Freud & The Cocaine Episode in Context

Coca in Context: From The Andes to Paris & Atlanta

An early documentation of the use of the medicinal properties of the coca plant came from the Spanish friar, Vincente de Valverde, reporting on the importance of the coca tree to the Incas:

"...coca, which is the leaf of a small tree that resembles the sumac found in our own Castile, is one thing that the Indians are ne'er without in their mouths, that they say sustains them and gives them refreshment, so that, even under the sun they feel not the heat, and it is worth its weight in gold in these parts, accounting for the major portion of the tithes."¹

 It was not long until quantities of the medicinal plant were being exported from South America to Europe and the United States, where Western "medicine men" began making coca infused beverages and tonics. Historian Howard Markel points to an 1817 article published Gentleman's Magazine to illustrate the European fascination with coca:

"[The Indians] masticate Coca and undergo the greatest fatigue without any injury to health or bodily vigor. They want neither butcher nor baker, nor brewer, no distiller, nor fuel, nor culinary utensils."²

According to Markel, the article called for immediate scientific research to uncover the wisdom of the power of Coca.

By the mid-nineteenth century, coca leaves were being analyzed for their chemical structure. In Germany, Albert Niemann earned his doctorate by developing a method for extracting the coca alkaloid from the leaf in 1860.³  As academics and pharmaceutical laboratories were investigating the chemical properties of coca, medicine men of a different sort were developing tonics and a variety of coca-infused beverages. One of the most popular and successful of these libations was Vin Mariani, a coca wine developed by the French chemist Angelo Mariani. By the turn of the century, Vin Mariani had become the choice intoxicant of many celebrities and artists. Mariani published a collection of celebrity endorsements for his wine in a book entitled Portraits from Album Mariani.⁴

In 1859 the influential Italian neurologist and fiction writer, Paolo Mantegazza, published an influential paper On the Hygenic and Medicinal Virtues of Coca.⁵  Sigmund Freud was an avid reader of Mantegazza's fiction.⁶

The most famous of all cocaine drinks of the 19th century did not appear in France, but rather, in the United States. John Smith Pemberton, a disabled, Civil War veteran had developed a severe addiction to morphine, the standard pain medication of the day. Having read a number of research studies on the use of Cocaine to overcome morphine addiction, Pemberton developed a Vin Mariani spinoff that he marketed as French Wine Coca. Pemberton's cocaine infused wine tonic enjoyed a short-lived popularity when, in 1886 Fulton County, Georgia, banned the sale of alcohol. Because Pemberton's manufacturing plant was located in Fulton County, he substituted the alcohol with kola nut extract, patenting Coca-Cola as a health drink to be sold in pharmacies. Coca-cola contained cocaine until 1903 when the manufacturer began using spent coca leaves which had the cocaine extracted.⁷ 

By the early 20th century, cocaine was widely used as an anesthetic. It was eventually replaced for use in surgery with Novocaine, a new (novo) anesthetic that did not have the euphoric, addictive qualities of cocaine.

Using the Google Ngram viewer, we can see that the word "coca" entered the published literature in the 16th century. The word "cocaine" appeared in publication in the mid 19th century. This is partly due to the development of the manufacturing and sales of refined cocaine powder by the Parke, Davis & Co. pharmaceutical manufacturers. The powdered cocaine produced by Parke, Davis & Co. was applied as a topical anesthetic (a paste brushed on to the desired area), or dissolved in water to taken orally. Cocaine injections were used to deliver the anesthetic in surgery and became more widespread in recreational use in the late 19th century. "Snorting" the cocaine powder did not become popularize until the mid-20th century.

By the 1880s cocaine was a popular additive in beverages, toothache powders, teas, as well as a variety of other products. It was hardly unknown by the public in both Europe and the United States. What was unclear was that it had addictive properties.

