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Books So Bad They're Good: What is a Hoax? (date mistake rewind) [1]
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Date: 2025-04-12
It was April Fool’s of either 1987 or 1988. My then-husband and I were living in a small apartment in Malden, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. Our possessions included a somewhat cranky Mercury Lynx automobile, an Atari ST computer, far too many books for the space, and a small, paranoid, quite a bit more than cranky cat, Arwen.
As for Mr. Quatermain, look for the second diary about him next Saturday night:
So tonight I bring a rewind about hoaxes. It was intended to be the first in a year-long series about what is now called media literacy, only based on sociologist Curtis D. MacDougall’s work identifying and defining the characteristics of hoaxes. I didn’t finish the series but the first installment still holds up, and is even more valuable than ever in these parlous times.
Last week’s diary, “Allan Quatermain’s Excellent Adventures, Part I,” promised the second installment tonight, April 12th. This not only was not correct — these diaries are on a biweekly schedule and have been for several years — it also implied that either a) I was going to write Part II on the 12th and then do a new diary on April 19th or b) I was going to reset the schedule and write a diary on April 12th and then on April 26th. This is not the case; not only are the days when I could bang out a diary a week are long, long gone, the Pioneer Valley Symphony is performing Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on the 26th and I simply will not have the time or energy to write while resting up for the concert.
Arwen was in some ways a forerunner of my longest serving Double Felinoid, Diamond Girl and Gil the Wonder Cat. Like Diamond, she was tiny, imperious, and basically regarded us as her Giant Slaves who existed solely to provide her with food, affection, and a clean litterbox. And like Gil, she was possessed of a long, gloriously silky, slate gray coat and a softly twitching tail that she carried high and proud as she purred her way through life. She was an excellent mouser, too, and despite a couple of incidents involving Polar Cream Soda, early morning activities of an intimate nature that I cannot discuss in a public diary, and a tendency to hiss at strangers, she suited us just fine.
My family knew this, and despite being a terrier person from way back, my mother always made a point of asking about the cat when she called to check on us. She herself had spent her early childhood collecting neighborhood cats the way most children acquire fossils, rocks, or possibly stamps, and she had plenty of good advice on how to groom, feed, and pay due obeisance to a creature the size of a loaf of bread who was well aware that her ancestors had been worshipped as gods and expected similar treatment.
My aunt Betty...well. Betty claimed later in life to be allergic to cats, not that this seemed to cause her even a speck of discomfort when she encountered one of her brother’s barn cats. She didn’t like them much, though, possibly because of Mum’s attempt to become Little Miss Pet Collector of 1935, so other than the occasional “oh, you still have it?” comment, we didn’t really talk that much about Arwen.
This may be why I decided that Arwen would be the subject of my April Fool’s Day fun, at least when it came to Betty.
Now. I’m not normally much for April Fool’s tricks. Some of them are pretty funny — see: the Smithsonian’s 2016 attempt at breeding tribbles - but others are just lame, while still others cause otherwise sane people to lose their minds — see: WNAC’s 1980 announcement that the Blue Hills volcano had erupted. I don’t like being fooled (much), either, and am a terrible liar, so it’s not like a career in scamming the public, making informercials, or selling used cars was ever a realistic possibility.
Fooling Betty, though...oh, that would have been sweet. Not only had she repeatedly sent assorted relatives on wild goose chases (my father’s fruitless efforts to find “Mozart’s Italian Symphony”) and gotten them to believe rumors that began in her fertile brain (the sad death of character actor Burt Mustin, at least until Betty ran into him in the sock department at Kaufmann’s), she loved, loved, loved to fool co-workers, friends, and family with plausible but utterly false April Fool’s stories. The most memorable was the afternoon in the early 1950’s that my mother spent climbing all over the furniture in her apartment trying to get a good view of a non-existent fire at the county airport, but there were plenty of others.
Worst of all? It was all but impossible to fool Betty. My mother tried, assorted co-workers tried, I tried as soon as I was old enough...and zilch. Zada. Zip. No matter what we said, no matter how plausible the story, no matter how calmly told, Betty knew immediately when she was being pranked. By the time I lived in that little apartment in Malden in the mid-1980’s, pretty much everyone had given up.
That included me — at least until I tossed off a simple, throwaway comment in the middle of a conversation that night:
“Oh yeah! You remember our cat, Arwen? You won’t believe this, but she just had a litter of the cutest kittens you’ve ever seen!”
