Of Fear and Strangers

THE BIRTH AND early life of that political and moral peril called xenophobia commenced in the shadows. Coined simultaneously by an unknown doctor as well as anonymous enemies of ultranationalism and then reminted for colonial use by Jean Martin de Saintours, this term spread far and wide, floating about among foreign journalists and diplomats, imperialists, racists, liberals, and socialists, its meaning stabilized at times by one author and one context, only to be flipped around and reconceptualized by the next. After the Nazi Holocaust, the word’s implications became more set. However, xenophobia had not yet found its theoretician, someone who could answer the critical question: why? No one had yet established what lay under the iceberg’s tip. No one provided explanations that might make sense of this trouble’s origins and menacing power.

In 1936 a League of Nations expert noted that the seemingly political problem of xenophobia was “in reality essentially psychologic.” Intense hostility toward strangers had no single pattern, he wrote, but must be explained by a deeper understanding of the inner workings of those who were carried away by such hatred. By then, this claim was not novel. Philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, behavioral physiologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts had already begun to promote differing psychic and behavioral explanations for stranger hatred. After Auschwitz, these experts—unlike the forgotten consuls and journalists who first deployed the term—became revered figures, even celebrities, who increasingly were seen as crucial to the survival of humankind. The man who unleashed the atomic bomb, President Harry Truman, addressed the American Psychiatric Association in 1948, and rather stunningly declared that world peace lay in his audience’s hands. Such desperate hyperbole said much about the fear and the burden, the mystery too, that made experts of the psyche move to the foreground.

By then careful students could have recognized that xenophobia was three-headed, like the hound that guarded the gates of the underworld. This Cerberus was made up of knotty questions regarding human identity, its relation to emotions like fear and aggression, and, lastly, the nature of groups. If postwar thinkers were hoping to slay this monster, each of those heads needed to be lopped off, dissected, and better understood. Otherwise, in a continually globalizing world armed with nuclear weaponry, the same intolerance that haunted prior periods of history might make for mass murder on a scale never before seen.

These three interrelated questions were rarely taken up together; mostly, they were divided from each other. Different intellectual communities focused on what was most amenable to their methods. Some asked who was this xénos, this stranger? What made him or her different? What linked me to you, but not her? Others zoomed in on the misperception of threat that seemed to lead to either a phobic retreat or a violent reaction. What made the normal regulation of emotion, which routinely managed everyday dangers and forms of novelty, go berserk? Lastly, some noted that from the Chinese Boxers to the British Brothers’ League, from the KKK to the Hitler Youth, xenophobia took up residence in many at once. It possessed certain qualities that emerged only in groups.

During the second half of the twentieth century, varied experts went to work on what seemed to be a catastrophe waiting to happen. Their efforts led to a series of powerful, if never fully integrated, models, defined by new terms, new explanatory concepts, some empirical research, and a slew of therapeutic applications. All this in an effort to make good on the promise, “Never Again.”

WHAT MAKES A man phobic of strangers? In the 1880s, when xenophobia first appeared in a clinic, the doctors who observed this fear had little to offer by way of explanation. For most of them, heredity provided a one-stop solution. To explain phobias, models of inheritance could be deployed, including Herbert Spencer’s model of Social Darwinism, in which human life was geared for the survival of the fittest; the French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s view that learned experiences could be inherited; and Ernst Haeckel’s contention that the life of the individual recapitulated the life of the species. Mix and match these speculative theories and almost anything could be given a supposed reality, a biological cause, and an essence that required no further explanation.

Degeneration theory was such an intoxicating mix. It explained numerous problems—psychiatric, neurologic, rheumatic, addictive, and others—as the result of an unspecified hereditary decay. Family trees would be marked by this damage, which could even be tied to thinly veiled Christian sins like boozing and whoring. Through Lamarckian mechanisms, the punishment for these venal excesses, it was said, would be visited on the children. Evolution thus went into reverse. In Dreyfusard France, degeneration and its ills were found—surprise!—among “foreign races” like the Jews.

Alongside degenerative heredity, another proposed cause of morbid fear was trauma. A prophet of that peril was the American neurologist Dr. George Beard. Having cured himself of lethargy through self-administered electrical shocks, Beard proposed that many urban dwellers were short-circuiting. In the whirring metropolis with its ceaseless competition, the strain was much too much. Humans had only so much nervous force, and as one’s batteries ran down, the capacity for emotional self-regulation diminished. “Neurasthenia” ensued, marked by unceasing fatigue, jittery states, and odd fears. Beard’s 1881 book, American Nervousness, was taken up by the popular press. Early self-help books followed with titles like Don’t Worry (Worry: The Disease of the Age) and Why Worry?

