An American Circus of Skulls: Paul Stob on Phrenology, the P.T. Barnum of Pseudosciences

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Earlier this month, we did a show with the historian Michael Blanding on, one of the wealthiest Christian nationalist families in America, the Greens, who founded Hobby Lobby, the, do-it-yourself store. He has a new book out, The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby. And these Greens, they're worth about $14 billion, are very odd. They've invested massively in all sorts of things, including the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, very controversial museum. I think one of the things that strikes me about the wealthy in America is that they tend to be somewhat odd, and we are talking about another group of rather odd wealthy Americans today, a nineteenth century family called the Fowlers. This family owned a company called Fowler and Wells, and they were supporters of a science or a pseudoscience called phrenology. And we have another historian on the show, Paul Stob, who has a new book out. It's called Empire of Skulls, all about the Fowlers, the phrenologists from New York. And John— not John. Paul is joining us from Nashville, Tennessee where he teaches at Vanderbilt. Paul, congratulations on the book. How odd were these Fowlers? Are they particularly odd characters, or can we explain them in the oddity of mid-nineteenth century America?

00:02:15 Paul Stob: You can definitely explain them in terms of sort of the oddities of mid-nineteenth century America. But even for that age, they were, quirky to say the least. They were interested in sort of creating revolutions, even utopias, and they saw phrenology as one way of doing it. It's, it's three siblings when we talk about the Fowler family and phrenology at the time. Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte Fowler. And by far, the most sort of eccentric of the group was the oldest brother, Orson, who, was really the lead, force behind phrenology in America, and also started a number of other, revolutions as he saw them at the time.

00:02:59 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe then, Orson Fowler is the David Green of the nineteenth century America. So tell me, Paul, about this pseudoscience of phrenology. Of course, it was taken as a science up until about the middle of the nineteenth century. What was it? What does it mean phrenology?

00:03:20 Paul Stob: So phrenology literally means discourse of the mind. And at the time, in the early to middle nineteenth century, it had sort of two foundations to it. The first belief that phrenologists held were that different parts of the brain do different things. They perform different functions and have different jobs. And that's actually true. We know that today. At the time, that wasn't very clear to a lot of people. They thought the brain a lot of people thought the brain was just a sort of unified mass that carried out one thing and then did another. But the Fowlers, and other phrenologists were at the forefront of saying, actually, the brain, is doing many different things at many different times, and different parts of the brain are carrying out these different operations. So that's the first sort of basis of it. The second basis of it is basically that the bumps and shapes and masses and divots on your head, the shape of your skull, mirror those on your brain. And by touching and feeling those, we can actually see and in effect feel what's part of your brain underneath. And that way we can feel which of your organs, these different parts of the brain, are big or small and which ones are sort of really controlling the brain and performing these different functions. And that's just not true. We know that, beyond—

00:04:38 Andrew Keen: I mean, it's really bizarre. Your, your book got a nice review in the New York Times, and its headline was, “Was phrenology real? Ask the lump on your forehead,” and The Wall Street Journal asked a similar sort of question. How bizarre is it? I mean, it seems particularly bizarre now looking back, Paul. But even for early-to-mid-nineteenth century scientists, was this considered bizarre, or were there serious scientists who investigated it, who took it seriously as a science?

00:05:12 Paul Stob: There were a number of scientists that took it seriously as a science. Many of them came to the conclusion, rightly, we now know, that the phrenologists were really good at counting evidence that was supportive of their theories and really good at discarding evidence that was not supportive of it. So they weren't doing the best job collecting the most, you know, balance of evidence on the whole. But for a lot of people, they took it seriously, and they understood it as a potential step towards a proper understanding of the brain. And they had, they were cautiously optimistic about what the future of phrenology and our understanding of the mind could be. It turns out this was not, you know, the right way to go in a lot of different ways, but it also turns out that there was some truth underlying basic ideas about different functions of the brain doing different things. But among scientists, particularly in Europe, but also in the United States, phrenology was interesting to a lot of people and then, sort of quickly fell by the wayside as a viable, option for scientists.