“Really?” Betty actually sounded interested, which was not usually the case when I brought up the subject of pets. “I thought you said you got her spayed last year.”
“Well, that’s what we thought, but I guess they botched it,” I said, and damn my eyes, I even shrugged. “Because she got out a couple of months ago for an hour or two, and now we have kittens. Four of them. They’re really tiny and — “
Now Betty really sounded interested. “What color are they? Can you send me pictures?”
“Sure, but I thought you didn’t like cats. Did you want one?”
“Of course not! I just want to know what they look like. Have you picked out names? What colors are they?”
“You sure you don’t want one? They’re awfully cute, and you really should have a pet. Poindexter,” the ceramic dog that was the animal she allowed in the house “could use a real companion and — “
“He’s just fine,” said Betty. “How many are boys and how many are — “
“Two of each,” I said.
“ — well, they sound very cute but I need to wash my hair.”
“I won’t keep you any longer.” I took a deep breath. “Have a good night.”
“Good — “
“And oh, by the way. April Fool’s.”
There was not a sound from the other end of the phone for a good five seconds. “April — “
I broke into the biggest grin of my life. “Gotcha!”
“April — “ Betty burst out laughing. “April Fool’s to you too!”
We spent the few minutes recovering before truly saying good night. I set down the phone and took a moment to pet Arwen (who had indeed been spayed, and had watched the whole proceedings with that “Lady Bast, those hairless monkeys are strange” expression familiar to every cat owner), then dialed the phone number I knew best in the world.
“Mum? Hi, it’s Ellid. I just got off the phone with Betty, and you’ll never guess what happened — “
The above is perhaps the one and only time I’ve ever personally managed to pull off a hoax. As I said above, I’m a poor liar, so it’s quite likely that I succeeded in persuading my aunt that my neutered cat had suddenly given birth solely because she couldn’t see me failing to suppress a grin. I also don’t really like deceiving people, which is, well, necessary if you’re going to fool someone. Life is hard enough without devoting time and effort to make someone else look silly. I have certain talents and know many things, but I am well aware that being a merry hoaxster isn’t one of them.
This may be why I’ve always been fascinated by hoaxes, the reasons we fall for them, and the man who first studied them in any depth: the late sociologist/journalist Curtis D. MacDougall.
Born in Wisconsin, educated at Ripon College and Northwestern, MacDougall was already a seasoned editor and reporter when he received his PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1933. By 1935 he’d joined the Northwestern journalism faculty, where generations of students knew him as “Dr. Mac.” Other accomplishments included a stint as director of the Illinois Writers Project, where he mentored luminaries such as Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, runs for office (he was a New Deal Democrat), and the publication of several influential textbooks that shaped the training of students at every J school in the country for the next half century.
Of all his works, though, perhaps the most significant is his 1940 work Hoaxes.
This drily fascinating little book, which seems to have been inspired by the popularity of (dare I say it?) fake news stories in the early 20th century press, draws upon MacDougall’s training as both a newspaperman and a sociologist in equal measure. The first part, which is what I’ll be discussing in my diaries, sets worth the reasons why even the most intelligent and best educated among us can and do fall for blatant and obvious fakery. The second part, which is equally interesting but somewhat dated, examines literally hundreds of examples of hoaxes that succeeded, at least for a while, then ends with an invitation for the reader to document ongoing examples of a joke that got completely out of hand.
First and foremost, though, MacDougall did what any good academic (or journalist) does at the very beginning of any analysis: he defined his term. And since I’ll be devoting a significant chunk of this year to his ground, I will adopt his definition of a hoax: a deliberately constructed untruth made to masquerade as truth.
Let me repeat that for the peanut gallery, since I’m going to be referring to it a lot in future diaries:
A hoax is a deliberately constructed untruth made to masquerade as truth.
Now. This definition may seem somewhat broad, since it can (and does) encompass everything from my little harmless April Fool’s joke on my aunt to political dirty tricks like the infamous “John McCain has a black child by a woman who is not his wife” whispering campaign that circulated through the Carolinas just before the 2000 Republican primaries. However, think about it. My aunt, who absolutely should have known better than to believe that my spayed cat had just expelled a quartet of Miracle Kittens, demanded to know the non-existent beastlets’ color, gender, and names within thirty seconds of me opening my mouth. How is this different from otherwise ordinary people deciding that John McCain was an evil adulterous super secret race-mixer despite his official biography including the story of how he and his wife came to adopt their Bengali daughter, Bridget, except in degree?