The Young Dr. Freud's First Medical Publications

In 1883 the 27-year-old Dr. Sigmund Freud, a newly minted medical doctor, was serving as resident physician at The First Psychiatric Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital, in Austria. He was engaged to be married; his letters describe an eager, young, professional who harbored dreams of scientific fame and a desire to establish himself financially in the anticipation of marriage and a family. His love letters to his betrothed, Martha Bernays, reveal the young doctor's enthusiasm for research, discovery, and learning. According to his biographer, Ernest Jones, the first mention of cocaine was found in a letter written to Martha on April 21, 1884.

"I have been reading about cocaine, the essential constituent of coca leaves which some Indian tribes chew to enable them to resist privations and hardships. A German has been employing it with soldiers and has reported that it increases their energy and capacity to endure. I am procuring some myself and will try it with cases of heart disease and also of nervous exhaustion, particularly in the miserable condition after the withdrawal of morphium (Dr. Fleischl). Perhaps others are working at it; perhaps nothing will come of it. But I shall certainly try it, and you know that when one perseveres, sooner or later one succeeds. We do not need more than one such lucky hit to be able to think of setting up house. But don't be too sure that it must succeed this time. You know, the temperament of an investigator needs two fundamental qualities: he must be sanguine in the attempt, and critical in the work."⁸

The letter to Martha shows a young professional who is eager to establish himself professionally and

to begin a family with his fiancé. We also take note of his mention of Dr. Fleischl's morphine addiction treatment. Dr. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow was a colleague and friend of Sigmund's who had accidentally sliced his thumb while conducting an autopsy. Freud's biographers point out that the young Doctor Freud's interest in the mystical coca plant was not only driven by a strong desire for professional security and scientific notoriety, but also a devotion to help his friend, Dr. Fleischl, through a debilitating morphine addiction.

Sigmund had previously attempted a scientific breakthrough with using gold chloride to dye tissue slides for microscopic viewing. Having failed to achieve the professional renown that was necessary for both his scientific and family plans, he turned his eye to investigating the uses of the Incan plant for the treatment of morphine addiction and depression. Freud first ordered one gramme of cocaine hydrochloride from the pharmaceutical company Merck of Darmstadt, Germany in 1884. As was a common research practice of the time, Freud tried one-twentieth of a gramme (Coca-Cola originally contained about 4.3 milligrams per six-ounces)⁹ of cocaine, the equivalent to about five, 12-ounce bottles of Pemberton's Coca-Cola drink) on himself. Jones reports that Freud "found it turned the bad mood he was in into cheerfulness and gave him the feeling of having dined well 'so that there is nothing at all one need bother about,' but without robbing him of any energy fro exercise or work."¹⁰

Sigmund's research was reported in his first major medical article Über Coca published in 1885. The article praised the uses of coca for depression, morphine addiction, and hastily mentioned cocaine's anesthetic qualities, which would become the primary medical use for the drug. Freud's first patient was his friend, Dr. Fleischl-Marxow. Markel describes that the initial results were "nothing short of miraculous," and that by the end of the month-long "cocaine therapy" Fleischl's morphine use was gone. Unfortunately, the addictive qualities of cocaine were only then trickling-in through the scientific community and Fleischl develop a cocaine addiction, which he then gave up and returned to morphine. Dr. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow eventually died at the young age of 45.

From Medicine to Psychoanalysis 

Ernest Jones tells us of Freud's lifelong regret for prescribing cocaine to his close friend. While Freud regretted that he could not help his friend overcome his morphine addiction, he also seems to have attributed the addictive quality of cocaine and other substances more to the individual than to the drug. A theme that remains in psychodynamic addictions treatment today is the idea of an "addictive personality," which explains why some people become addicted to substances while others do not. Freud viewed his friend Dr. Fleischl as someone who had an addictive personality, and thus could not be treated with cocaine nor morphine. Perhaps in a classic example of denial, Freud did not see himself as the addictive type, despite the fact that he smoked up to 20 cigars a day.