However, as the new century arrived, degeneration theory and neurasthenia both began to lose scientific support. If phobias were due to degeneration, one Harvard doctor quipped, we all must be degenerates. A third suspect now stepped forward: was there some disruption in childhood development? In this search for phobias stemming from the playground, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall played a pivotal role.

After graduating from Williams College, Hall considered the priesthood but then went to Harvard to study with William James. There he received the first American doctorate in psychology, before traveling to Germany to train in their state-of-the-art labs. Upon his return, Hall became a professor at Johns Hopkins and promptly turned his sights toward morbid fears. Fear was the expectation of pain, he reasoned, and it led humans to consider “whether to fly or fight,” his anticipation of the famous “fight or flight” reaction, demonstrated by the landmark physiological research of Walter B. Cannon a dozen years later. Acutely frightened individuals faced a stark choice: escape or lunge into defensive violence. Phobics were not just people who shied away from their fears; they were also those who leapt irrationally into battle.

G. Stanley Hall

Armed with this basic understanding, Hall sought to map out the fears of childhood. Unlike his meticulous, lab-based German colleagues, his method was simple, sloppy, and, like America itself, gargantuan. Hall sent out thousands of questionnaires across the nation to youngsters of all ages. Recipients sent back a landslide of replies to his rather vague queries. By 1897, Hall had collected more than seventeen hundred reports from infants to young adults. He reported on 6456 kinds of fear. Reptiles and thunder were the most common source of terror, but coming in third, acknowledged by over a quarter of his respondents, was a fear of strangers.

If Hall’s data could be trusted, stranger fear was extremely common among American youth. But who were these bogeymen?

Children’s fears of persons are often at first directed to black, lame, ugly, or especially deformed people, to gypsies, rag men, Chinamen, policemen, coal men, tramps, tinkers, doctors, teachers, peddlers, and often extend to almost all strangers.

Hall hurried on from this list, never bothering to ask why the foremost stranger was “black”? What made the “lame” or “rag men” or “Chinamen” frightening? Instead, he offered a deeper explanation. Once upon a time, humankind believed “all strangers were dangerous.” Now such fear existed only in sparsely populated areas, where the stranger incited unnecessary trepidation and awe. Such worry was atavistic, irrational, part of a lost world. “Serpents are no longer among our most fatal foes,” Dr. Hall wrote, and “strangers are not usually dangerous.” The transformation of strangers from enemies to others we simply do not know was not unlike the conquering of a superstition. As children became adolescents, they mostly made this transition; the older adolescent didn’t dash away from a Chinese boy. Knowledge and maturity tempered such reactions.

Hall’s conclusions aligned with the beliefs of American progressives, who placed their faith in reason and education. However, he yearned for a deeper revelation. An unsure theoretician whose piles of data never added up to very much, Hall one day awoke from his discontent to an epiphany. Embracing Lamarck and Haeckel, he concluded that phobias were inherited. Great-granddad’s dog bite was long forgotten, but little Billy, three generations later, on his first sight of a mutt, would recoil as if he had been mauled. Ancient traumas led children to instinctively distrust strangers. Once bitten, many generations shy.

In 1904, Hall compiled his masses of data and published Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. It was a fourteen-hundred-page tome that had the effect, by sheer heft, of making that stage of life an object of study. Near the end of his encyclopedic work, Hall confessed a desire to broaden his purview to include the “nearly one third of the human race” that lived in “136 colonies and dependencies” under “a few civilized nations.” How did this relate to adolescence? Thanks to Social Darwinism, eugenics, and ethnic psychology, Hall soon made that clear.

Natives across the globe were “adolescents of adult size.” Virtuous, confiding, and affectionate, they—like children in Hall’s survey—saw strangers as enemies. Diversities that Westerners accepted, they found intolerable. Education could lift up these childish minds, but in the same way that obstinate children refused to grow up, some primitives rejected civilizing. If so, an unavoidable fate awaited them. Like the “great auk” or the “Southern buffalo,” these groups would be driven to death. Never before, Hall marveled, had so many “lower races” been plucked like “weeds in the human garden.” He listed these killed-off tribes—Beothuks, Aztecs, Tasmanians, Huichols, Maori, Burra, and Adelaide … he innocently went on and on. When the Nazis prepared their Final Solution, the ground had been prepared by progressive do-gooders like G. Stanley Hall. All that was left was to define the Jews as recalcitrant children.