MacDougall began his discussion with one of the greatest pieces of fake news of the day: a supposed wedding announcement from the Fountain Inn Tribune, a folksy little newspaper from South Carolina. The editor, Robert Quillen, was well known for writing jokesy little pieces that poked gentle fun at the foibles of small town life, which led MacDougall to wonder why the following was ever taken seriously, let alone became a national sensation in January of 1930:
Mr. Robert Chetway and Miss Alice Broadkin were married at noon Monday at the home of the bride's parents, Mr. and Mrs. P. D. Broadkin, Rev. M, L. Gassoway officiating. The groom is a popular young bum who hasn't done a lick of work since he got shipped in the middle of his junior year at college. He manages to dress well and keep a supply of spending money because his dad is a softhearted old fool who takes up his bad checks instead of letting him go to jail where he belongs. The bride is a skinny, fast little idiot who has been kissed and handled by every boy in town since she was 12 years old. She paints like a Sioux Indian, sucks cigarettes in secret, and drinks mean corn liquor when she is out joyriding in her dad's car at night. She doesn't know how to cook, sew or keep house. The house was newly plastered for the wedding and the exterior newly painted, thus appropriately carrying out the decorative scheme, for the groom was newly plastered and the bride newly painted. The groom wore a rented dinner suit over athletic underwear of imitation silk. His pants were held up by pale green suspenders. His Number Eight patent leather shoes matched his state in tightness and harmonized nicely with the axle-grease polish of his hair. In addition to his jag he carried a pocketknife, a bunch of keys, a dun for the ring, and his usual look of imbecility. The bride wore some sort of white thing that left most of her legs sticking out at one end and the bony upper end sticking out at the other. The young people will make, their home with the bride's parents - which means they will sponge on the old man until he dies and then she will take in washing. The happy pair anticipate a blessed event in about five months. Postscript: This may be the last issue of The Tribune but my life ambition has been to write up one wedding and tell the unvarnished truth. Now that it is done, death can have no sting.
Needless to say, there was no Mr. Chetway, no Miss Broadkin, no Rev. Gassoway, and of course no blessed event on tap for June. Quillen had written a trifling bit of humor, just as he had so many times before, and was at a loss as to why something so silly, and so blatantly fake, was instantly accepted as real by readers and editors across the United States. As Curtis MacDougall put it, he was “concerned with why such whoppers [are] accepted as factual,” since
Human events and thought seem to have been determined as much by what is untrue as what is true, and it is important to dip deep into the well of human credulity and find what is at the bottom.
Given the decade that had just passed when Dr. Mac wrote these words, and the war that had erupted in large part due to deliberately constructed falsehoods that were accepted without question by literally millions of educated, intelligent, cultured people, it’s easy to see why he was curious. And despite the passage of eighty-plus years since the publication of those words, it’s more important than ever to see if we can figure out why it’s so easy to fall for even the most ridiculous hoax (“Melania Trump/Nancy Pelosi/Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh/My Aunt Matilda has a body double, just look at her/his/their teeth/skin/hairstyle/wrinkles/random grimace, it’s all on YouTube/XYZ123&&&& blog!”), and how our tendency to do so can and does lead to everything from broken marriages to mass assaults on the seat of our government.
I can’t promise a definitive question to this question, any more than Curtis MacDougall did in 1940. But it’s certainly worth a try.
One more thing: the ticket to the time-honored ceremony of washing the lions at the Tower of London? Not only is it a blatant hoax since the only royal animals at the Tower in Victorian times were the famous ravens (which were and are not lions unless their current keeper is a master geneticist named “Dr. Moreau”), it’s not even original. That dubious honor belongs to the 1698 prankster who persuaded several hundred curious Londoners to show up at the White Gate to see the royal lions get their annual bath in the moat...and never mind that there was no White Gate, nor were the lions anywhere near the moat. That hasn’t prevented puckish types from “reviving the custom” periodically over the last three hundred years, including the mid-Victorian attempt above.
Nor has it stopped the British press from poking fun at the Tower itself. Why, just two years ago they reported that the Tower moat would be transformed into an enormous ball pit so the good people of London could romp, play, and otherwise disport themselves outside Her Majesty’s oldest and most storied residence….
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Have you ever fallen for a hoax? Attempted to wash the Queen’s lions? Played an April Fool’s prank? Would you admit it if you had? The Last Homely Shack is surrounded by snow this cold Saturday night, but hop on the GIANT SNOW SCOOT O’DOOM, knock back your hot beverage of choice, and share….
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