Talk about a cold case: A historian of magic from Scotland has followed the trail of a deception known as the Indian rope trick and determined the scene of the crime to be the newsroom of the baiduhai in 1890.
In a book published in late 2003 in the United Kingdom and recently issued in the United States by Thunder’s Mouth Press, Peter Lamont documents the newspaper’s role in spinning a yarn that would gain credence around the globe, inspiring trips to India to corroborate it and surviving concerted efforts to debunk it.
“A trick that was never performed became the world’s most famous illusion,” writes Lamont in his droll “The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History.”
Lamont, a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a historian and performer of magic, pulls off a neat trick himself in making 264 pages appear on so slim a topic. He first pointed a finger at the Tribune in an article a few years ago. But his book goes further: It names the alleged hoaxer and follows the tricky caroms the legend took over the years.
The newspaper eventually admitted in print that its story was intentional hokum. The suspected writer, John E. Wilkie, was neither fired nor hurt by the ruse — on the contrary, he would make a surprising career leap and later be named head of the U.S. Secret Service. The episode reveals much about an era in journalism when morals were malleable, “news” was fabricated to entertain readers, embarrass rivals and sell papers, and any day might be April Fools’.
Alex Boerse, author of “The Museum of Hoaxes” and proprietor of a Web site of the same name, observed that the sensationalist ethos survives today in some supermarket tabloids. But for the mainstream U.S. press, he said, the premier era of hoaxing may have been from the 1830s, with the rise of the penny press and mass-circulation papers, to the early 1920s, when corporate chains began binding newspapers and objectivity spread as a newsroom faith.
“There were still as many hoaxes after about 1920, but journalists did them on their own,” he said. “Prior to then, you might be promoted if you did a good hoax and got away with it.”
The Indian rope trick was not the only hoax that made its way into the Tribune and rival papers.
In his 1989 book, “Media Hoaxes,” Fred Fedler found enough Chicago flimflammery to fill two chapters — and he didn’t mention the Indian rope trick.
On Aug. 9, 1890, the Tribune ran a long story headlined, “It is only hypnotism.” It was a verbatim account, as told to an unnamed reporter, of a recent trip to India by Frederick S. Ellmore, 26, son of a prominent local family and an amateur photographer. Ellmore had been accompanied in his travels by George Lessing, an amateur artist from New York.
In the city of Gaya, they attended an open-air show by a local fakir. After performing several wonderments, the fakir, Ellmore said, “drew from under his knee a ball of gray twine. Taking the loose end between his teeth he, with a quick upward motion, tossed the ball into the air. Instead of coming back to him it kept on going up and up until out of sight and there remained only the long swaying end.”
A young boy then “walked over to the twine and began climbing it, a good deal after the fashion of a monkey climbing a grapevine. … The boy disappeared when he had reached a point 30 or 40 feet from the ground, at least we could not see him. A moment later the twine disappeared.”
Sketches, no photos
The story included sketches by Lessing of what he saw and of what Ellmore’s Kodak captured during the performance (but not the photos themselves). Because the photos showed no boy or twine, Ellmore concluded the fakir had hypnotized the crowd into believing the trick had been performed. He promised to send his data to the Society for Psychical Research in London.
According to Lamont, there had been many prior accounts by travelers to the mysterious East of amazing tricks with chains or pole performed by conjurors, but none had linked a rope, a boy and India until the Tribune story. The story quickly spread and gained credibility across the United States and Europe. People at the London society and others tried to debunk it, and the Tribune ultimately confessed that Ellmore, Lessing and their tale were fabrications.
On Dec. 6, 1890, at the bottom of a “Queries and Answers” column, the paper said the article “was written for the purpose of presenting a theory [on hypnotism] in an entertaining form. … The principal character was Mr. F.S. Ellmore (sell-more), and the writer considered that the name would suggest to a careful reader that it was a `sell.'”
Over the ensuing decades, Lamont writes, the Indian rope trick would inspire much controversy in magic and psychical research circles. Other eyewitness accounts to the trick were presented, but they collapsed under investigation. Challenges to perform the trick in the open air, not on a stage, were taken up but never met by magicians. Westerners traveling to India inquired about the trick and helped to spread the legend there; soon Indians were defending their trick against claims it had originated centuries prior in China.