G. STANLEY HALL WAS a transitional figure who explained morbid anxiety states by both childhood development and nineteenth-century evolutionary models. The next generation of American psychologists stepped free of hereditarian explanations and embraced environmental models. The most prominent theory in the first decades of twentieth-century America was behaviorism. It narrowed psychology’s focus to external stimuli and their observable reactions alone. In this way, behaviorists rid themselves of the need for inferences about what was going on inside that black box called the mind. If the price was high—essentially a psychology without a psyche—so too was the potential profit, for unlike other psychologies, everything behaviorists concerned themselves with was observable and comported with the rules of empirical science.

Without saying as much, behaviorism actually banked on an older psychology called associationism, a theory that commenced with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The mind/brain operated like a loom, weaving together perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. Phobias, it followed, might be due to an aroused sense of fear linked to the wrong perception. Morbid fear of strangers might be the result of such a mis-association. Or so it was said. There was never much proof until a stunning series of experiments were reported from Moscow. In these seminal 1890s studies, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov demonstrated exactly how, in dogs, mis-associations created physiological responses. Reactions once considered “inborn instincts,” like the natural fear of strangers, now seemed to be clearly the result of learned connections.

Life for Pavlov’s dogs was bewildering. The Russian scientist and his army of coworkers trained their canines to link the sound of a buzzer with a forthcoming meal. When they heard the buzz, they eventually began to secrete saliva in anticipation. After a while, even with no food in sight, the buzzer alone would create a “psychic secretion.” The buzzer—mistranslated from Russian and passed down to non-Russians as a “bell”—led to a gush of spittle. The association of a buzzing sound with the (now absent) food activated a reaction in the animal’s glands. Pavlov labeled this a “conditional reflex.” Again, thanks to a mistranslation, it entered English as a “conditioned reflex,” and there it would remain.

Pavlov and his dogs became celebrities. Scientists from around the world came to examine them and they left astonished. The Russian had demonstrated that supposedly automatic reactions—not just hunger but also fear and hostility—could be created and not only for truly terrifying stimuli, but also for innocuous objects. How many of the supposedly inborn “instincts” or “inherited illnesses” were actually conditioned reflexes? Was this the source of stranger phobias? Pavlov pushed forward, eager to unlock those secrets. He was awarded the Nobel Prize and received the full backing of the Soviet Union, after they realized that his psychology meshed with Marxism. However, despite his immense ambition, Pavlov did not dare to take the obvious, if morally dubious, next step. In 1920, an American named John Watson did just that. He applied Pavlovian methods not to a dog but to a child.

Born in South Carolina, Watson was an unruly, bright, and cocky boy. When his father ran off, he experienced both stark poverty and strict Baptist discipline. He hated both and was in a hurry to get away and make his fortune. After a lackluster college career, he demonstrated his self-promotional skills by talking his way into graduate school at the University of Chicago. Psychology there was being severed from philosophy, and Watson took up this new scientific crusade. Graduating with his doctorate in 1903, the debonair instructor stayed on to teach, and fell in love with a student, Mary Ickes. They secretly married, an act the bride’s upstanding brother, a future political powerhouse, Harold Ickes, denounced. Watson, in his view, was a “selfish, conceited cad.”

Watson didn’t care. He displayed a lack of interest in niceties. In his hope to make psychology more biologic, he gained quick notoriety when The Nation lambasted his experiments on rats as vicious. Nonetheless, he was recruited to Johns Hopkins, where he took up rat models to study learning, seeking to extend Pavlov’s work. In this effort, Watson was joined by a graduate student, Rosalie Rayner, who soon became his lover. Together, they decided to extend Pavlovian methods. In a foster home, they found a human subject and named him “Little Albert.”

In their groundbreaking paper, the psychologists assured readers that Albert was a sturdy fellow. Then they detailed his conditioning. Confronted with a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, and even a monkey, the nine-month-old displayed no alarm. That changed when Watson and Rayner made crashing cymbal-like sounds behind the boy’s head whenever the white rat appeared. Albert quickly grew terrified of the rodent. Whenever it approached, whether sonically assaulted or not, Albert shrieked and quivered. Furthermore, his fear generalized so that any animal that approximated a white rat drew forth the same terror. Watson and Rayner announced to the world that they had created an infantile phobia.

Children, they concluded, were equipped with two sources of innate fear: loud sounds and the sensation of falling. Every other fear was acquired from their surroundings. Dr. Watson believed America had created a generation of crybabies and nervous Nellies, riddled with irrational phobias. Aware of the social implications of his work, he also insisted that racial or ethnic “instincts” were created, and aversions between races or ethnicities were conditioned. “I defy anyone,” Watson wrote, “to take these infants at birth, study their behavior, and mark off the differences in behavior that will characterize white from black and white or black from yellow.”

