Fear of Monsters: How America Became a Home of Titans

This essay was a prize-winning entry for the Rags Drum 2021 Pre-Festival.

Introduction: Humans and Giant Beasts, Humans and the Fear of Beasts

Jùshòu, 惧兽—“Fear of Monster,” as it is also called—names the fear humans and beasts inspire in one another. It is a pun on the identically pronounced 巨兽, “giant beast.” This reciprocal fear runs through creative work across many media. From folk legends to the flickering screen, immense, grotesquely shaped, all but uncontrollable creatures often stand at the center of the story. And one home of these titans is undoubtedly America, the center of the culture industry. This essay examines how giant creatures have been understood and constructed in American history, exploring the place of “extraordinary” creatures in American culture and their part in shaping it.

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 encountering a complex ecosystem. This all-encompassing system is “intelligent, irrational, everlasting, isolated from the world”; its main body is the planet’s only living organism: the vegetation covering its entire surface.¹ The plants fear the dangerous explorers just as the dangerous explorers fear the plants. The plants fear adventurers capable of dominating and changing them—adventurers who also represent colonial power in its traditional sense. Each individual adventurer, meanwhile, fears becoming a number in the expedition’s casualty count.

Osden, a scientist on the team, can sense this fear clearly thanks to his special powers. He says: “I think I can feel their roots, in the ground beneath my feet, buried deep below … I can feel their fear … They’re afraid of me, an alien creature, but I can’t help sending that fear back to them.” Le Guin draws on Andrew Marvell’s verse to name this “vegetable fear.” Extend this intelligent but irrational ecosphere to the global ecosystem—to the “nature” humans inhabit—and we have an apt central subject for the work’s environmental concerns. In Bentham’s view, what distinguishes a “thing” from an actor possessing rights and interests is sentience: that is, what we so often discuss as animals’ “intelligence.”² Le Guin extends animal intelligence to the entire ecosphere. Viewed in terms of actual environments and history, “beasts” lend themselves all the more readily to this inference, since they interact more extensively with humans.

From remote antiquity to the recent past, humans feared the herds of beasts racing across the wilderness. But once the land beneath our feet became a globe—once the “world” seen at the largest scale became a sphere we could perceive and touch—the actual herds had long since retreated. The distinctive impression left by nonhuman creatures, however, combined with other images to exert its power in new media. The ferocious dragons and sea monsters of the classics, histories, philosophical writings, and literary collections found new elements to join with in the modern era. Consider how a protagonist of The Monkey Wrench Gang describes the multinational corporation: “A global sea monster: suckers and tentacles, a gaping parrot’s beak, but a computer data center for a brain and circulating capital for blood.”³ Such cultural products continually renew themselves through the issues of their age, sustaining their influence within the cultural industries. We still need, then, to look back and examine the cultural images of “giant beasts” and “wild beasts” in historical perspective. And that discussion cannot leave out America, the center of the culture industry.

II. Studying Giant Beasts in Early America: The Claverack Giant

Huge though he is, Behemoth is gentle;
Calm in temper, undisturbed;
Safe and at ease, a spirit in the waves,
He steps ashore and mingles among men.
—After Edward Young, 1719⁴

With this poem of life alongside a giant beast to lead us, we must insist that America did indeed live alongside giant beasts. This is indisputable—and it becomes clearer if we replace the subject of that sentence with “the land called America.” In the summer of 1705, near Claverack Manor in the Hudson River valley, a tenant farmer found a fist-sized tooth on the riverbank. It weighed almost five pounds. Because it resembled a human canine tooth, this relic was immediately identified as “the tooth of a human giant.”