00:06:18 Andrew Keen: I wonder what Charles Darwin thought of him.

00:06:20 Paul Stob: Darwin was well ahead of the game by the time he, you know, publishes On the Origin of the Species and, understood the big problems with what a lot of the phrenologists, were saying at the time for sure.

00:06:31 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's striking that Darwin's great advances in science should be at the same time as this—

00:06:32 Paul Stob: Yeah. Absolutely.

00:06:38 Andrew Keen: Pseudoscience. Is it fair to call it, Apollo [unclear] pseudoscience, or is that maybe even slightly complimentary?

00:06:46 Paul Stob: I would call it, when I write about it in the book, I write about it as a science. And, I do so for a couple of different reasons. One, that's how they thought about it at the time. They thought about it as a legitimate science. And in fact, scientifically speaking, it was more accurate than a lot of other sciences at the time. So, in that sense, the phrenologists were not that far off comparatively, obviously, to what a lot of other people were thinking and doing at the time. I also am less interested in calling it a pseudoscience because this is a book not about the scientific accuracy of phrenology. We know it's inaccurate. We know it's not true. This is about the way it functioned in its historical moment and the way it really spreads across the nation and gets lots of people excited by it, including some of the most prominent reformers of the era, and they called it a science. They embraced it as a science, not as a pseudoscience. Right? Pseudoscience, nobody uses that to describe their own beliefs. That's what people use to denigrate it. So because my project is really trying to get at it back in its historical moment, I always talk about it as a science.

00:07:55 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I have to admit, when I first heard about the book, I thought this is interesting, and I wonder how it connects with eugenics and, again, the pseudosciences that justified one kind of—

00:07:55 Paul Stob: Yeah.

00:08:06 Andrew Keen: Racism or another. But one of the interesting things, that you know, in Empire of Skulls, is that a lot of nineteenth century progressives, and the figures within prominent figures within the antislavery movement, Susan Anthony, John Brown, Walt Whitman, were all infected, if that's the right word, with some sort of faith in phrenology. So it doesn't break down politically into a kind of left and right and reactionary and doesn't necessarily get used by racists, particularly given the America of the mid-nineteenth century, which, obviously, was a time shaped in most ways by theories of race.

00:08:52 Paul Stob: That's right. I mean, we have to remember that this time period, the time period I'm dealing with in the book, right, the eighteen thirties to the eighteen sixties, basically, is known as the era of reform. And it's known as the era of reform because we've survived the founding of the nation. We think the nation will survive. There are questions about it, but we also know that, the nation needs to get a lot better than it is currently. We need to do more to get this nation on track. And so a lot of different groups sit down and say, what can we do, and what does this nation need to do to become a better version of itself? And that means things like abolishing slavery, giving women equal rights. You know, there's dietary reforms. There's prison reforms. There's education reforms. All of these reform movements, practically down to a single one, the leaders of them are supporters of phrenology. In fact, in a lot of ways, phrenology becomes the kind of intellectual glue of the era of reform, and it's for one big reason, and that reason is improvement. Phrenology, improvement. Self-improvement.

00:09:55 Andrew Keen: And social improvement, I guess.

00:09:57 Paul Stob: And social improvement. No matter where you start in life, you can get better. You can improve yourself. So even if you start life in chains, even if you're enslaved, you can actually turn yourself into, a greater mind, a greater thinker. Right? You need to be freed from your chains, in fact, because you need to be given the opportunity to improve yourself and to show what you can really become.

00:10:19 Andrew Keen: So there's a plasticity then to this theory. Again, thinking about the title of your book, Empire of Skulls, and this idea of phrenology. We're not just born with natures according to the phrenologist. It doesn't just depend on the shape or the size of our skull. We can, so to speak, reshape ourselves. Is that— was that one of the assumptions of the phrenologist?

