Milo Hastings: Difference between revisions
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Two of Milo’s science fiction works are known to survive: ''In the Clutch of the War-God'' (1911) and ''City of Endless Night'' (1920). There may be others. His son, Warren, remembers mention of another work about the influence of religion and the need for a proper diet. If there is another work it likely appeared in serialized form in a Bennarr Macfadden publication, as was the case with Milo’s known works. |
Two of Milo’s science fiction works are known to survive: ''In the Clutch of the War-God'' (1911) and ''City of Endless Night'' (1920). There may be others. His son, Warren, remembers mention of another work about the influence of religion and the need for a proper diet. If there is another work it likely appeared in serialized form in a Bennarr Macfadden publication, as was the case with Milo’s known works. |
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=== Clutch === |
=== Clutch of the War-God === |
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''Clutc''h was serialized in three parts in the July, August, and September 1911 issues of ''Physical Culture'' magazine. It was never published in book form. What is known of the origin of Clutch comes from the Sam Moskowitz article “Bernarr Macfadden and His Obsession with Science-Fiction” that appeared in ''Fantasy Commentator'' in 1986. Macfadden at the time (1910) was under a suspended jail sentence for an obscenity conviction related to a beauty contest. He commissioned Milo to write a futuristic fiction story promoting his (Macfadden’s) views on physical health and scolding the federal government, hoping to shame officials into granting him a pardon. Macfadden wrote a signed introduction to the story: |
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Some predictions in Clutch are remarkably accurate. Modern aircraft carriers are anticipated as is industrial agriculture. As a polemic the story served to further antagonize the government against Macfadden. Milo continued to write for Macfadden for years to come. |
Some predictions in Clutch are remarkably accurate. Modern aircraft carriers are anticipated as is industrial agriculture. As a polemic the story served to further antagonize the government against Macfadden. Milo continued to write for Macfadden for years to come. |
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=== City of Endless Night === |
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The science fiction work for which Hastings is best known is City of Endless Night. It first appeared as the story Children of Kultur serialized in True Story Magazine in seven installments from May to November, 1919. The word kultur, German for culture, had been made infamous by Allied propaganda in World War I. After Woodrow Wilson’s reelection in 1916 there was a concerted effort on the part of his administration to convince the citizenry to go to war. A Committee on Public Information was established that produced pro-war and anti-German propaganda. There were pamphlets with titles such as “The German Whisper” and “Conquest and Kultur”. There were movies with titles like “The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin” and “Wolves of Kultur”. |
The science fiction work for which Hastings is best known is City of Endless Night. It first appeared as the story Children of Kultur serialized in True Story Magazine in seven installments from May to November, 1919. The word kultur, German for culture, had been made infamous by Allied propaganda in World War I. After Woodrow Wilson’s reelection in 1916 there was a concerted effort on the part of his administration to convince the citizenry to go to war. A Committee on Public Information was established that produced pro-war and anti-German propaganda. There were pamphlets with titles such as “The German Whisper” and “Conquest and Kultur”. There were movies with titles like “The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin” and “Wolves of Kultur”. |
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Revision as of 18:45, 16 January 2007
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Milo Milton Hastings (b. June 28, 1884 in Farmington KS; d. February 25, 1957 in Tarrytown NY) was an American author, nutritionist, and inventor. Hastings was married twice and had three children. Some of his writing is available in book form and on Project Gutenberg.
Editor and Writer
Hastings spent the bulk of his professional years as the food editor for Bernarr Macfadden of Physical Culture magazine. He wrote City of Endless Night, first published in 1919, an early classic of science fiction. He wrote on many other diverse topics, among them: The Dollar Hen in 1909 (chicken husbandry), Class of '29 in 1936 (political commentary), urban planning, and philosophy.
...more coming...
Science Fiction Writing
Two of Milo’s science fiction works are known to survive: In the Clutch of the War-God (1911) and City of Endless Night (1920). There may be others. His son, Warren, remembers mention of another work about the influence of religion and the need for a proper diet. If there is another work it likely appeared in serialized form in a Bennarr Macfadden publication, as was the case with Milo’s known works.