After the Irish archbishop James Ussher successfully “calculated” in 1650 that the birth of the earth corresponded exactly to the biblical account, a particular climate of discussion prevailed: properly interpreted, science would walk alongside theology, and the Bible would explain human history precisely. Likewise, in the early eighteenth century, religious fervor ran high among Christians in the thirteen colonies. It was the very foundation of many Massachusetts communities—the “Bible commonwealths.” The settler intellectuals able to participate in social and cultural debate—most of them clergymen—hoped and longed for some special sign that would prove the extraordinary nature of the land beneath their feet. In these circumstances, religious belief and scientific explanation fitted readily together, and so the story of the Claverack giant began. Before proceeding, we must also remember that these clergymen maintained an ardent commitment to enlightenment and reason: “The light of reason is God’s work; the law of reason is God’s voice.”⁵

As excavation of the Claverack giant’s remains continued in the colonies, its identity as an immense, unparalleled giant provoked heated debate among intellectuals. They argued from different positions, yet in practice arrived at the same destination. Clergymen who had crossed to the New World yearned to prove the distinctiveness of the thirteen colonies, and indeed of the whole American continent, as a larger “Bible commonwealth.” They therefore cited the Claverack giant as a natural wonder of the New World. Then let the Claverack giant be compared with the dragon of Northumberland! Europe’s celebrated wonders were European miracles, manifestations of God’s miraculous power. As a wonder, Claverack’s unprecedented giant should likewise inspire awe, competing with the giants of the Bible, the Aeneid, Guy of Warwick, and Geography Anatomiz’d.

The search for America’s incomparable natural wonders concealed a contradiction some intellectuals overlooked. The clergymen were proud that the thirteen colonies had the honor of possessing such a giant’s bones, yet also compared the giant to the pagan giants Moses killed in Galilee.⁶ In other words, the giant’s existence proved Christ’s divine power, while defeating the giant took nothing from Christ’s crown of glory. The underlying logic here was colonial. In this context, the colonists of the thirteen colonies, who saw themselves as possessors of the giant, believed they would overcome the dangers of conquering the wilderness, just as in Exodus. Those dangers were chiefly heathens: besides giants, naturally, there were Indians, or the Indians’ gods—those things that were at once Indians and giants. The contradiction thus posed no dilemma for the argument.

Athanasius Kircher, giant-size comparison, from Mundus subterraneus, vol. II, p. 59. The Latin heading reads: “Skeleton of a giant found on Mount Erice near Trapani, according to Boccaccio’s testimony, 200 cubits tall.” The four smaller figures, left to right, are labeled “ordinary man,” “Goliath,” “Swiss giant,” and “Mauritanian giant.” The enormous figure depicts a reported size, not a measurement Kircher accepts: the surrounding text disputes such extravagant heights.

Meanwhile, closer study of the giant’s bones led members of the Royal Society to try another way of looking at the enormous remains identified as a “giant.” Taking a more scientific and more logical approach, Dr. John Woodward was considering a different destiny 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 demonstrate. The flood Noah endured had created a wilderness, and in a wilderness science and industry were necessary for human survival. Investigating the fossils buried there demonstrated the validity of divine creation.

Woodward dismissed the rumors of giants and advanced a view of his own: the bones unearthed at Claverack were the remnants of some sea monster. They should therefore be called not a “giant” but the American incognitum—the unknown American creature.⁷ The chaos of the post-Flood world Noah encountered furnished the basis for Woodward’s theory of “progress” from a savage pagan age to a civilized Christian one. This very idea became the foundation of the Founding Fathers’ later secularized Enlightenment thinking. Benjamin Franklin and the other American founders grew up with the legend of the American incognitum. Colonial clergymen, not writings from Paris, first shaped the theories through which they understood the world.

III. “We Possess Giant Beasts”: The American Spirit and Its Giant-Beast Inheritance

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, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query VI

While the American colonies were struggling westward through the wilderness, Russian expansion eastward revealed an important fact: “Russia is the home of elephants.” Relatively complete mammoth remains had been excavated in Siberia. Unlike the formula that would later become dogma through repeated instruction, however, the statement should properly have been “Siberia is the home of elephants.” What makes the theory laughable is that it uses a category less than a thousand years old to explain another measured in millennia: Russia as a national concept arose long after mammoths roamed Siberia. Yet the same logic is the subject of this essay from beginning to end. America, too, is the home of giant beasts; during the War of Independence, America needed to become the home of giant beasts. Above all, America needed to become the home of elephants.

Mammoth remains excavated in Siberia in the early eighteenth century gradually lifted the veil from the American incognitum. Colonial intellectuals came to understand that these were not the remains of a giant but of an equally enormous and ferocious quadruped. Yet the fact that the creature was a beast, not a human, could still confirm the earlier logic. Whatever else it was, the American incognitum seemed to be a survivor of the Flood. This did nothing to disturb the position championed by Dr. Woodward—a position soon put to the test in the subsequent War of Independence.