00:10:46 Paul Stob: That is absolutely one of the assumptions, especially in the United States. It was different in Europe where phrenology actually gets its origins, and the leading phrenologists there were much more convinced that you are born with a certain mental makeup and that remains your makeup throughout the rest of your life. In the United States, particularly with the Fowler family, it— phrenology gets sort of wound up and bound up with, sort of the democratic ethos of the era, and they make it and they fundamentally believe you have the power to change the shape of your head based on the ways you think and the ways you refrain from thinking. The best analogy is really like, exercising and curling a bicep. Right? So you get a dumbbell, and you lift the dumbbell, and it tears the muscle of your bicep, and then it repairs and it gets bigger. They thought the very same thing would happen on your brain. You exercise one part of your brain and literally, it will deposit new gray matter over that spot, and it will push out on that, portion of your head and even push out a little bit on your skull, so that you are able to sort of track people's mental development over the course of their life.

00:11:52 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's astonishing. I think on the one hand, it'd probably be rather unfair to compare the Fowlers to the Greens who are very conservative, very religious. But even ex— talking about this now, did they have any empirical evidence that people's bumps on their skull would change if they, so to speak, exercise? Was this a mental kind of exercise, presumably, not a physical kind?

00:12:17 Paul Stob: Yeah. It was a mental exercise for sure. And they believe they had tons of evidence to support this. Now looking back, we can see that they didn't because it's not possible to do this. But they would talk about how they would track people throughout their life, and sort of, see the shape of their head change. They would often point to portraits or, etchings or busts of famous Americans. And you'd have somebody who was younger and their head was shaped like this, and then they were older and their head had a different shape because of the kind of mental exercises they did. They also would do it a lot to kids, and they would explain to parents, you know, bring your kids in for a phrenology exam. We'll feel their head, and we'll tell you where they have to go in life, what direction they have to go in terms of their studies and in terms of their activities and their social life. And they would say then, you know, a few years goes by, they feel the kid's head again, and it was different. It had grown in the ways that they indicated it should grow, and that to them was just concrete evidence to support their theory.

00:13:17 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's very bizarre. I wonder what a later Viennese scientist, Freud, would have thought of all this. What kind of, sexual implications are there on this? I mean, I guess they're checking the head rather than other parts of the body, but it's just also odd, Paul. What's your explanation? I mean, is there a Freudian explanation, a psychological one, a physiological one?

00:13:42 Paul Stob: There's really a research-based explanation in terms of being able to locate the evidence that you want to support your theory. But this is— we gotta remember, this is an era where everybody thought not just the Fowlers. Right? But so many people thought we could create a kind of heaven on earth. If we have the right theory, if we have the right understanding of the mind, if we have the right sort of social and economic and political organization, we can create a utopia. That's why we have this era of all these sort of utopian experiments. The Fowlers believed wholeheartedly that phrenology was the intellectual basis of creating that kind of utopia. So other utopians at the time would look to what the Fowlers were doing, and they would support it. It really gets sort of bound up and in a lot of ways distorted with this idea of hope, and what the Fowlers were trying to do.

00:14:31 Andrew Keen: And so does it cross over with those Upstate New York utopian communities, or were they a bit later in the nineteenth century?

00:14:39 Paul Stob: Nope. It absolutely crosses over with them. Robert Owen and the Owenites were very, very interested in phrenology. The Fowlers go around and they tour, different cities and towns all across, right, from the largest metropolises to the smallest ones. They're giving lectures. They're giving hands-on demonstrations. They're giving instruction to people, and they make stops at a lot of these utopian communities. And it is inspiring and exciting to these people who wanna get together and change the world and create this heaven on earth.

00:15:09 Andrew Keen: And were there skeptics, as I mentioned? Whitman, Anthony, Brown were all sympathetic to phrenology or at least open to its theory. Were there other, perhaps, more hard, excuse me, the pun here, more hard-headed types on the left or the right who just said this is complete nonsense.