Clutch of the War-God
Clutch was serialized in three parts in the July, August, and September 1911 issues of Physical Culture magazine. It was never published in book form. What is known of the origin of Clutch comes from the Sam Moskowitz article “Bernarr Macfadden and His Obsession with Science-Fiction” that appeared in Fantasy Commentator in 1986. Macfadden at the time (1910) was under a suspended jail sentence for an obscenity conviction related to a beauty contest. He commissioned Milo to write a futuristic fiction story promoting his (Macfadden’s) views on physical health and scolding the federal government, hoping to shame officials into granting him a pardon. Macfadden wrote a signed introduction to the story:
FOREWORD: In this strange story of another day, the author has "dipped into the future" and viewed with his mind's eye the ultimate effect of America's self-satisfied complacency, and her persistent refusal to heed the lessons of Oriental progress. I can safely promise the reader who takes up this unique recital of the twentieth century warfare, that his interest will be sustained to the very end by the interesting deductions and the keen insight into the possibilities of the present trend of international affairs exhibited by the author. — Bennarr Macfadden.
The story is subtitled “The Tale of the Orient’s Invasion of the Occident, as Chronicled in the Humaniculture Society’s ‘History of the Twentieth Century.’” Japan has a superior society and government but suffers from food shortages and excess population. They go to war with the United States successfully invading the central states with airplanes transported across the Pacific on flat-topped ships. Here are some excepts:
But with all her material glory, there was not strength in the American sinews, nor endurance in her lungs, nor vigor in the product of her lions. Her people were herded together in great cities, where they slept in gigantic apartment houses, like mud swallows in a sand bank. They over-ate of artificial food that was made in great factories. They over-dressed with tight-fitting unsanitary clothing made by the sweated labor of the diseased and destitute. They over-drank of old liquors born of ancient ignorance and of new concoctions born of prostituted science. They smoked and perfumed and doped with chemicals and cosmetics — the supposed virtues of which were blazoned forth on earth and sky day and night.
Some predictions in Clutch are remarkably accurate. Modern aircraft carriers are anticipated as is industrial agriculture. As a polemic the story served to further antagonize the government against Macfadden. Milo continued to write for Macfadden for years to come.
City of Endless Night
The science fiction work for which Hastings is best known is City of Endless Night. It first appeared as the story Children of Kultur serialized in True Story Magazine in seven installments from May to November, 1919. The word kultur, German for culture, had been made infamous by Allied propaganda in World War I. After Woodrow Wilson’s reelection in 1916 there was a concerted effort on the part of his administration to convince the citizenry to go to war. A Committee on Public Information was established that produced pro-war and anti-German propaganda. There were pamphlets with titles such as “The German Whisper” and “Conquest and Kultur”. There were movies with titles like “The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin” and “Wolves of Kultur”.
Children of Kultur was later revised, retitled City of Endless Night and published by Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., copyright 1919, 1920. It was reprinted in 1974 by Hyperion Press, Inc. with an introduction by Sam Moskowitz who edited a reprint series of two dozen science fiction classics for Hyperion. Here is an excerpt from his introduction putting the work in its place in the development of science fiction:
Of the pioneering anti-Utopian novels, one of the finest and least known is City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings, first published in book form by Dodd, Mead in 1920. This unusual work, filled with uncanny prescience about impending events, was born out of the experience of World War I and the impact on Americans of imperial Germany’s statist creed, which believed in the subjugation of the individual for the sake of the nation. On all counts of inventiveness, social significance, narrative flow and intrinsic worth, it ranks with When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells, Messiah of the Cylinder by Victor Rousseau and We by Eugene Zimiatin, all written and published about the same period.
City of Endless Night was written as World War I was ending and anticipates the resurgence of Germany and the rise of fascism. City of Endless Night is one of the works cited in an article on “Literary Propheteering” by Murray Teigh Bloom that appeared in the February 1, 1941 Saturday Review of Literature:
Back in 1920 there was another prophet for modern Germany. His name was Milo M. Hastings and he put his guesses in a fast-paced novel called "The City of Endless Night." The city was Berlin of the year 2041. It had become an entirely roofed-in city of sixty levels, sheltering 300,000,000 sun-starved humans. Since 1941 the city had held out against the World State (here it is again) which tried to bomb it into line. Hohenzollerns ruled this tight world; ruled it with the blessings of "autocratic socialism," "the perfect government which we Germans have evolved from proletarian socialism."