Although his enthusiastic praise of cocaine quickly disappears from his love letters to Martha, he does mention using cocaine in 4 of nearly 300 letters that he wrote to his main confidant of this time, Dr. Wilhelm Fliess. In a letter to Fleiss dated May 30, 1893 Freud mentions using cocaine to successfully treat a headache. On January 24, 1895, Freud described using "a lot of" an anesthetic cocaine paste to treat the pain and swelling associated with nasal infection. In letters dated April 26 and 27, 1895, he again briefly mentions using cocaine to treat pus that was forming in his nasal passage due to a chronic infection. Finally, on October 26, 1896, Freud tells Fliess, "incidentally, the cocaine brush has been completely put aside." This is in reference to using the brush to apply the cocaine paste as an anesthetic. No mention of cocaine use was made again in any of Freud's correspondence, many of which where much more intimate in nature than any censorship of cocaine use would have warranted. The last word on cocaine was 1896 four years before his first publication on psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams.

When one searches The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, one finds that "cocaine" occurs about 26 times in Freud's writings. Most of these references occur in his seminal psychoanalytic text, The Interpretation of Dreams. The mention of cocaine in The Interpretation of Dreams comes from the retelling and analysis of a dream that serves as the book's central topic of analysis. It is known as Irma's Injection.¹¹

Irma's Injection is the "model dream" Freud used to illustrate the process of psychoanalytic dream analysis. To understand the dream analysis, one must also understand the real-life scenario that played-out between Drs. Freud and Fliess, and their patient, Emma Eckstein. It is important to note that Irma's Injection has little to do with cocaine, which had been used as an anesthetic during her surgery and as a post-operative pain management, and had a lot to do with the guilt Freud felt for malpractice with both Eckstein (Fliess forgot to remove the surgical gauze after surgery and nearly killed his patient) and his friend, the now deceased, Dr. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow.

Presentism & Yellow Scholarship

Freud's Cocaine Episode has been the topic of discussion in university classrooms for over a century. For reasons that are sometimes rather superficial, it seems that some professors and authors exaggerate and sensationalize topics in an attempt to make them more appealing to students, or to promote a certain attitude. With Sigmund Freud, the two most common cliches have to do with cocaine addiction and sexual perversion. When professors and authors, many of whom might be relying solely on secondary source materials and biased opinions of their own teachers, exaggerate or sensationalize the scholarship for dramatic effect they are doing a disservice  not only to the theorist they present to their students, but also to their students themselves.

Reviewing the current evidence, there is little basis to promote the theory that Sigmund Freud was addicted to cocaine. There is evidence that he used cocaine between 1884 and 1895 for either stimulation, mood enhancement, or pain relief. In the context of 19th century writers and thinkers, the use and abuse of cocaine by artists and thinkers was the practice, rather than the exception. One must be careful of presentist attitudes when critically evaluating historic episodes. All evidence suggests that Freud had stopped using cocaine for any purpose in 1895, which predates any of his psychoanalytic writings by four to five years.

During the newspaper circulation wars of the early 20th century, the practice of sensationalism and crude exaggeration was used to sell more newspapers. Scholars have a term for this practice;  yellow journalism. It seems that we too, in academics, need a term to describe the misrepresentation of academic research in the attempt to "sell" an idea. I propose the term yellow scholarship, and put forth the story of Freud's cocaine episode as one of its foremost examples.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of  the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1986.

Freud, Sigmund. The Letters of Sigmund Freud. New York: Dover, 1992.

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: Norton, 1988.

Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. New York: Pelican, 1953.

Markel, Howard. An Anatomy of Addiction. New York: Pantheon, 2011.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904. Translated by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1985.

Direct questions, comments, & corrections to Matthew Giobbi.

A Chronology of Media Psychology Research

Research and discussion of the media has taken place long before the designation of media psychology as a field of study. The humanities and social sciences have discussed the implications of media since the written text overtook the oral tradition. Philosophers as early as Plato explored the implication of the switch from an oral to a written culture. The influence of mass media has been discussed since the entrance of the movable type printing press in the 15th century. Although thinking about media has taken place for 2,500 years, how we think about media has changed over time.