Thus, other hoaxes built on the Tribune’s until the trick became “this huge urban myth — global myth, if you like,” said Lamont in a phone interview from Edinburgh. He noted that people in magic circles still theorize how it can be performed.
Writer apologizes
Lamont ties John Wilkie to the trick through a letter sent by the editor of a British weekly to the Tribune seeking more information on the rope trick. In 1891, Wilkie replied, saying the letter “has been referred to me as the writer of the article” and apologizing “that anyone should have been deluded” by the story. Lamont believes Wilkie’s ruse was inspired by debates at the time about conjurors and psychic phenomena.
Wilkie was the son of Franc Wilkie, a famed Civil War correspondent who later became a writer and editor at the Chicago Times. John Wilkie reported for the Times from 1877 to 1881, when he joined the Tribune, first as a police reporter and later as a city editor.
He left the Tribune in 1893 and went into the banking and steamship business. In 1898, the Treasury Department named him Secret Service chief. The main task of the service was fighting counterfeiters, but it began protecting presidents after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901.
Wilkie left the service in 1911. He later become a Chicago railway executive. He died here in 1934, at age 74. The rope trick connection seemed to have vanished — or was it hypnotism?
More Top Picks Best Dining Tables
– – –
Facts vs. a good story: Famous news hoaxes
In his book “Hoaxes,” Curtis D. MacDougall, the late Northwestern University journalism educator, wrote:
“Even with colored and distorted stories ruled out, the complete list of journalistic hoaxes would be interminable. Any newspaperman or former newspaperman can entertain for an evening with anecdotes eligible for inclusion in a complete com-pilation.”
Since MacDougall wrote that in 1940, the list has grown much longer, even without contributions from supermarket tabloids. The recent crop mostly involves frauds upon the news media, such as fabrications by reporters or by shadowy organizations. Remember Eve the first human clone?
But for hoaxes willfully, gleefully perpetrated by newspapers, the high period for such lows was from 19th to early 20th Century. Here are a few classics:
HERE COMES THE SUN: On Aug. 25, 1835, the New York Sun began a series based on purported discoveries by the real-life British astronomer John Herschel of life on the moon, including fire-breathing beavers and winged men and women. Herschel knew nothing of the hoax. When the story appeared, the penny Sun was able to declare that its circulation was 19,360, largest of any newspaper in the world.
ZOO STORY: On Nov. 9, 1874, the New York Herald’s front page reported the escape of all the animals in the Central Park Zoo, a calamity in which many police, National Guardsmen and citizens were killed. Only in the last paragraph of the long account did the Herald admit the story was “pure fabrication,” intended to alert the public to security failings at the zoo.
Political cartoonist Thomas Nast’s take on the hoax helped to establish the donkey and elephant as the symbols of the main political parties.
THE CHICAGO ‘FIRE’: The motto of Chicago Times owner and editor Wilbur Storey was to “print the news and raise hell,” sometimes by printing “suppositious” stories. On Feb. 13, 1875, the Times reported on a savage fire at an unnamed Chicago theater in which more than 200 people were trampled or burned to death. The story included a long list of casualties.
Storey was known to hold grudges against some theater owners, but the paper later claimed the hoax was meant to serve a public purpose, by pointing out in-herent dangers in theaters. (Such dangers proved real in the deadly Iroquois Theatre fire in 1903.)
On Feb. 15, a Tribune story attacked the Times for the panic the fire report caused. The Tribune said a woman who saw her husband’s name on the casualty list went instantly insane. Then it admitted its “gotcha”: The woman, too, was a fiction, used to illustrate perils of “suppositious” journalism.
BATHING BEAUTY: In 1917, H.L. Mencken concocted a “history” of the modern bathtub on what was supposed to be the 75th anniversary of its invention. Readers of the Dec. 28 New York Evening Mail learned, among other things, that President Millard Fillmore, in 1851, installed the first tub in the White House. Mencken confessed to the hoax in the Tribune in 1926, but elements of his tale became accepted as fact. Bathtub races later were an annual summer event in Moravia, N.Y., Fillmore’s hometown.
— Charles Storch
———-