments that classically educated founders expected. Meanwhile, the racial supremacism embedded in their education prevented them from making Indigenous people a legitimate part of that history. At this moment, a naturalist in possession of the American incognitum’s bones happened to visit Philadelphia during the congressional session, opening the way to a new founding myth. Jefferson quickly became interested in the subject of elephants and accepted that the American incognitum was a carnivorous quadruped akin to an elephant. Ferocious, immense, and without equal, the American incognitum quickly won renown in Paris after Jefferson became minister to France, leaving an indelible mark.

That mark made the United States truly the “homeland of elephants.” On this basis, one could conclude that the “Old World” and the “New World” were not inherently superior or inferior to one another. This formed the argumentative foundation for colonial independence and, beyond that, for the United States’ very existence. God, nature, and nation converged here. The force of the Claverack fossil lay in treating it simultaneously as a remnant of the Flood and a foundation of empire. Because the New World was not innately baser than the Old, the Old World had not been endowed with a natural right to rule the New. The Thirteen Colonies, and later the United States, possessed an evidentiary foundation that included the fossil record. Let us repeat the implication of this fossil evidence: Noah’s Flood had created a wilderness—and cultural production assigned that wilderness to America.

Standing before the animal’s remains, the Founding Fathers, from learned Calvinist clergymen to Enlightenment philosophers and Jefferson himself, reached a broad conclusion: theirs was the dominant race, bringing civilization to savages and, more importantly, to savage nature. The jaw of the American incognitum confirmed prehistoric nature’s savagery, connecting it both to their own exploratory spirit toward the natural world and to what would become the empire’s ambition. Even when the American incognitum was eventually identified as the American mastodon rather than a human giant, this could not alter the significance it once held as an American founding myth—a founding myth that would resonate with the giant primate America “possessed” on its twentieth-century screens.

IV. “It Came to Life!”: The Screen and the Rebirth of the Giant Beast

“At least one of our national characteristics is illustrated in the RKO-Radio production of King Kong which loomed over the audiences of both Radio City moviehouses last week. It is a characteristic hard to define except that it is related to that sometimes childish, sometimes magnificent passion for scale that foreigners have remarked in our building of hundred-story skyscrapers, our fondness for hyperbole in myth and popular speech, and our habit of applying superlatives to all our accomplishments. … Efforts to explain it have not been very satisfactory; the result is usually a contradiction in which we are represented as a race that is at once too civilized and not civilized enough.” —William Troy, 1933

The appearance of King Kong struck like a thunderclap. Its premiere made an immediate public impact; audiences poured into the concrete jungle of actual New York to watch a “jungle film.” After viewing and studying films such as Dracula, the distinguished director Merian C. Cooper attempted to bring an immense figure to his own screen: a dangerous giant primate, and, most importantly, a giant beast. It was an unprecedented act of cultural production. Dracula and his friends were terrifying; the sailors aboard the Battleship Potemkin burned with passion. But those screen images had not yet made full use of sets and models to create an entity that resonated with the myths of the past and would run throughout the American production of giant-monster films to come. In King Kong, that entity was the primate of Skull Island—Kong himself.

Why does Kong share the characteristics of the giant beasts that preceded him? And what makes him distinctive as a giant primate? To answer, we must analyze the definition of the “jungle film” and grasp its central feature. Although King Kong was often treated as a “horror film” in the 1930s, it was in fact compared to the travel documentaries and adventure films then in vogue. Both centered on ethnography and contact with the exotic “Other.” In this sense, the camera replaced the rifle in the explorer’s hands. Cultural workers joined the explorers’ ranks, producing from safe, comfortable offices and studios the travel writing that once demanded explorers’ toil and sacrifice. King Kong shares these characteristics. The dual identity of its central figure Carl Denham—as both director and explorer—already says everything: he hopes to display Kong as a museum specimen and to film him for profit, thus proving the logic at work.

Yet King Kong was more than a jungle adventure. Other films of its kind, offering an exotic view without adding anything new, were gradually losing their audience. In 1932, journalists lamented that such animal programs would soon be obsolete. Cooper, however, deftly combined several elements within the formula. He introduced a romance organized around the hero’s rescue of a beauty: the love between Ann Darrow and Jack Driscoll countered the monotony of a work otherwise built as an adventure narrative, while a varied publicity campaign drew an audience. Once inside the theater, viewers could experience the film’s underlying logic directly—the adventure of camera/gun, a multivalent text jointly composed by cinematographer/explorer.

