We’ll make a regular headliner of it

In 1919 Theodore Dreiser published a series of short biographies of people he had known collected together in a book entitled Twelve Men. The first biography was about a young man he called Peter who like Dreiser at that time worked in newspaper and magazine publishing. Dreiser regarded Peter very highly, a polymath with an enormous zest for life who died tragically young. On one occasion Peter decided to invent a wild man just for the fun of it.

“For heaven’s sake, what’s coming now?” I sighed.

 “Oh, very well. But I have it all worked out just the same. We’re beginning to run the preliminary telegrams every three or four days—one from Ramblersville, South Jersey, let us say, another from Hohokus, twenty-five miles farther on, four or five days later. By degrees as spring comes on I’ll bring him north—right up here into Essex County—a genuine wild man, see, something fierce and terrible.

We’re giving him long hair like a bison, red eyes, fangs, big hands and feet. He’s entirely naked—or will be when he gets here. He’s eight feet tall. He kills and eats horses, dogs, cattle, pigs, chickens. He frightens men and women and children. I’m having him bound across lonely roads, look in windows at night, stampede cattle and drive tramps and peddlers out of the country. But say, wait and see. As summer comes on we’ll make a regular headliner of it. We’ll give it pages on Sunday. We’ll get the rubes to looking for him in posses, offer rewards. Maybe some one will actually capture and bring in some poor lunatic, a real wild man. You can do anything if you just stir up the natives enough.”

It worked of course. There were sightings and stories about Peter’s imaginary wild man coming in from all over the place. Eventually to round it off, he dressed himself up as the wild man of his imagination then dropped the whole thing and so it fizzled out and was soon forgotten.

Perhaps Peter's wild man is a reminder of how important credulity has always been and how much it has always been manipulated by mass media. We cannot question everything and to our enduring cost it is more socially constructive to accept rather than reject. Almost as if we are built to believe. Who is your wild man?