As understanding of the American incognitum deepened, early natural-history discussions analyzed its excavated lower jaw. Colonial inhabitants increasingly regarded it as a huge, ferocious carnivore: how else could one explain such an animal’s sharp fangs and claws? The fact that this carnivore existed, or had existed, anchored America’s identity as a wilderness. It also conferred a special distinction on the thirteen colonies, the future United States, which possessed it. It both represented America’s indisputable sovereignty over the wilderness and tied the giant beast’s existence to what sustained the American nation.

Why? Because before and after the War of Independence, a loud and insistent argument held that America was a degenerate land—and this was precisely because science had begun using comparative biological methods. “Every living creature in America is smaller; even the human spirit is baser and more abject.” Such claims did find partial confirmation in certain New World creatures. Generalizing from these, the Old World justified its superiority to the New, as an encyclopedia of the time put it: “The inhabitants of the New World inevitably live on diseased land.”⁸ Such a negative founding myth was intolerable to a newly created nation. Yet America was indeed a country without a history of its own. As a colony, it lacked ancient sanctuaries and monuments, a fact its classically educated founders could not accept. At the same time, the racial supremacism embedded in their education made it impossible for them to justify including Indigenous peoples in their own history. A naturalist possessing bones of the American incognitum happened to visit Philadelphia while the assembly was in session, opening the way to a new founding myth. Jefferson quickly developed an interest in matters concerning elephants and agreed that the American incognitum was an elephant-like carnivorous quadruped. Ferocious, enormous, without rival: the American incognitum rapidly became famous in Paris during Jefferson’s later service there as minister to France, leaving an indelible mark.

Three views each of an elephant jaw (left: II, IV, VI, from top to bottom) and the American incognitum jaw, now identified as mastodon (right: I, III, V). Plate IV accompanying William Hunter’s 1768 paper; the heading identifies Philosophical Transactions, vol. 58, p. 43. The lower-left signature credits Riemsdyk as draughtsman (“del.”). See the Linda Hall Library’s identification and reproduction.

As a result, America truly became “the home of elephants.” On this basis, neither the “Old World” nor the “New World” could claim superiority over the other. This was fundamental to the case for colonial independence, and indeed for America’s existence. God, nature, and nation converged here. This was the true meaning of the Claverack fossils: “Here is the survivor of the Great Flood, the foundation of empire.”⁸ Because the New World was not inherently inferior to the Old, the Old World had no inherent right to rule it. And the thirteen colonies, the future United States, possessed the grounds for that argument, fossil remains included. Let us repeat the point of our discussion of fossils: the flood Noah endured created a wilderness—and through cultural production, that wilderness was assigned to America.

Confronted with this animal’s remains, the Founding Fathers, Jefferson among them, reached a broad conclusion from debates stretching from learned Calvinist clergymen to Enlightenment philosophers: they were indeed a dominant race, bringing civilization to savages and, more importantly, to savage nature. The jaw of the American incognitum confirmed the savagery of prehistoric nature and became linked to their own spirit of exploration of the natural world—the same spirit that would later become imperial ambition. Even when the American incognitum was eventually shown to be merely a subspecies of mammoth, this could not alter the significance of its having served as an American founding myth.⁹ And that founding myth corresponded in turn to the giant primate that twentieth-century America “possessed” on screen.

IV. “It’s Alive!”: The Screen and the Giant Beast Reborn

“Last week’s King Kong revealed at least one of our national traits. As foreigners say of us: our obsession with hundred-story skyscrapers, our taste for the outsized in myth and folklore, and our pride in our own achievements—there is simply no other way to describe this trait … We are now a people both too civilized and not civilized enough.”
—After William Troy, 1933¹⁰

King Kong at the Radio City RKO Roxy. The marquee advertises “King Kong—Supreme Picture Thrill” and promises the “Greatest Entertainment”; the smaller lettering is indistinct. The Chinese caption names Radio City Music Hall, but the sign identifies the RKO Roxy, a different theater; both showed the film.

