Personality in the palm of the hand
Oh my, look at your hands. If only they could talk, what would they say to you?
A century ago, some working women in Little Rock were more concerned about what their hands might be saying about them.
The ladies of the Business and Professional Womens Club had brought this concern upon themselves by inviting Mrs. Addison Hall, noted expert newspaper columnist of Des Moines, Iowa, to speak at their meeting.
“It will not be possible to ever think of our hands again as only useful mechanical implements or ornamental appendages of our anatomy,” said Mary Keyes, describing the lecture to the Arkansas Democrat.
“She spoke of the influence of heredity on character, as shown by the hands. It was quite wonderful to hear her, a stranger, tell one’s best friend things about herself which you knew to be perfectly true, merely by looking at the shape of the thumb, the contour of the palm, or the length of the fingers.”
Hall wasn’t a fortune-teller. She was something a bit more elaborate. She read inherited personalities and qualities of character into the shape and textures of people’s hands, as displayed in handprints they created at home: Heat gum camphor with a match; wave the smoking nugget under paper until it’s uniformly black. Press a bare hand to the paper. Lift the hand away. Pour alcohol over the resulting impression, to set it. Mail it to the Des Moines Register.
Friend Reader may have heard the old notion that lean-fingered cooks excel at making pastry, while fat-fingered folks should stick to making bread. Hall went deeper. She would look at your handprint and tell you what job you were born to do. She would compare prints from engaged couples and tell them whether they should marry.
She wasn’t the first acknowledged expert in hand analysis in 1922. Twenty-two years earlier, one William G. Benham had published a seminal “The Laws of Scientific Hand Reading,” which must have been read by several subsequent expert ladies. (This book continues to influence hand-reading philosophers; see arkansasonline.com/1219view).
Benham saw what he called palmistry as a science-like, businesslike approach to matching people and jobs. He developed his system during the Industrial Age, and it’s easy to imagine captains of industry lighting upon it
as a guide to hiring the right human tools — you know, the human assets. Much waste could be avoided if only people chose a career they could do. A similar aspiration rings through Mrs. Addison Hall’s advice.
A different expert lady was quoted by the prolific Robert J. Haskins, whose informational essays appeared in the Arkansas Gazette. In the Feb. 20, 1921, Gazette, under the headline “Hands Best Guide to Character Analysis,” Haskins quoted Mrs. Harriet Gunn Roberson, “the well known character analyst,” to wit:
“If you have long, delicate fingers, you probably have good judgment about your dress and personal appearance, whereas the short fingered person is apt to be less of a connoisseur in this respect. Where the owner of the stubby fingers scores is that he is likely to be a more loyal friend than the longer fingered person. Short fingers go with a common sense, straightforward temperament, and long ones mean greater interest in fine detail. The long-fingered person is a more aesthetic type and one which is likely to be super sensitive, easily offended.”
She adds, “This is not palmistry. It is Psychology.”
And she didn’t merely rely upon the hands. No, she also looked at the person’s face to confirm what the hands showed her.
One characteristic Roberson looked for was strong executive ability.
The hand type of people with this particular trait of managing affairs had a long first finger. “Napoleon, an outstanding example of the executive genius, had a first finger that was as long as his middle finger,” she told Haskins.
But the third finger also was significant.
“The third finger, or ring finger, carries the sign of success,” Roberson said. “The more it approaches the second finger in length, the more successful the owner is apt to be. In the little finger, length indicates capacity for friendship and business versatility.”
I especially enjoyed Haskins’ translation of her thumb analyses:
“Watch the thumb. … Character analysts say that a large, well developed thumb indicates strong will and an undersized, thin thumb shows a character lacking in decision. Feeble minded people sometimes have this undeveloped thumb and in occasional cases, no thumbs at all.”
I’ve read this eight or nine times and still it makes me laugh out loud.
But back to Mrs. Addison Hall and how she wowed the business ladies of Little Rock. She assessed the handprints of a few local lights, including the indomitable Erle Chambers (1875-1941). If that name is unfamiliar, please take a moment to look her up in the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas (arkansasonline. com/1219erle).
Here’s what Hall had to say about her, according to the Dec. 24, 1922, Democrat, which quoted her under a little headline that asked, “Is this the Erle Chambers you know?”:
“We are told that Br’er Rabbit had a laughing place where he looked over the chimney pots of human nature and saw the funny side of things. Miss Erle Chambers, executive secretary of the Arkansas Tuberculosis Association and member-elect of the state legislature, has her dreaming place where she plays in delightful fashion. Her hand shows her to be the possessor of an imagination that can slip off whither it will. And, though her imagination has wings and impulse is strong, that selfsame hand shows most practical viewpoints reserved to give her a safe landing when fancy and impulse might carry her adrift.
“Her thumb is shod with tenacity and purpose for all her impulsiveness. Each one of her dreams, therefore, is likely to be builded on a little more solid foundation until after a while what was but a dream becomes a practical reality. In the broad world of her imagination, which is so marked a part of her hand, there comes to her a breadth of view and understanding of other people’s rainbow gleams and dreams which she might have lacked had she not had eyes to see where fairies beckon. This has widened her sympathies and made her know that those who stray in to the Christmas tree in rags and tatters, without learning and dignity of ancestry, are to be equally served with the invited guests. Surely some day her hands will write large a history for all to read. Perhaps they will be her Christmas gift to the world — a toy for each of us.”
If Friend Reader has a Newspapers.com account, you can look up Hall’s Sunday columns in the Des Moines Register archived there. A good one ran Sept. 5, 1920. I regret that I don’t own rights to reprint that column or some of the hand images printed beside her other columns. It’s really quite sweet to imagine the eager Iowans making their hands sooty, spilling alcohol carefully across the page.
It seems a naive sort of fun. But was it any more so than posting videos of yourself lipsync dancing on TikTok to be critiqued by middleschoolers in Tokyo, or wherever?
Other people’s rainbow gleams and dreams.