We will begin our investigation in Ancient Greece. Early philosophers discussed not only the use of persuasion and rhetoric in speaking and writing, they also considered the psychological effects of media including speaking, writing, visual arts, and music. The sophist explored how the way something is said affects how it is received. This research in rhetorical analysis continues in contemporary media studies. Plato (427-347 B.C.E.) discussed the influence of music and visual art on the individual and groups. He warned against the power of poetry and even advised on which music to avoid when sad, angry, or happy.

Perhaps one of the most extensive philosophical critiques in media comes from Plato in the dialogue The Phaedrus. Written around 379 B.C.E., this dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus explores the merits of speaking over writing. A fundamental text of media studies, The Phaedrus also explores rhetoric and the power of language. In The Phaedrus, Plato also has his character Socrates describe his theory of the soul, or personality. This dialogue is one of the essential texts for thinking about media and the individual and culture.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) is another Ancient Greek thinker on media. Ranging in topics from political rhetoric to how we come to make meaning, Aristotle is frequently cited by contemporary media philosophers. Some of his most referenced works for media psychologists are: De Anima, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Rhetorica, Politica, and De Poetica.

Philosophical discourse on media continues to be a prominent area of study. From Ancient Greece, through the Roman Empire, Medieval Scholasticism, Enlightenment Modernism, Romanticism, and existentialism, through contemporary Postmodern theory, much of media research is informed by philosophy. A few names from philosophy that you will encounter include: G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek.

Sociologists and political theorists have a long tradition of media critical media research. Take for example this passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1840 text, Democracy in America.

“In France the space allotted to commercial advertisements is very limited, and… the essential part of the journal is the politics of the day. In America three quarters of the enormous sheet are filled with advertisements and the remainder is frequently occupied by political intelligence or trivial anecdotes; it is only from time to time that one finds a corner devoted to the passionate discussions like those which the journalists of France every day give to their readers.”

By the mid nineteenth century, newspaper and magazine circulation established circulation as the criteria for the value of advertising space. The political and economical interests in these media led to an interest in understanding the audience reception of the media and the messages. Advertisers wanted to best understand how to influence readers to purchase their products, as did the newspapers and magazines who published those ads. The greater the readership (circulation) the more valuable the ad space. The interest in audience reception was not limited to the publishers and advertisers. Politicians were interested in the reception of their political messages by audiences. Politics and commerce were the two driving forces of early media analysis.

One of the first, contemporary, shapers of media research was Walter Lippman. Lippman was a strong critic of journalism and journalists. Lippman penned two books that laid the groundwork for media research. His 1920 text, Liberty and the News called for a more scientific and objective journalism. In 1922 he published Public Opinion in which he applied the principles of psychology to journalism. According to some scholars, Public Opinion is the first, contemporary, work of media scholarship.

The 1930s were the golden age of radio. The first broadcast medium, radio quickly found itself experimenting with programming and revenue models. Taking the newspaper and magazine industry as a model, adspace became adtime, and listener numbers dictated the value of that adtime. Researchers developed new techniques in establishing who was listening to show; and when, on the radio.

The ambitions of advertisers, publishers, politicians, and academics describes the four, original kinds of research done in the media: public opinion research, propaganda analysis, marketing research, and social science research. Beginning in the 1920s, each of these groups employed various methods of research to gather data and form theories of how audiences receive media and messages.

Media historians usually point to Walter Lippmann’s 1922 text Public Opinion, as the starting point for contemporary media research and analysis. The text, divided into 28 chapters, analyzes a large spectrum of mass media issues, including how reality is shaped and how newspapers are organized. Two years earlier, Lippman published Liberty and the News, which explained journalism as a fourth-estate at the objective and just service of democracy. Chapters included titles such as Journalism and the Higher Laws. By 1925 Lippman demonstrated the susceptibility of the American political system to mass media propaganda. The Phantom Public is essential study for social and media psychologists.