00:15:30 Paul Stob: I'll give you an example of two of them who represent sort of different sides of a spectrum. The first one, the best sort of scientific critic of phrenology, is Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the great man of letters and physician of the nineteenth century, who sort of knew right away that phrenology was, just a bad way of trying to get at the brain. And in fact, the analogy that, Holmes uses is, you can just as easily, tell what's on the inside of a safe by feeling the knob on the outside as understand the brain by feeling—

00:15:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. That's a brain by a brain. [unclear]

00:16:05 Paul Stob: It's great. Right? So Holmes— and in fact, Holmes is the one who coined the term pseudoscience, and he coined it as a way of describing the phrenologists. And so it really— this idea of pseudoscience is born of this era, and it's born of Holmes' critique of the Fowlers and other phrenologists at the time. The other example of somebody who was a wonderful critic of phrenology is, Mark Twain. So in, the early eighteen seventies, Twain is in London. And in fact, one of the Fowler brothers had moved to London at the time to sort of try to recreate what they had done in America. And Twain goes into, his shop, and he gets a head exam. And the only evidence we have of this is what Twain himself leaves behind, so we have to take it with a little grain of salt. But, basically, Twain says, the first time I go in there, I hide my identity. I don't tell, Lorenzo Fowler, this is the middle brother. I don't tell him who I am. I just sit there for a reading, and he describes Lorenzo as being incredibly, apathetic, uninterested. And in fact, he says, the organ of mirthfulness, which is the organ of humor on the head according to phrenologists, was incredibly low. There was sort of a divot there according to, Twain. Three months later, Twain goes back. And this time, he steps proudly into the phrenological depot there in London, and he hands Lorenzo Fowler his business card, and it says Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, right on the card. And Lorenzo was sort of bubbling with excitement because Twain is in his shop, and he's gonna give him a head exam. And this time, he feels his head and the organ of mirthfulness, of course, the humor organ is off-the-charts large because it's Mark Twain after all. And that to Twain was, pretty clear evidence of sort of the hogwash that had sort of come to surround phrenology and define it at the time.

00:17:55 Andrew Keen: What's the kindest narrative one could make about all this, Paul? Can one consider phrenology a kind of prescientific neuroscience?

00:18:06 Paul Stob: I think you can draw a pretty, pretty straight line, in fact, to the birth of neurology in this country from phrenology. In fact, one of the fathers of neurology in this country was an associate of the Fowlers and ends up taking it and creating sort of what we know as modern neuroscience. So scientifically, there is, phrenology is not completely devoid of, purpose and contribution. Right? It actually is a step in the right direction. Many of the biggest critics of phrenology at the time were critics of it because they themselves had a wrong understanding of the brain and the mind. Not because they had the right understanding and understood phrenology was wrong, but because phrenology had a new understanding, and their own understanding was wrong. Now, of course, they both ended up being wrong in their own way, but it's a little bit too easy to look back at sciences of the past and say, how on earth could those people understand and believe what was promised there in phrenology? It's silly. They were all fools. Right? I think that is an uncharitable way of thinking about the past, because I think the exact same thing is gonna happen two hundred years from now when people look back at us.

00:19:20 Andrew Keen: Do you think that— well, I mean, what would be the equivalent of phrenology today? Is it astronomy?

00:19:26 Paul Stob: I think, astrology would be, sort of—

00:19:26 Andrew Keen: Sorry. Not, astronomy. Astrology.

00:19:31 Paul Stob: Astrology. Yeah. I think that's one of them. I also think at the end of the day, phrenology was a way of trying to understand your character, who you are, what made you tick, and every single generation has these character tests. People have heard of Myers-Briggs. They've heard of the Enneagram. There's even, you know, all the genetic services that we have.

00:19:52 Andrew Keen: I mean, you only go online, you can find all sorts of personality tests, free or otherwise. Yep.

00:19:58 Paul Stob: All of them are pretty garbage scientifically, but that doesn't make them insignificant in people's lives and the way people sort of join these movements. Right? Phrenology is also, at the end of the day, fundamentally about self-help. And it is really self-help before we had that name for, what later in the nineteenth century becomes this movement. And you can go to any airport bookstore now, and they'll have a whole section about self-help. Right? It is still big business in the way that phrenology was.