Little Albert became famous. His case would be endlessly cited as the origin story for American behaviorism. It underwrote innumerable experiments, for it seemed to show that human psychology was sculpted from conditioned cues. But a follow-up study proved to be just as important. In 1920, Watson and Rayner had predicted that conditioned emotions in infancy would “persist and modify personality throughout life.” However, a few years later, their Johns Hopkins colleague Mary Cover Jones showed that was not so. A child that she called Peter had been conditioned to have a phobia of rabbits. However, by presenting him with delicious treats alongside the bunny, little Peter gradually shook off his terror. He had been deconditioned. Phobias could be created through classical conditioning, Jones concluded, and eliminated through what she called “habituation.” Armed with these twin models of cause and cure, behaviorism was launched as a potential remedy for individuals and societies.

John Watson and Rosalie Rayner with Little Albert, 1920

The startling findings from this team at Johns Hopkins seemed to augur more to come. However, soon after Watson and Rayner published their study, their worlds fell apart. Watson’s affair with Rayner became public; his love letters to her were entered in court during the divorce proceedings with Mary Ickes, and then printed in Baltimore’s newspapers. Johns Hopkins dismissed him, and soon afterward, the founder of American behaviorism resurfaced at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he spent the next decades seeking to establish conditioned reflexes among consumers, so that they might reach for Maxwell House coffee or Pond’s cold cream.

At the same time, Watson remained a popular lecturer and writer, who tirelessly extolled the ameliorative possibilities of behaviorism. Critics in the United States responded to his work ecstatically. In 1925, some said Watson had ushered in “a new epoch in the intellectual history of man.” The New York Herald Tribune said of his latest work, “Perhaps this is the most important book ever written. One stands for an instant blinded with a great hope.” The thrill might have been in the fact that American progressives—not to mention socialists and Marxists—found vindication for their beliefs in Watson’s science. This “major intellectual revolution” actually confirmed their agenda. This was not without irony, for liberals needed to look past their commitment to individual freedom in order to accept science that made no room for free will. Many did, dizzied by the prospect of endless social improvement.

John Watson did not shy away from this adulation. The evangelist for behaviorism ramped up his promotional activity; he wrote countless articles for magazines, lectured widely, and even offered a course by mail. All other psychologies were ridiculous, he declared; his alone was science. All the riches and mysteries of the mind, from Plato to Shakespeare, from envy to adoration, from love to war, were stimuli in, reactions out. There were no unknown forces, no mediating mechanisms; it was all right there. John Watson, like others in the history of science, confused the limits of what was observable with the limits of what was real, but in all the excitement, few noticed.

In the 1920s and 1930s, while its impact in Europe was small, American behaviorism spread into psychology, medicine, pedagogy, literature, and business. Its impact was perhaps greatest on education. Traditional Judeo-Christian ethics had created maladies, Watson believed. These destructive teachings needed to yield to sound behaviorist approaches. Numerous progressive educators agreed. The Child Hygiene and Mental Hygiene movements tried to apply his lab work in the classroom, where teachers might strengthen good impulses and weaken bad ones. A 1924 compendium, The Child: His Nature and His Needs, noted that while G. Stanley Hall had discovered “numberless” things that children were afraid of, Watson had proved that these fears were all due to conditioned reflexes.

Behaviorism offered a model by which fear was conditioned and could be easily linked to false, unreal, or mistaken sources. Economic collapses or sudden cultural alterations now could be seen as buzzers that shocked individuals into misdirecting their anxiety toward strangers. For behaviorists, those children in Hall’s survey who feared “blacks,” the poor, the disabled, and “Chinamen” had been conditioned to do so. These were America’s white rats, waved in the faces of the jolted masses. Behavioral psychologists linked up with reformers, who joined in this new faith: change the stimuli, disrupt the conditioned reflexes, and make social ills like xenophobia into ancient history.

IF BEHAVIORISM GAVE liberals and social reformers great hope that they could recondition intolerant bigots and dissolve intergroup conflict, there was an equal possibility that the bigots might reeducate them. Behaviorism’s emergence in America coincided with the rise of totalitarian states in Europe, especially Pavlov’s own Soviet Union. The same psychology that might be used as a cure could provide a how-to guide for creating xenophobia. In his 1932 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley grasped the risk of such a dystopian world, in which—as he explained to his father—Pavlovian conditioning of children would be undertaken by a dictatorship. Flowers would be associated with shocks and deemed by all to be terrifying. Books would be accompanied by ear-splitting noise and equally dreaded. The state could flip anything it desired from safe to frightening, from loved to hated.