Propaganda, originally referred to a kind of evangelizing done by 17th century Catholic missionaries. In its contemporary sense, it is a sort of political evangelizing of an ideology. The word refers to the Latin propagare, referring to the propagation, or spreading, of an ideology. An ideology is a systematic organization of ideas into a worldview. An awareness of government propaganda in  World War I resulted in an emergence of research into the methods and function of persuasive techniques. Propaganda Technique in the World War by Harold Lasswell is an important, early, treatise on media propaganda.

The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, was working as a government opinion shaper as early as 1913. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays would promote psychoanalysis to advertising and public relations for the next 60 years. Bernays published over 20 books on social influence, some of which are said to have been a part of the library of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Although his uncle and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud did not approve of Bernays’s use of his theory for commercial and political gain, Bernays publication of Frued’s writings in America made Greenwich Village the “psychoanalytic capital of the world”.

In the 1930s, social scientists emerged as the authoritative voice in media research. In an attempt to measure the audience’s attitudes, public opinion research came to dominate the research. Mainly through polls, audiences were asked about their media consumption and data was statistically analyzed. The assumption was that people could objectively report what and why they consumed their chosen media. This was contrary to the psychoanalytic research, which assumed an unconsciously motivated, irrationally driven audience.

Between 1929 and 1932 the most significant, early study of media took place. The Payne Fund Studies was funded by a private philanthropic group and consisted of 13 studies focusing on the effects of motion pictures on the youth. The Payne Fund Studies found a correlation between juvenile delinquency, antisocial behavior, and promiscuity and movie consumption. A famous study used galvanometers to measure skin response during cinema viewing. The results showed that you people were most affected by cinema violence.

Meanwhile, marketing research was gearing up in the 1920s and by the 1930s was major part of the media industry. Applying social scientific, sociological, and psychoanalytic methods to advertising, media professionals sought the most effective way to convince audiences to purchase goods and services. Marketing research continues to be a formidable sector in the media industry. Research methods like subject interview and focus group feature prominently in advertising research.

In the 1930s, industrialization spurred a mass movement from agricultural towns to urban cities. The mass became a nameless, faceless, object of analysis for academics. Psychology, sociology, and psychoanalysis became interested in the group, in the mass psychology of the crowd. By 1933, when Hitler’s Nazi party became democratically elected by the German people, the social sciences were approaching the mass research at full-throttle. Titles such as The Mass Psychology of Fascism, The Authoritarian Personality, and The Sane Society explored the individual’s influence on the group, and the group’s influence on the individual.

By 1937, Princeton University and The Rockefeller supported the Radio Research Project. An all-star academic team including: Gordon Allport, Paul Lazarsfeld, Theodor Adorno, Frank Stanton, and Hadley Cantril investigated the effects of mass media on audiences and individuals. This research group examined listener habits and the influence of radio broadcast. Two of the most famous studies were of on the effects of the October 1938 broadcast of The War of The Worlds and the Little Annie Project, which introduced the Stanton-Lazarsfeld Program Analyzer. This research tool allowed subjects to rate programming in real-time. The researchers disagreed on methodology, resulting in Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno leaving the group in 1941. This split illustrates the ideological and methodological differences between cultural media studies and media effects studies that exists in the field. In the 1940s, Columbia University absorbed the Radio Research Project and renamed it the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Headed by Paul Lazarsfeld, the research institute functioned until 1977.

At the BASR, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues came to four major conclusions: 1. Mass media increased status for issues and institutions, 2. mass media created a sense of “normal” by showcasing oddities, 3. mass media decreased action and increased viewing, and 4. mass media propagates issues by monopolization (dominate the message), canalization (dominate the platform), and supplementation (meet face-to-face). The period of Lazarsfeld’s work is often referred to as the functionalist school of media studies.

A series of major research projects followed. In 1940, The People’s Choice study examined the 1940 presidential election between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie. Using radio broadcasts, Roosevelt secured a third-term as President of the United States. The study revealed that people seek out messages that are consistent with their attitudes (called selective exposure) and both interpret and remember messages differently, depending on their attitudes (selective perception and selective retention). The People’s Choice Study also established two other important concepts in media psychology: 1. media does not convert, it reinforces a person’s position, and 2. Media influences opinion leaders who go on to influence the masses (two-step flow model).