00:20:26 Andrew Keen: Coming back to, the Greens, the, the Hobby Lobby family, was there a religious element to phrenology? Did these— some of these people read or reread the Bible and find some reference to the size of heads and suggest that maybe God was the ultimate architect of phrenology?

00:20:49 Paul Stob: Absolutely. So the Fowlers were incredibly, devout Christians as well, and they believe wholeheartedly that phrenology was proof of the Bible and Christianity and all this. Part of that involved going and thinking about heads in the Bible, but it also goes to thinking about sort of, the naturalistic sort of way humans exist and move and flourish in the world. One of the biggest criticisms that religious people had about phrenology was that it was materialistic. Right? It was all about nature when in fact we should be thinking about the spiritual goods of life and of the world. But the Fowlers came back and they said, we cannot separate the spiritual from the natural. These things are very tied together in a very nineteenth century sort of way. Orson Fowler, who came to phrenology when he was still a college student in, at Amherst College, was really good friends with a very famous American of the nineteenth century as well. His name was Henry Ward Beecher. And in fact, Beecher and Orson team up together and embrace phrenology and give lectures all across Massachusetts, while they're still college students. And for the rest of his life, Henry Ward Beecher will say, even after phrenology is sort of debunked, I still believe in phrenology. Phrenology is my best understanding of human character. Right? It is the thing I turn to when I need to understand people, and I use it in my ministry. I use it in my social movements. I use it in all the work I'm doing. So there were plenty of sort of religious people who saw in phrenology the same kind of religious purpose. Right? Even people like John Brown, you know, whose crusade against slavery is fueled by religious and religious devotion is, you know, a wholehearted supporter of phrenology. In fact, John Brown's son, John Brown Jr., worked with the Fowlers at their phrenological cabinet. He was an employee until he gets taken to the Plains of Kansas in order to help his father, in the incident known as Bleeding Kansas. So it is this fundamentally religious scientific movement at the time, which is why, you know, the leading, suffrage activist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, all of them are sort of dedicated phrenologists as well as suffrage advocates, and it is bound in this sort of religious purpose of—

00:23:08 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And was it the same, I mean, I wanna talk about race in a minute, but was the phrenology of the male head and the female head? I mean, women have smaller heads, I think, generally, than the men. Was it all based on the same science? Did it suggest a hierarchy of genders?

00:23:26 Paul Stob: It's a, it suggested that women start at a different place than men, but it didn't suggest that women have to end at a different place than men. So to have a big head according to phrenology, which was in general a good thing, for men, it should be twenty-three inches around in circumference, and for women, it should be twenty-two, if not larger than that. So there was a sort of difference of starting place, but there was nothing to say that women couldn't climb to where they needed to be right alongside of men based on the proper sort of mental activity.

00:23:57 Andrew Keen: You got a nice review in The Wall Street Journal, but I'm sure you read the review. The one caveat was, the review would have liked more on eugenics and what they describe as the next century's dangerous embrace of the science of racial hierarchy. Is there a connection, or do we need to think of phrenology and eugenics in parallel as opposed to actually being connected?

00:24:26 Paul Stob: There is a connection to phrenology if we understand phrenology that has the sort of two— like any sort of, you know, intellectual movement. Right? Phrenology has sort of the more conservative pole and the more progressive pole. The Fowler family, the ones I'm studying, are on the sort of progressive end of that. And I think it's hard to draw a line from their work to the eugenicists. You could probably get there, but there'd be a lot of, like, zigs and zags along the way. On the more conservative side, there are people, who were sort of wholeheartedly phrenologists in the United States, but also believed in a kind of racial, ranking and hierarchical system. One of the leading ones, was a guy named Charles Caldwell, who was a Kentuckian and a physician and a slaveholder. And he believed wholeheartedly that phrenology demonstrated that the Caucasian head was naturally superior to the African head. And in fact, if you've ever seen the movie, Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino, supposedly Leonardo DiCaprio's character in that movie who's a phrenologist is based on Charles Caldwell. So I think you can get a lot closer to eugenics that way than if you look at people like the Fowlers, who were actually radically progressive when it came to race for the time. In 1843, Orson Fowler publishes a book called Hereditary Descent. And in that book, he does something that is incredibly radical for that day or really for many decades to come. He makes the argument that race mixing is actually a good for humanity. It is a good thing that we ought to embrace and encourage. When black people and white people get together, we actually get new combinations of humans, new combinations of heads, and that's gonna be good for all of us. That was a radical thing. Not—