Kong is a creature in whom these multiple themes converge. Director Carl Denham leads the actress Ann Darrow to an unknown place, where he engineers an exchange involving a woman and an unknown animal—an unknown primate, Kong. Contact with the local Indigenous people is, in effect, a dress rehearsal for contact with Kong. Indigenous people/Kong play the role of invaders who seize a woman, yet only because Carl Denham has deliberately used Ann Darrow as bait. Kong then quickly enters into interaction with the male explorers; following their heroic exploits, he immediately becomes a victim of natural history.

Why a victim? This means not only that Kong, an exotic creature, is eventually sacrificed in New York. It also points to a fact: in the early twentieth century, human–animal relations often took comparatively cruel forms in natural-history practice. The protection of animals frequently began with hunting the animals to be protected and turning them into specimens, while anthropological research intersected with colonialism and generated a host of moral dilemmas. Interaction with Kong is interaction with an animal, but also interaction with a human being. The giant primate, a composite of human and animal, thus confronts a double crisis, which finally places his life itself in danger.

The sequence that made Kong an indelible memory, however, takes place in a land he had never before set foot in: New York. Or rather, New York is the final stage on which Kong completes his narrative. Here he faces mortal danger, yet he also follows the logic of a rudimentary evolutionism, passing from beast to primate. After the 1930s, the image of Kong rampaging through New York was often read alongside that of the boxer. Boxers, like Kong, had become flashpoints in disputes over race, class, and nation. In New York, Kong destroys the facilities of civilization like a fighter rather than a beast, while bestial passion becomes an adjective applied to the fighter. On the one hand, Kong’s destruction of trains and ascent of buildings may seem aimless, but they follow the narrative logic Cooper has prepared: Kong advances toward the stage of his own destruction, the Empire State Building. At the same time, New York is overturned from the ground up in the course of the struggle. Kong therefore submits to the narrative and rebels against it at once. He can become a popular myth precisely because, in the final moments of his life, he fights like a Titan—in both the literal and figurative senses.

The creator of this popular myth finally meets his own destruction. Kong at last reaches his stage and battles airplanes atop the Empire State Building. Even in Cooper’s King Kong, the giant creature is no mere beast at this moment. Ann Darrow is finally lowered to safety, and Kong engages the planes in a futile struggle. Notably, the directors Cooper and Schoedsack themselves play the pilot and machine gunner in the airplane, completing the camera/gun narrative described above. The director appears not once but twice; the narrative, too, receives two endings. Cooper’s gunfire first enacts the technological conquest of the giant beast, giving the epic its seemingly perfect close. Then Carl Denham, the director within the film, arrives to mourn the giant beast—or perhaps the end of his own ethnographic project. Denham says: “Oh, no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.” After the spectacle of America’s newest technological power, Denham’s theatrical declaration supplies the film’s classic final line. Romantic ethnographic ambition goes hand in hand with violent aggression; acknowledgment and disavowal together compose America’s mythology of the giant beast.

On the screen, Kong moves from an imagined forest jungle into an imagined jungle of steel and concrete. Through the exhibition of Kong, Americans gained a mythology of their own—one structurally analogous to the American incognitum, through which they could claim knowledge and possession of their own history. This mythology emerged from the giant beast, developed through the giant beast, and finally returned to the giant beast.

Conclusion: Giant Beasts, Monster-Fear, and the World of “We the Human”

Humans once feared beasts. Do humans still fear them? In light of the texts discussed above, at least one point is certain: humans still need beasts to exist, just as an adventurer needs trophies and a scholar needs books. Humans need giant beasts to anchor and confirm their own position. Across many media and forms, giant beasts will therefore continue to play the role of entities “needed by humanity.” Put differently, the giant beast has become something created by humans to serve humans. It was once a founding myth of empire; now it is an anchor through which people confirm their identity and distinguish themselves from others. This logic corresponds exactly to the relation between nature and humanity discussed in the first section. Humanity acquired the ability to represent itself before nature and thus became capable of transforming and understanding nature in ways entirely unlike those of the past.

Then, as the American Founders declared in the Preamble to the Constitution, “We the People of the United States . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . .” Citizens of the United States today—and humanity more broadly—should, and indeed do, speak for themselves before nature as “We the Human.” Humanity addresses nature in the hope of securing the blessings of liberty for itself and its posterity; nature responds by returning a question. Confronted by one climate and ecological crisis after another, humanity must gradually recognize its own position. It must also define the giant beast, as an “extraordinary creature,” as something other than a hostile Other or a possession. Only then can we cease to define giant beasts solely by a human measure—and cease to define the human world, the nature in which we live, by a human measure alone.

References

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