The effects of cinema, television, and comic books were prominent in the 1950s. Treated in much the same way as video games are today, many of our culture’s social-ills were attributed to these three media. Television in the LIves of Our Children was published by Wilbur Schramm at Stanford University. Regarding adolescent and child television viewing, Schramm concluded:

“For some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful. For other children under the same conditions, or for the same children under other conditions, it may be beneficial. For most children, under most conditions, most television is probably neither particularly harmful nor particularly beneficial. . . .”

Comic books came under close scrutiny in the 1950s. In 1954, Dr. Fredric Wertham published a text of exhaustive research on comic books and juvenile delinquency, provocatively entitled, Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham claimed that comic books promoted violence and sexual aberrations, including homosexuality in the Batman and Robin series.

Although psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychology played an influential role in media research through the 1960s, the American psychologists were largely behaviorists. After a scandalous affair with a graduate student resulted in his dismissal from Johns Hopkins University, John B. Watson, the father of behaviorism, took a position at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York City. Watson applied the concepts of behavioral learning to ad design. The shift in the social sciences away from qualitative research resulted in an almost rigid preference for “scientific,” quantitative, research data.

An example of early, “data driven” research is work done by Hilde Himmelweit at the London School of Economics. In one of her studies, Himmelweit examined 1,854 child television viewers in 4 British cities. through surveys and observations, they concluded that television had its greatest influence on areas in which the children had no previous influence. They also found that repeated, dramatic, contextual narrative increased the influence of the message on children.

In the 1960s a number of criticism were aimed at the media effects approach. These critics claimed that media effects used a hypodermic needle approach that understood the individual as a passive, and involuntarily controlled, object to the media message. The critics also claimed that psychology should: 1. be looking at violent individuals rather than violent media, 2. should consider children in their cognitive developmental stage, 3. be aware of their conservative biases, 4. more precisely define their area of study, 5. refine their methodology and interpretation of data, 6. become more aware of their biases regarding the masses, 7. ground itself in theory, rather than arbitrary pieces of information. There was also an interest in conducting longitudinal studies that looked a long-term, rather than immediate media effects.

George Gerbner, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968. The cultural indicators that Gerbner identified include: 1. TV has long-term effects that are gradual and accumulate over time, and 2. The more television watched, the more dangerous people perceived the world to be. The findings have come to be called the cultivation effect of media. Gerbner had studied 450 children in a New Jersy, finding that heavy television viewing produced a, mean world syndrome.

In the 1970s, Elihu Katz, also researching and teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, examined how people use media to fulfill personal and social needs. His theory, called the Uses and Gratification Theory, described active viewers who actively participated in their media consumption. This model reflected the increasing popularity of the cognitive paradigm in psychology that was taking over academic psychology. Katz found that people are driven to media by needs, that they have certain expectations of the media to fulfill those needs, and that a dependency on the media for need gratification could result in unintended consequences. Another Uses and Gratifications theorist, Denis McQuail, pointed out that media serves four types of needs: diversion, personal relationships, personal identity, and surveillance.

Meanwhile, in the cultural studies tradition, a group of exiled, European, theorists were building an influential body of theoretical work in the American universities. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was a unique blending of Marxist political analysis and Freudian psychoanalysis. These theorists included: Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas. On of the interests of the Critical Theorists was to illustrate the threat to democracy by “dumbing-down” of citizens by “popular” mass media. Today, we find this tradition in the critical media theories of feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, Marxist critique, rhetorical, and erotic analysis of the media.

Today, we find media psychology research to be a interdisciplinary field, informed by neuroscience, film studies, sociology, Critical Theory, literary theory, economics, history, art, design, communications, and political science. Media psychology is perhaps the most avant-garde of the psychologies, one that is serving as a model for the future of all of psychology.