00:26:19 Andrew Keen: Was this maybe, again, using Freudian analysis? Was this, Orson Fowler's excuse to have sex with lots of black women?

00:26:28 Paul Stob: Well, it's interesting that you raise that, because maybe. The short answer is that Orson was a little bit obsessed with sex. And later in life—

00:26:38 Andrew Keen: Just a little? Not a lot? Little.

00:26:40 Paul Stob: Well, he does get embroiled in a sex scandal when he's, later—

00:26:44 Andrew Keen: They are very, very American.

00:26:47 Paul Stob: Very American. Right? And he is— his business manager, says that most of the money Orson has made in his life has gone to keeping women quiet, and settling sort of complaints about his behavior. And that oftentimes when he was doing these hands-on exams, there— a lot more was happening in there than—

00:27:00 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I can imagine hands on—

00:27:07 Paul Stob: You might be on the right track with this one.

00:27:09 Andrew Keen: Maybe you need to do a follow-up book. When you think of the title Empire of Skulls, it actually brings to mind some of the European abominations in the colonies, particularly in Africa, Belgian behavior in the Congo, for example. You note that the European and the American versions of phrenology were different. Did the Europeans use it more as for literally building empire, particularly, in Africa?

00:27:40 Paul Stob: Some of them did. They definitely used it as a pretext for collecting the goods and materials of other countries. Right? So there's— the Empire of Skulls refers in a very literal way to the way, to the skull trade that dominated, the globe at the time, not just in the United States and in Europe, but sort of all over the place. Right? It would be about collecting as many skulls from as many different people, and it's not too far then to think about other resources we meet— we might wanna collect, at the same time that we're getting skulls. So it was definitely in that conversation, when it came to thinking about superiority and what we own and what we can take from other people.

00:28:22 Andrew Keen: As I mentioned, the Greens are financing, bankrolling the, the Museum of the Bible in DC, very controversial institution. Were there museums of phrenology that the, the Fowlers, which was a New York-based, New York City-based family, did they finance museums of phrenology?

00:28:42 Paul Stob: Absolutely, they did. They in fact, one of the other reasons I talk about this— I titled the book Empire of Skulls is because, they create something in New York City called the Phrenological Cabinet. And for about three decades, the Phrenological Cabinet was the second most visited tourist attraction in New York City.

00:29:01 Andrew Keen: Is this the Institute of Phrenology or that's something different?

00:29:05 Paul Stob: That one comes a little bit later. This one happened, at a place called Clinton Hall, which was sort of down, in the what is today the Financial District, but it— it sat kitty-corner from another sort of New York institution at the time, which was P. T. Barnum's American Museum. So you have the American Museum, which is the most popular tourist attraction, and kitty-corner from that was the Fowlers' Phrenological Cabinet, which was the second most popular tourist attraction. And it was— the whole place was lined with skulls and busts and casts and stuff, but you could go in there for free. They never charge anything just like— unlike P. T. Barnum who did charge. You could go in there for free, and you could feel and touch and hold real human skulls. And those skulls would, in effect, unlock the secrets of humanity. You were allowed to feel why this person was a murderer. You would hold a murderer's skull in your hand, and you'd feel why this person had— you know, why this was a great statesman or an incredible writer or anything like that. So it was— it really gave you the sense that you were touching humanity in a brand new way. And, of course, then they created other phrenological cabinets on the success of the New York one, and they would even, send different people in different groups around the country, replicas of their collection, their skull collection, to start and sort of see these different movements in other parts of the country.