This was not just a fantasy. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon described the way the Soviets broke down dissidents. The possibility of what a former American OSS member, Edward Hunter, nicknamed “brain-washing” in totalitarian states would lurk over the next decades. Pavlov, Hunter claimed, personally gave Lenin the keys to the kingdom of human behavior. A psychiatrist warned that Stalin had developed a special “Pavlovian Front” to indoctrinate the unwitting. For Americans, however, there was no need to travel to Moscow or to a dreamed-up dystopia to witness the effects of such negative conditioning. In 1940, a stunning novel explored the way this process unwittingly operated at home. Entitled Native Son, the ironic title announced its central theme. An American native grew up in an environment where he was treated as a despised and dangerous alien.

The author was Richard Wright. This grandson of slaves was born in 1908 on the Ruckers’ plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, where his father was a sharecropper. Wright’s childhood was filled with loss. His father abandoned the family, and his mother was so poor that she had to place her boy in an orphanage. He had little schooling until the age of twelve, but once enrolled, he excelled. Surrounded by racial insults and the specter of white violence in the Deep South, the nineteen-year-old followed the Great Migration to Chicago. There he fell in with a group of local Marxists, and the scales fell from his eyes. Dehumanizing economic forces had destroyed the inner lives of his fellow Americans, Black and white. Wright began to crank out short pieces for leftist periodicals like New Masses and soaked up all he could.

Wright had a big idea, which he spelled out in his successful application for a 1939 Guggenheim Fellowship. He wanted to write a novel that told the story of “Negro juvenile delinquency on Chicago’s Southside,” as created by the “strange and warped conditions” of segregation and racism. Published a year later, Native Son was greeted by rave reviews. It sold over 200,000 copies in the first three weeks; Look magazine and many others featured Wright. John Houseman and Orson Welles quickly sought the rights for a stage adaptation. However, some were not pleased. James Baldwin, one of Wright’s protégés, condemned his mentor for letting sociological aims overwhelm his artistic obligations. This was a “protest” novel, Baldwin complained, in which the reader never came to understand the main character’s inner life. His crimes were depicted as mere compulsions. This was true, but it missed the larger point. Bigger Thomas was a man whose inner world had been so mutilated that he had little capacity to experience it or share it with others, including the reader. He had been reduced to fear and conditioned responses; those were the elements of his psyche. He did not possess his experiences, they possessed him.

Written in a taut, riveting style, Native Son immediately placed readers inside that wide-eyed, phobic world. The first section, entitled “Fear,” commenced with a Pavlovian shock. “Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!” An alarm bell startles Bigger into consciousness. He wakes alongside a brother, sister, and mother, all crammed into a tiny bedroom in the Black Belt of Chicago. A huge rat appears and runs crazily about, desperately biting and attacking them, and as his sister passes out, Bigger kills it.

This opening scene—with all its references to Watson and Pavlov—lays out in miniature what is to come: Bigger is like a child in an evil psychologist’s lab. The entire Thomas family subsists in a world where constant threats from white predators and poverty keep them on edge. They have only two alternatives: fight or flight. The path taken by Bigger’s religious mother and his fainting sister symbolize two of those paths—capitulation and a retreat into phobia. Bigger takes the other path: he will fight. And, like that rat, his mad, violent dash will be doomed, a protracted act of suicide.

Thanks to a childhood of chronic fear, Bigger’s capacity for inner freedom, empathy, and ethical choice have been strangled. Wright exposes the way Bigger seeks to compensate for his sense of helplessness by adopting the pose of a bully. When he gets a break, he is too broken to use it. Hired by a liberal white family to be their driver, Bigger finds himself in the bedroom of their well-meaning daughter, the drunk, blacked-out Mary Dalton. Panicked that he will be falsely accused of rape when her blind mother enters the room, Bigger smothers Mary to death. This murder is reflexive: “It was not Mary he was reacting to when he felt that fear and shame. Mary had served to set off emotions, emotions conditioned by many Marys. And now that he had killed Mary he felt a lessening of the tension in his muscles.”

When his crime becomes known, Bigger “stared without a thought or an image in his mind. There was just the old feeling, the feeling that he had had all his life; he was black and done wrong; white men were looking at something with which they would soon accuse him. It was the old feeling, hard and constant now, of wanting to grab something and clutch it in his hands and swing it into someone’s face.” Then, however, making the narrative even more disturbing, Bigger rapes and murders his Black girlfriend, just to cover his trail. He has become what white society always said he was, what it conditioned him to be: a violent monster.