Willis Parker Hoover & The Easton Panorama of 1913

Image by Willis Parker Hoover (1913). http://www.loc.gov/item/2007661505/

In the summer of 1913, a 29 year-old photographer from Williams Township climbed the massive, rocky, overlook at the forks of the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers (known as Mt. Ida), and took three photographs. The fact that Willis Parker Hoover had this panoramic photograph copyrighted and registered at the Library of Congress that same year (the only photograph he would do so with) suggests that he understood the value it would have to those who were to view it over 100 years later.

Matthew T. Giobbi, 2014.

Hoover must have climbed the hill as I did, starting on the southeastern slope, where the railroad passes within feet of the formation. At the time of Hoover's photograph, the rock seems to have been barren of trees, with only some ground cover visible in the lower-left hand corner. Today, the tree growth is quite thick, and seems to be a popular drinking area and latrine. Upon my ascent, I was confronted with a strong stench of human urine and empty liquor bottles. I wondered if Hoover encountered this as well, in an industrial rail area on the outskirts of town?

I considered putting my mirrorless, digital, Fuji camera in my backpack, just in case I would encounter a dangerous situation. I really wasn't sure what I might find atop that rocky crag. Was this Hoover's concern too? I imagine he was probably carrying a 1913 Kodak Autographic, bellows camera. There is no way of knowing; however, the "autographic" came with a special feature for inscribing a photograph, which Hoover did on two of the three images.

Mt. Ida,
http://www.gingerb.com/cnj_trackage_rights_easton_to_allentown.htm

Willis Parker Hoover was born on March 14th, 1884 in Reading, Pennsylvania. According to the 1900 Census, his father was a minister in Reading. With his mother, Mary E., and a servant named Lizzy Lesker, Willis was raised with five other siblings.

On the 10th of November, 1909, Willis married Kathryn May Line in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. The marriage certificate lists Willis's profession as "photographer," and shows that he lived at 19, South 15th Street, and she at 173, North 15th Street in Harrisburg. By the 1910 Census, Kathryn and Willis were living in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.

In 1913, when the panoramic photos were taken, Willis must have been living and working as a photographer in Easton, Pennsylvania. On September 12, 1918, Willis registered for the First World War draft in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. The Draft Registration card shows that he was a self-employed photographer, working in a studio at 343, North Street, in Easton. He and his wife lived at R.F.D. 5 in Easton.

In 1915, Kathryn and Willis had a daughter, whom they named Margaret. In 1930, Kathryn, Willis, and their daughter Margaret were living in Williams. By the 1940 Census, Willis (now going by "Willie") and Kathryn were still living in Williams, and are listed as proprietor and clerk of an "art gallery".

May, 2014 by Matthew Giobbi.

On April 27th, 1942, Willis once again registered for the draft; this time for the  for the Second World War. His draft registration card lists him as a 58 year-old photographer with a "ruddy" complexion. At this time, his photography studio was located at 22, South Third Street in Easton. The building currently houses a group of artists's studios. Willis still resided at R.D. 4 in Easton. He seems to have been living with someone named William Nickolas, whom he listed as an emergency contact on his draft registration card.

May, 2014 by Matthew Giobbi

May, 2014 by Matthew Giobbi.

Kathryn passed away in 1950, and Willis in 1954. They were laid to rest at Durham Cemetery in Williams, Pennsylvania. In 1917 a second photographer ventured to the top of the rock peak overlooking Easton. Wm. O. Bixler's image shows the change that the city underwent in four years. In the autumn, when the leaves have fallen from the trees, I will revisit the rock, and spend some time with Willis Parker Hoover. Further research has uncovered a panorama by William Herman Rau, taken in 1896. That archive refers to "Picadilly Hill," which seems to be present day Southside Easton.

William O. Bixler's 1917 panorama of Easton, Pennsylvania. http://www.loc.gov/item/2007661506/

Matthew T. Giobbi 2014 panorama of Easton, Pennsylvania. 

1896 "Easton, panorama from Picadilly Hill," by William Herman Rau. http://www.loc.gov/item/2007661541/

Postcard of Mt. Ida ("Coca-Cola Mountain"). Photographer unknown, around 1910.