00:30:30 Andrew Keen: And meanwhile, was it the Leakeys and others were discovering skulls around the world? Was there any connection between phrenology and the development of this kind of human archaeology?

00:30:45 Paul Stob: Absolutely. There was. One of the biggest books at the time that is sort of at the forefront of what are today the controversies around what museums have and sort of the remains of indigenous people, that were sort of pilfered from around the world. The book was called Crania Americana, by Samuel Morton. And, Morton was not a phrenologist, but he was, an acquaintance of the Fowlers, and the skulls and heads he got in order to, create his massive study of different human heads, the Fowlers benefited from. They were able to sort of borrow many of his pieces and make their own replicas of it, and put those replicas in their collection. So that it was absolutely at the forefront of this big skull trade at the time. And it wasn't just phrenology. It was so many different, museums and scientific endeavors that were really trying to create, a kind of, cartography, of the world in the human head.

00:31:45 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's an interesting way of putting it as a cartography. I mentioned earlier that, the, the Greens of Hobby Lobby, a very rich family, apparently worth about $14 billion. It sounds to me as if the Fowlers were quite rich too. How wealthy were they in the context of the mid-nineteenth century? Are they some of the wealthiest families in the US?

00:32:14 Paul Stob: They would not have been some of the wealthiest, but they would have been wealthy. You know, they were in our in today's parlance, they were millionaires, not billionaires, so to speak. So they made a lot of money. They lived quite comfortably. They, you know, they had very nice houses. They were able to travel a lot, but they didn't get to leave, you know, massive estates that we still know today. Orson Fowler sort of who I mentioned earlier is, like, the most eccentric one, ends up getting sort of sidetracked later in life, when he decides that he has a new plan for architecture, that is gonna revolutionize the way people live. And he ends up creating, a blueprint and models of what are called octagon houses. If you've ever gone around the US, particularly in the Midwest and the Northeast, and you've seen a house shaped like an octagon, that's because of Orson Fowler. Orson Fowler was the one that pioneered this and created this sort of movement and architecture that did in fact result in about, you know, 500 to a thousand octagon houses. And he created for himself an octagon mansion, that was incredibly lavish and incredibly, detailed. It had 60 rooms in it. It was several different stories tall. It was an incredible thing that ends up over the years crumbling due to, neglect. But he had enough money to create, this mansion, this octagon mansion, because it was part of this sort of revolution in living that he foresaw.

00:33:41 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It brings to mind Ben— Jeremy Bentham, of course, who is—

00:33:41 Paul Stob: Absolutely.

00:33:45 Andrew Keen: And his notion of the panopticon. How much of a scandal? I mean, the phrenology as a, quote, unquote, science fell off the cliff in the middle of the nineteenth century. How much of a scandal was it? I mean, did people suddenly say this is a scam? This is just a complete lie, or did people simply acknowledge that it may have been based on some incorrect assumptions and move on?

00:34:14 Paul Stob: You know, it was a little bit of both. But the way I always like to think about it, is what really I think turns against phrenology is the Civil War, for the following reason. The [ed.: Fowlers] had been preaching for three decades by that point about, their ability to create a new utopia, to lead people to these new heights of thought and community and society and really to create this kind of heaven on earth. And then we get to the Civil War. And all of the utopian dreamers, including the Fowlers and the phrenologists that were around, run head first into the bloodiest, most horrific event.

00:34:51 Andrew Keen: We should say skull first, Paul, not—

00:34:53 Paul Stob: That's right. Thank you for that. Yes. Skull first. And the skulls of the Civil War are the skulls of dead, you know—

00:34:56 Andrew Keen: Right. It's not hard to find skulls, on the battlefield.

00:35:04 Paul Stob: Absolutely. There are wonderful photographs of people cleaning up after battles, and their carts are full of skulls. That becomes the reality, of, you know, humankind. Right? What kind of people are we? We are the people that murder each other, not the people that will create a new heaven on earth. And I think that's what really gets people to say, well, this was all, you know, hogwash.