After Bigger’s capture, a lynching mob howls outside the courtroom, and he is asked to explain his actions. He can’t. But, in conversation with his communist lawyer, Bigger confesses that his life as a Black man in America has meant one thing: constant, unyielding fear. A Mississippi newspaper covering Bigger’s trial chimes in with the Southern solution of “conditioning Negroes so that they pay deference to the white person.…” “We have found,” the editorialist writes, “that the injection of an element of constant fear has aided us greatly in handling the problem.” That of course was not fiction. That was life for African Americans, especially in the Jim Crow South.

Reviewers picked up on the behaviorist underpinnings of Wright’s masterfully paced tragedy. In the New York Times, one critic noted of Bigger that “it is Mr. Wright’s purpose to show it as a typical kind of social and racial conditioning.” The protagonist does not fully consider his choices; he reacts. In the New York Herald Tribune, the reviewer noted that each of Bigger’s actions is traced back to “a significant reflex, and all of these, finally, to the social set-up that conditioned it.”

For those who might have missed Wright’s behaviorism, a heavy-handed introduction, written by the influential editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club Dorothy Canfield Fisher, pulled back the curtain:

How to produce neuroses in sheep and psychopathic upsets in rats has been known to research psychologists so long that accounts of these experiments have filtered out to us, the general public, through books and periodicals. The process seems to be a simple one: the animal is trained to react in certain ways to certain stimuli and then placed in a situation in which these reactions are impossible.

Fisher went on to explain that some rats give up and others madly bash themselves to death. Without missing a beat, she then turned to the American Youth Commission’s work on Negro youth. This stolid and patronizing exercise was mercifully cut after the first edition, for Fisher seriously understated Richard Wright’s artistry, wrongly reducing his masterpiece to a psychosocial experiment. In fact, Wright’s extraordinary skill, another critic correctly noted, was what took a cardboard notion—Black America as tormented Little Alberts—and made it pulse and pant.

Richard Wright

In 1941, Wright himself weighed in on the controversy in “How Bigger Was Born.” He described growing up in Mississippi alongside many pseudo-tough boys who, having been shocked too often, grasped a moment of freedom in violence, before being duly lynched, maimed, imprisoned, or murdered. Bigger’s “behavioristic patterns,” Wright warned, were not limited to American Blacks. They were the same for many of the poor and maligned around the world.

Native Son remains a deeply unsettling work. It asks the reader to identify either with a brutal killer or with an evil social order. In so doing, it prevents any easy way out. Wright felt his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children, allowed for sentimental reactions in which readers could take the side of victimized Black heroes without grasping the depth of American racism. Native Son allowed for no such easy identifications. The book also understandably made many African Americans deeply uncomfortable, for it suggested that white American terror had made their own people not just fearful but also violent. Worse, it played directly into the myth of the Black rapist.

However, Wright’s confidant, Ralph Ellison, noted that Native Son served an important purpose. “In the novel,” he wrote to Wright, “you sliced deep and opened up the psychic wound,” bringing forth raw emotions that “tear” at our insides but “we Negroes refuse to talk of.…” Native Son shattered the myth of the pastoral, cheery, easygoing African American, those beings often portrayed in Harlem Renaissance works, who emerged from the inferno unscathed. In another impassioned letter, Ellison revealed that Bigger awoke memories of his own lacerating youth, and the way he too tried not to remember and feel. “We are not the numbed,” Ellison defiantly declared, “but the seething.” In the end, being able to remember the source of that rage and pain led the younger writer to note a kind of “pride which springs from the realization that after all the brutalization, starvation, and suffering, we have begun to embrace the experience and master it.” “It makes you want to write and write and write, or murder,” confessed the future author of Invisible Man.

Nevertheless, the immense success of Native Son must have given its author pause. To not tell this story, Wright insisted, would be to allow racism to silence him. But his astronomical sales meant his white countrymen were lapping up this tale of an African American racist. For make no mistake, Bigger is a racist. That was the daring gambit that Richard Wright took up. Deformed and traumatized by a white racist society, Bigger is forced to take his place in their bifurcated symbolic order of white hosts and black strangers, good whites and bad Negroes, as if all the shades and colors of the universe had shrunk into two. To survive, he has been forced to construct an identity that fits in that world and to constantly discriminate based on race. To do anything else under Jim Crow would be madness. When Bigger and his friends “play” white, they talk with stiff demeanors about golf and J. P. Morgan. And despite the fact that Mary Dalton treated Bigger with humanity and kindness, “she looked and acted like all other white folks,” Bigger believes. When asked to explain his murder, Bigger says, “White folks and black folks are strangers. We don’t know what each other is thinking.”