Other Hastings bulls'-eyes:
o A rigidly controlled press. ("Every paper, every book and every picture originates in the shops of the Information Staff . . . the writing is done by specially trained workers of the Information Service. ... ")
o State-fixed diets, on a calories-for-work-done basis.
o Sham "Ja" elections.
o Nazi religion: "We supermen long ago repudiated that spineless conception of the soft Christian God and the servile Jewish Jesus." However, "Jesus’ father was an adventurer from Central Asia, a man of Teutonic blood."
o The importance of "pure and un-defiled pedigrees" for marriage partners.
o Eugenic breeding.
o A vast labor corps, whose members are trained from childhood to do only manual labor.
o Racial theories. "We have long known that all those great men whom the inferior races claim as their geniuses are of truth of German blood and that the fighting quality of the other races is due to the German blood that was scattered by our early immigrants."
Some say that City of Endless Night was the original inspiration for the Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the classic science fiction movie of 1927.
Inventor
Hastings received patent Serial No. 911,875 in 1909 for a humidity measuring device. He tried to patent a forced draft chicken incubator in 1912. The technology was later patented by another party. When that patent was challenged the matter went all the way to the Supreme Court and the patent ruled invalid on the basis of Hastings' prior art. Another invention was Winni-Winks, a processed food snack.
...more coming...
Chicken Husbandry
...more coming...
Weeniwinks
Hastings’ interest in healthy eating and his proclivity as an inventor lead to his creation of “Weeniwinks” (also spelled in the early 30’s. The idea was to create a processed food as a snack for kids that would be good for them. That meant the ingredients were based on natural grains and no sugar. At the time such a product did not exist. Milo tried many mixtures of ingredients before hitting on a promising combination or wheat and corn. He used his young children and their friends as taste testers.
The technical problem to be solved in the manufacture of the product was how to cook the ingredients without their sticking to the mold. Milo tried several possibilities and wound up using ordinary cast iron. The development of the product was done in his compound in Tarrytown, New York where a pilot plant was built. For bulk production a factory was built on the family farm in Effingham, Kansas. With the deepening of the Great Depression the monies to continue the venture were not forthcoming and the factory was abandoned. Later in 1938 Hastings tried to promote the idea in Russia.[1] A test-tube filled with Weeniwinks remains in the memorabilia of one of Hastings’ sons:
Urban Planning
Hastings was one of a number of reformers engaged in the campaign to reinvent housing according to principles of greater efficiency. "A Solution of the Housing Problem in the United States" was his entry in a competition for the "The Best Solution of the Housing Problem," sponsored by the American Institute of Architects and the Ladies Home Journal. It was awarded one of the two top prizes. [2] Hastings was enthusiastic about the Roadtown project, a linear city proposed by Edgar Chambless, and wrote a review of the project for The Independent, May 5, 1910.
...more coming...
Broadway Connection
Though a prolific writer Hastings never learned to touch-type. This led to a never-ending search for typing help. That was how he came to be friends with Billy Rose. Billy Rose is remembered mainly as a Broadway impresario, writer and producer of many shows. He was born William Samuel Rosenberg in 1899. His first claim to fame was as a stenographer. He was trained in Gregg Shorthand by John Robert Gregg himself and at age 16 won a high-speed dictation contest. During World War I he was the chief stenographer for financier Bernard Baruch, head of the War Industries Board. Somewhere Billy Rose and Milo Hastings met and hit it off. On the train between New York and Washington Milo would dictate and Billy would record. In the 1920s Billy began to write songs. Milo thought the songs were good but he needed a stage name and suggested “Billy Rose”. Billy would bring his girlfriends over to Milo’s apartment in New York and ask Milo what he thought. When Billy married Fanny Brice in 1929 Milo and his wife Sybil were wedding guests.
In the early 1920s Hastings had penned a comedy-drama with Leslie Burton Blades. Evidently the play was never produced. A copy exists in the archives of the New York Public Library Performing Arts Theatre.
Hastings was also acquainted with Ned Wayburn the head of the Ned Wayburn Studios of Stage Dancing. Family lore holds that much of Wayburn’s 1925 book The Art of Stage Dancing was actually written by Hastings.
In 1936 during the Great Depression Hastings and Orrie Lashin (secretary to Walter Lippmann) wrote the play Class of ’29 under the auspices of the WPA Federal Theatre Project. The play is about some college graduates unable to find work during the depression and their spiritual unrest. Heywood Broun devoted one of his It Seems to Me columns to accusations that the play was socialist propaganda. The play enjoyed a brief run in New York in the Spring of 1936 and was also produced a few other places around the country.