King Kong arrived like a thunderclap out of a clear sky, drawing a public response from its very premiere. Audiences flocked to see this “jungle film” in the jungle of steel and concrete that was the real New York. After watching and studying films including Dracula, the outstanding director Merian C. Cooper set out to bring an immense figure to his own screen: a dangerous giant primate and, above all, a giant beast. This was an unprecedented act of cultural production. Dracula and his friends and relations were terrifying; the sailors aboard the Potemkin were seething with passion. But what these screen images had not achieved was a full use of sets and models to create something that corresponded to the myths of the past and would run through America’s subsequent production of giant-beast films. In King Kong, that something was the primate of Skull Island: Kong himself.

Why does Kong share the characteristics of his giant-beast predecessors? And what makes Kong distinctive as a giant primate? We need to examine the category “jungle film” and understand what is essential to it. Although King Kong was often regarded as a “horror film” in the 1930s, it was in fact compared with the travel documentaries and adventure films then enjoying enormous popularity. Central to both were ethnography and encounters with the “other” in foreign lands. In this sense, the camera replaced the rifle in the explorer’s hands. Cultural workers joined the ranks of explorers, completing in comfortable, safe offices and studios the travel narratives that had once cost explorers such labor and sacrifice. King Kong likewise possesses these characteristics. Carl Denham’s dual identity as director and explorer alone says it all. He hopes to exhibit Kong as a natural-history attraction and also to profit by filming him: there is the logic.

Yet King Kong is more than a jungle-adventure film. Its counterparts, offering little beyond a view of foreign lands and introducing no new elements, were gradually fading from the scene. In 1932, disappointed journalists wrote: “Those animal shows will soon be phased out.”¹¹ Cooper, however, skillfully combined several elements with this template. He introduced, for example, a romance centered on a hero rescuing a beautiful woman. The love story of Ann Darrow and Jack Driscoll became the main narrative thread, overcoming the monotony of the adventure material, while a varied publicity campaign drew audiences in. Watching it, they could feel the film’s underlying tenor directly: the adventure of the camera/gun, a many-sided text jointly written by photographer/explorer.

Kong is just such a creature, answering to several themes at once. Director Carl Denham brings the actress Ann Darrow to an unknown place for the very purpose of conducting a kind of transaction with Kong, an unknown animal and also an unknown primate—a transaction whose object is a woman. Contact with the local Indigenous people is, in fact, a rehearsal for contact with Kong. The Indigenous people/Kong play the part of aggressors who seize a woman, yet Denham has brought this about by deliberately using Ann Darrow as bait. Kong soon engages with the male explorers and, in the immediate wake of their heroic deeds, becomes a victim of natural history.

Why a victim? This means more than Kong’s eventual death in New York as a creature from a foreign land. We must also point out that, in the early twentieth century, natural history often dealt with both humans and animals by rather cruel means. Protecting animals often required hunting the very animals to be protected and turning them into specimens. Anthropological research, meanwhile, intersected with colonialism, creating numerous moral dilemmas. Interaction with Kong is at once interaction with an animal and interaction with a human. This composite of human and animal, the giant primate, consequently faces a double danger—one that ultimately imperils his life.

Yet the sequence that finally makes Kong unforgettable takes place somewhere he has never set foot before: New York. Or rather, New York is the final stage on which Kong completes his narrative. Here his life is threatened, but he also follows a rudimentary evolutionary logic, moving from beast to primate. After the 1930s, images of Kong rampaging through New York have often been read alongside images of boxers. Like their metaphorical counterpart, boxers became a focus of debates over race, class, and nation. In New York, Kong destroys the structures of civilization like a fighter, not a beast; the beast’s passion now becomes an adjective describing that fighter. On the one hand, his destruction of trains and climbing of buildings appear aimless, yet follow the narrative logic Cooper has laid out for him: he moves toward the stage of his own destruction, the Empire State Building. At the same time, the battle overturns New York from below. Kong is thus both obedient to the narrative and rebellious against it. He can become a popular myth precisely because, at the end of his life, he fights like a titan—in both the literal and the figurative senses.