It is only in jail, when Jan, Mary’s boyfriend, and Mr. Max, Bigger’s Marxist lawyer, treat the prisoner with respect, that his own racism melts. “For the first time in his life,” Wright wrote, “a white man became a human being to him; and the reality of Jan’s humanity came in a stab of remorse: he had killed what this man loved and had hurt him.” Through exposure and habituation, behaviorists would have put it, Bigger’s conditioned reflexes gave way.

Bigger Thomas’s epiphany was also, as James Baldwin did not fail to note, a literary disaster. This beautifully paced novel features a climax that includes a tedious, preachy summation by Mr. Max, who goes on and on in Bigger’s defense. It is a telling misstep. How else could Wright trust that his audience would reach these conclusions themselves? “Today, Bigger Thomas and that mob are strangers, yet they hate,” Mr. Max explained. “They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel the deepest feelings in their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in the blind play of social forces.”

Ellison, then a fellow traveler writing for the Daily Worker, could not help but note the strain at the novel’s end. In Mr. Max’s speech, Ellison wrote to Wright, “you were struggling to create a new terminology, i.e. you were trying to state in terms of human values certain ideas, concepts, implicit in Marxist philosophy.” Eight days later, Ellison reported that, despite this heavy-handedness, many in their circle still missed the point, which was that Bigger was “more human than those who sent him to his death, for it was they, not he, who fostered the dehumanizing conditions that shaped his personality.”

For those who wondered, Richard Wright had not neglected to also describe the toll on the white perpetrators in a racist society. In his 1938 collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright portrayed how this symbolic order turned them into Pavlovian killers. “Big Boy Leaves Home” would seem to advertise a coming-of-age story. Big Boy, along with three of his buddies, Bobo, Lester, and Buck, go skinny-dipping in a pond. Joshing and roughhousing, the boys tease each other and mess around. However, when they are spied by a white woman, the story plunges into horror. White Southerners also operated out of deeply conditioned fear. Black males, they have been taught, cannot stop themselves from raping white women. In reality, from the time of the first enslaved Africans’ arrival on, white masters far more frequently raped enslaved women; somehow, this historical reality had been magically turned into its opposite. Stimulus: naked, Black adolescents splashing in a pond. Conditioned reaction: the white woman shrieks. Danger closes in. The boys scramble out of the water. The woman’s husband, Jim Harvey, grabs a gun to “defend” his wife. He blows away Lester and Buck. Big Boy struggles for his life, and in the process Jim Harvey is shot. Later, from a hiding spot, Big Boy witnesses the tar and feathering, the burning, and then the lynching of Bobo. Our hero leaves home and three dead playmates, all washed away in a torrent of conditioned racist fear and hatred.

Jim Harvey and his wife cannot see impish children splashing and joking. They cannot feel anything other than fear and rage. Bigger Thomas cannot recognize how Mary Dalton, in her youthful, awkward ways, strove to treat him as a human being. He too feels conditioned fear and rage. The cymbals crash, the buzzers sound, and three centuries of racist hatred make them all react in a scripted manner. Racial fear and hatred have soaked so deeply into America’s social fabric, it seemed, not even children would be spared.

BEHAVIORIST THEORIES on the conditioned fear of strangers opened a Pandora’s box. How were these responses created, stoked, and unleashed? At the University of Chicago, an influential group of sociologists sought answers. Their efforts began in 1908 when a wealthy heiress, Helen Culver, donated $50,000 to Professor William Thomas for the study of bias against immigrants and other races. He traveled around Eastern Europe doing fieldwork, before deciding to study the problem in his backyard, with Chicago’s community of Polish immigrants. Like most early-twentieth-century sociologists, Thomas hoped to use quantitative methods, but he supplemented these with oral histories, documents, and letters. While flirting with evolutionary points of view, by 1909 Thomas concluded that “the inherited mind of different races is about the same.” The differences of intelligence within races was greater than between them, and much of those distinctions were simply the acquired result of racial prejudice. Environmental forces ruled.

The Chicago school produced work that often meshed neatly with behaviorism and the work of their former colleague, John Watson. Irrationally phobic reactions to foreigners were mistaken, conditioned responses learned in a social milieu. Reactions of fear, disgust, and hatred were wrongly linked to foreigners, but why? Thomas’s student Emory Bogardus dedicated himself to that question.

Born to Illinois farmers in 1882, Bogardus attended Northwestern University, where to make ends meet, he worked at a settlement house then a boy’s club. After getting to know immigrant laborers and “juvenile delinquents,” he grew interested in their plight. He enrolled in the psychology department at the University of Chicago but was taken by the witty and wide-ranging Professor Thomas, who encouraged Bogardus to switch to sociology. After taking a job at the University of Southern California, Bogardus published his method of quantifying stranger anxiety, which he called the “Social Distance Scale.” It measured the discomfort Billy experienced when consorting with his brother, then his neighbor, then a stranger in a store, then someone with a different religion, country, or race. A team fanned out and administered this scale to 8000 Americans.