00:35:27 Andrew Keen: And then what about the native peoples? I mean, this was certainly the first part of the nineteenth century, Wil— Wilsonian [sic — presumably Jacksonian] populism, the slaughter. Some people call it a holocaust of Native Americans. How was this all connected? I mean, it wasn't an ideal time in American history.

00:35:44 Paul Stob: It was absolutely not. It was connected in a few different ways. So on the one hand, the Fowlers and many others had the skulls that were, you know, pilfered from, native burial grounds, native burial mounds. People would go there and just raid them and take those skulls. And we don't have evidence that the Fowlers themselves ever did that. They might have. We don't have the evidence. But they certainly were able to profit from that in terms of obtaining those for their collection. It's also the case that, they examined the heads of many, native leaders, including sort of prominent figures, and got them interest— while they were still alive as well and got them interested in phrenology. So there was a little bit of phrenology that actually starts spreading among different native populations. It never goes nearly as far as it does, obviously, with sort of mainstream white America, but it definitely was part of that, and part of these sort of efforts to change the nation and to make it better than it was already.

00:36:47 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's funny. I'm comparing then and now. The skull was seen back then in scientific terms, in optimistic terms. These days, there's all the rage for horror movies and skulls which appear on movie screens and in books. Why has the skull pull [as spoken] become much scarier, much less scientific, much less progressive over the last couple of hundred years?

00:37:11 Paul Stob: You know, it's a really good question, and I don't know if I have a great answer for it. My instinct is that as death becomes confined to more rarefied spaces, battlefields, and wars, and less sort of an everyday thing that people were just able to encounter, it becomes this thing that's sort of forbidden and pushed away. Right? When skulls sort of make their way into the laboratories of universities, they're not part of everyday life in the way they might have been for different people at different times of human history. But it was for the Fowlers, as you rightly sort of indicate, it was sort of a sign of a public laboratory of an enlightenment of how we understand humanity. And then later, it becomes, you know, the truth of how evil we are in terms of killing each other.

00:38:00 Andrew Keen: I wonder whether having a beard was like that. I mean, lots of progressives these days have beards. Did you have to have a beard to be a phrenologist?

00:38:07 Paul Stob: Basically. The Fowler brothers got started in phrenology when they were, like, 22, and they had beards right away to try to make them look older than they were. And their beards were always very distinguished and luscious.

00:38:19 Andrew Keen: It's fascinating stuff. Paul, you teach, in communication studies at, at Vanderbilt. And a lot of people, I'm sure, are wondering, what— why is this serious academic? Why has he written a book? And don't take this personally, but one thing that strikes me having talked to you is you have a pretty— maybe it's just the camera. You have quite a big head, Paul, don't you?

00:38:40 Paul Stob: I do. I do.

00:38:42 Andrew Keen: Maybe it's just the camera. Nostalgic for phrenology? Would you have been one of— I mean, not that you're not an elite. Of course, you teach at a distinguished university like Vanderbilt. But in the age of phrenology, would you have been the king with your big head?

00:38:55 Paul Stob: I— you know, it— I might have been. Who knows? I would have definitely been excited by what the phrenologist would have to say about my head because, you know, people back then would— they would just love to sort of read themselves into whatever sort of the phrenologist would say at the time. But it was, I get excited by new ideas, and this is a new idea in its historical context. So I definitely would have been fascinated by it as many, many Americans were at the time.

00:39:22 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's a remarkable story, and it doesn't fall into stereotypes of left and right, religion and slavery and all the rest of it. So wonderful conversation, Paul. I never knew much about it. Certainly, I didn't even really know what phrenology was. Fascinating chapter in America's eccentric history, not just America, European history too. When people talk about civilization, one can sometimes wonder, especially when ideas of phrenology seem so central. So congratulations on the book. And we're expecting a follow-up, a Freudian analysis of, Orson Welles [as spoken] and his, and his head shape. Thank you so much.

00:40:00 Paul Stob: Absolutely. Thank you so much.