And Kong, the creator of this popular myth, finally meets his own destruction. He reaches his stage and fights the airplanes atop the Empire State Building. Even in Cooper’s King Kong, the giant beast is no longer merely a beast. Ann Darrow is finally set down, while Kong struggles futilely against the planes. It is worth noting that the directors, Cooper and Schoedsack, themselves played the pilot and machine gunner aboard a plane, completing the camera/gun narrative described above. The director appears not once but twice; the narrative ends not once but twice. First, Cooper’s gunfire completes a technological conquest of the giant beast, an immortal epic with a perfect ending. Then the director Carl Denham appears at the scene in a posture of regret, mourning the giant beast—or the end of his own effort to write an ethnography. Denham says: “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.” Following this display of America’s latest technological power, Denham’s seemingly affected declaration puts the finishing touch on the film as a canonical text: romantic ethnographic ambition comes with intense aggression; acknowledgment and disavowal constitute America’s giant-beast myth.

On screen, Kong moves from an imagined jungle of trees to an imagined jungle of steel. Through the spectacle of Kong, the American public acquires a myth of its own: a myth of possessing knowledge and commanding its own history, structured like the myth of the American incognitum. This myth arises from the giant beast, develops through the giant beast, and ultimately returns to the giant beast.

Conclusion: Giant Beasts, Fear of Monsters—The World of “We the Human”

Humans once feared beasts. Do humans still fear beasts? From the texts discussed above, at least one thing is certain: humans still need beasts to exist. Just as an adventurer needs his trophies and a scholar needs his writings, humans need giant beasts to anchor and confirm their own position. Giant beasts will therefore continue to perform this role of “being needed by humans” across many media and material forms. In other words, the giant beast has become something humans create to serve humans. Once an empire’s founding myth, it has now become an anchor for confirming our identity and our difference from others. This logic connects directly with the relationship between nature and humans discussed in the first section. Humans have acquired the ability to represent themselves before nature and can thus transform and understand nature in ways entirely different from those previously known.

As America’s Founding Fathers declared in the preamble to the Constitution, “We the People of the United States … secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity …” Today’s citizens of the United States—and indeed humanity—should speak for themselves before nature as “We the Human,” and in fact already do. Humanity makes this declaration before nature in the hope of securing the blessings of liberty for itself and its descendants. Nature gives something back, but also answers with a question. Faced with one climate and ecological crisis after another, humans should gradually come to recognize their own position. They should also find definitions of giant beasts, those “extraordinary creatures,” beyond the hostile other and property in their hands. And then we should no longer define giant beasts solely by human measures. Nor should we define humanity’s world—the nature we inhabit—solely by human measures.

References

1. Sayre, Gordon M. Review of Paul Semonin, American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity. The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 58, no. 2 (2001): 555–58. Review.

2. Godfrey, Linda S. Mythical Creatures. Mysteries, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena series. Chelsea House, 2010 as cited; the publisher’s catalogue lists the hardcover as 2009.

3. Godfrey, Linda S. American Monsters: A History of Monster Lore, Legends, and Sightings in America. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2014.

4. Vaughan, F. Richard. Review of Keith Thomson, The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America. Montana: The Magazine of Western History 59, no. 2 (2009): 80, 82.

5. Rothschild, Thomas. Review of Cynthia Erb, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture (1998). MEDIENwissenschaft: Rezensionen | Reviews 16, no. 4 (1999): 452–53. In German. Review.

6. Riquet, Johannes. “Killing King Kong: The Camera at the Borders of the Tropical Island, 1767–1937.” Nordlit 31 (2014): 133–49. Article.

7. Heise, Ursula K. 地方意识与星球意识：环境想象中的全球 [Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global]. Translated by Li Guicang and colleagues. China Social Sciences Press, 2015. Chinese edition.

8. Merchant, Carolyn. 自然之死：妇女、生态和科学革命 [The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution]. Translated by Wu Guosheng, Wu Xiaoying, Cao Nanyan, and Ye Chuang. Jilin People’s Press, 1999. Chinese edition.

9. Regan, Tom, and Peter Singer, eds. 动物权利与人类义务 [Animal Rights and Human Obligations]. Translated by Zeng Jianping and Dai Feng. Peking University Press, 2010. Chinese edition.

Text by 哲哥 (Zhege). English translation credited to 甚谁bot. Text licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Image rights are separate; the source supplies no separate image licenses or photographic credits.