ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JEAN?
In this issue’s cover feature (p34), Brian J Robb tells one of the strangest stories to come out of America in the first half of the 20th century. The tale of how a group of wealthy New Yorkers were suckered by a smooth-talking conman into bankrolling an experiment to raise an “immortal baby” may be largely forgotten, and is extremely strange, but arguably it fits into a long American tradition where supposedly progressive experiments in alternative living shade into hucksterism, snake oil and confidence tricks. The saga of James Schafer, the Master Metaphysicians and “Baby Jean” – the little girl taken from “indigent parents” to be reared in a luxurious mansion on a strictly vegetarian “eternity diet” – reads like something Sinclair Lewis or even Scott Fitzgerald might have come up with as the subject for a novel; but the strangely uncritical newspaper and magazine articles of the time attest to the truth of this bizarre scheme. These days, alarm bells would undoubtedly start ringing if a secret fraternity of rich society types – the men calling themselves “Storks” and wearing “diaper pins” in their lapels – decided to take an infant from its mother and attempt to transform it into an “immortal” child; in the late 1930s, the Master Metaphysicians seem to have been viewed as just another bunch of harmless eccentrics, the latest in a long line of self-helpers, crank dieters and fitness fanatics.
ERRATA
FT405:56: Dr Paul Stott wrote in with a correction to Cathi Unsworth’s “On the Trail of Jack the Stripper” article. “She refers to tensions in the 1950s involving immigrants and ‘Oswald Mosley’s British Unionist Party’. Mosley’s party at the time was actually called the ‘Union Movement’. I think the author has made a conflation of the Union Movement with his pre-war party, the British Union of Fascists.”
FT406:59: We apologise to Peter McCue for an error in his Forum article “Misleading Obfuscation” in which we introduced some misleading obfuscation of our own. The caption for the photo at the top right of the page is given, incorrectly, as “Newton of Falkirk in Fife.” The location in question should have been “Newton of Falkland”.