Family
Milo Milton Hastings was the youngest of the seven children of Z. S. and Rosetta (Butler) Hastings. Only four of the boys survived to adulthood. Each of the children had double initials. "This happened so with the two first, with the others it was purposed so."[3] His father was a preacher and farmer in Kansas where the family was raised. His mother's father was Pardee Butler, an abolitionist preacher who came to Kansas before the Civil War and is remembered in Kansas history for being set adrift on the Missouri River for his beliefs. [4] After the Civil War the family became involved with the temperance movement and anti-smoking campaigns. Milo rebelled against his family's religious beliefs, athough his writing is sprinked with biblical references.
Milo married Beatrice Hill in 1906. They soon separated and were divorced in 1913 [5]after he had his first children by Carmen Horowitz. He married a second time in 1916 to Sybil Butler, a first cousin and had two more children. There are three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
After living many places in his youth, Hastings bought an old quarry in Tarrytown, New York in 1920 and lived there until his death in 1957. The quarry was given to the town of Tarrytown and in now a park. Milo is buried with some of his family in the Pardee Cemetery in Cummings, Atchison County, Kansas.
Notes
- ^ From Hastings' letter to Everett Taft, June 13, 1938.
- ^ The Joke About Housing, Charles Harris Whitaker, ed. Boston, Marshall Jones Co., 1920, p. vi-vii.
- ^ Quoted from the Autobiography of Z. S. Hastings (privately published), p. 47.
- ^ Butler describes his life and times in pre Civil War Kansas in Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler, Rosetta Butler Hastings, Cincinnati, Standard Publishing Company, 1889
- ^ Milo's divorce proceedings "Beatrice Hastings v. Milo M. Hastings", Index number 35,293 for the year 1912, Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York contains much personal information about that period of Milo's life.
Bibliography
- Wayburn, Ned (1925). The Art of Stage Dancing. New York: Ned Wayburn Studios of Stage Dancing.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - Moskowitz, Sam (Fall 1986). "Bernarr Macfadden and His Obsession with Science-Fiction". Fantasy Commentator. 5 (4): 261–280.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - Hastings, Milo (1919). The Olympian System of Physical and Mental Development. Chicago: The Olympian System.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - Hastings, Milo (1920). City of Endless Night. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (1937). Class of '29. New York: Dramatists Play Service.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - Hastings, Milo (September 14, 1909). "A Cold-Storage Evaporimeter". U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Animal Industry Circular 149. G.P.O.
{{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (1919). The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast. New York: Brann Publishers.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - Hastings, Milo (1914). "The Continuous House". Sunset, The Pacific Monthly.
{{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (1911). The Dollar Hen. Syracuse: National Poultry Publishing Company.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (April 7, 1909). "The Egg Trade of the United States". U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Animal Industry Circular 140. G.P.O.
{{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (1931). "Food, Health, Happiness (series)". New York Graphic. Macfadden Publications.
{{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (1937). High Blood Pressure: the Menace to Life that Begins at Forty. Chicago: Brownlee and Shaw.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (1962). History of the Department of Poultry Husbandry, 1900-1960. Manhattan, Kansas: Kansas State University Press.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (1910). "Home Course in Poultry Keeping". The Mansfield News.
{{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (September 18, 1915). "A Million Chicks to the Acre". Scientific American.
{{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Sykes, A.H. (July 1994). "Milo Hastings - An Appreciation". World Poultry Science Journal. World Poultry Science Association.
{{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (July-September, 1911). "In the Clutch of the War God". Physical Culture.
{{cite journal}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (December 1916). "The New Chivalry". Metropolitan Magazine.
{{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (1924). Physical Culture Cook Book. New York: Macfadden Publications.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - Hastings, Milo (1929). Physical Culture Food Directory. New York: Macfadden Publications.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Hastings, Milo (May 5, 1910). "Roadtown: A Multiple Home". The Independent.
{{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Whitaker, Charles Harris (1920). The Joke About Housing. Boston: Marshall Jones Co.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - Hastings, Milo (192-). The Who-Ams. New York Public Library Performing Arts Theatre.
{{cite book}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help)
External links
- US patent 911875, Milo Hastings, "Apparatus for Measuring the Humidity In Or Determining the Evaporating Power of the Air", issued 1909-02-09
- Collins, George: Collection on Linear City Planning at Harvard Design School
- The Dollar Hen at Norton Creek Press
- U.S. Supreme Court SMITH v. HALL, 301 U.S. 216 (1937) at FindLaw