In 1928, Bogardus published Immigration and Race Attitudes, which reported on responses to an array of out-groups, including foreign nationals (English, Japanese, Mexican), non-Christian believers (Hindus, Russian Jews, German Jews), and America’s historical outsiders (“Negroes,” “Mulattos,” and “Indians”). He inquired about early formative experiences that might make the subjects associate fear or anger with a stranger. A few could come up with something: a Black neighbor killed my dog, one reported, and I’ve hated them ever since. Chased by a Chinese man in the woods as a young girl, a woman lived in fear of Asians. However, most bigots could muster up no trauma, no personal associations, nothing. Many detested entire ethnicities whose members they had never met. The most hated group in America, Bogardus discovered, highlighted this point. It was not the “Negro” (who came in a respectable second) but the “Turk.” Among Turk haters, most confessed that “they had never seen a Turk, much less did they know even one.” And yet this animosity ran deep.

Why? Bogardus had a thesis, one that made him credit the flurry of stories—145 in the New York Times in 1915 alone—that had focused on the Armenian genocide. Americans read “lurid headlines,” Bogardus suggested, and tales about “the exotic life behind the mysterious veil and barred window.” It was impossible, one respondent confessed, to divorce the Turk, in general, from their Muslim religion as well as from their killing of Armenians and their nasty habit of despoiling young girls. After watching a movie at age seven, another reported, he concluded that Turks had no morals. Another confessed that his most hated group—Mexicans—had been discovered at school. “I learned that Mexico was a lazy, hot, dirty country,” he confessed. He had never set eyes on a Mexican.

Racial and ethnic hatred, in some cases it seemed, could be simply learned. It could be picked up in schools or the papers or the motion pictures. However, if that was true, how did that mesh with behaviorism? Where were the crashing cymbals that made one tremble before the Turks? These were just ideas, and according to Watson, ideas did nothing. They didn’t even really exist. And yet here were 8000 subjects with a lot of hate that did exist. Bogardus concluded that phobias were formed by both frightening experiences and also by what he delicately called “derivative” experiences. In those cases, consumers of media felt as if they had been startled, wounded, or terrorized. They reacted as if these had been their own experiences. “The person who relies heavily on second-hand and hear-say racial reports usually gives evidence,” he wrote, “of having entered imaginatively into them so often and so thoroughly, that they seem to have become his own personal experiences.” Imaginatively? The imagination? Was there any role for that faculty in the world of Little Albert?

In Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, the unwitting husband of an African American woman, John Bellew, jovially admits that he has never met a “Negro.” However, he quickly adds, “ ‘I read in the papers about them. Always robbing and killing people. And,’ he adds darkly, ‘worse.’ ” It was as if Little Albert had become a father who taught his children to fear white rats. Was such a heritage equivalent to Pavlovian training? Even Bogardus’s phrase “derivative” experience seemed to be forced, or at best mystifying, since traditionally such “derivatives” were not considered experiences but rather ideas, the very element of the mind that John Watson and his ilk dismissed.

Despite these contradictions, Bogardus held the same hope as the behaviorists. “Derivative race antipathy is all-compelling,” Bogardus concluded, “until dislodged later by a series of direct personal experiences of an opposite character.” Exposure would lead to habituation. Meet the Turk. Know the Turk. No longer fear the Turk. However, Bogardus’s sobering data also called that into question. Of the 4290 examples of stranger hate tracked over a ten-year period, only 8.9 percent registered any alteration at all.

Behaviorism created a powerful model for understanding the way intense fear could latch on to a stranger. Yet Emory Bogardus’s results showed that, more often than not, a quieter route led to xenophobia. When James Baldwin complained that there was something missing in Richard Wright’s portrayal of Bigger Thomas, it was precisely that—an inner life filled with ideas, imagined fantasies, intentions, desires, and beliefs. And it was there, it seemed, that many, perhaps most, of this antipathy resided. If behaviorism explained how some xenophobes were formed by traumatic “fight or flight” reactions linked to a stranger, something more serpentine was at work in many of these cases, where the animus took nourishment from a storehouse of fact and fantasy, symbols, stories, and myths. If one were to understand xenophobia, that cognitive realm would need to be understood. For while less dramatic than Pavlov’s conditioned responses, it was ideas, as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow knew, that were often worshipped on the way to the slaughter.