Psycho-Phone Messages
By Francis Grierson
And was there no one who could have cautioned him against the finesse of Clemenceau, who spent sixty years sharpening his wits on the political grindstone of Europe? Was no one in America aware that the French Premier is fluent in English? Mr. Wilson could speak no French, which reminds me that Jack Spratt could eat no fat and his wife could eat no lean, so they both licked the platter clean. But a clean plate does not mean a clean slate, and the President brought one home filled with the riddle of the Sphinx.
Yet the Peace Conference revealed the secret of perpetual motion. It conferred a timely service, for the commotion created by the Wilson-Lansing-House-Party at Versailles kept the Senate from passing into a trance. A blind man can tell the difference between pepper pods and apple dumplings, but who can tell where tweedle-dee ends and tweedle-dum begins? No one. Then how can your statesmen distinguish between the psychological characteristics of the Hungarians and the Bohemians, the Bavarians and the Saxons, the difference between a polka and a polonaise, a pig in a style and a pig in a slaughterhouse?
Patriotism often depends on an influence that is too subtle for analysis, yet they would enact drastic laws to bind Europe in one bond. They will hardly succeed in a thousand years—some pay through the nose, some through the pocket, and some through the stomach. Americans are paying through all three. Danton declared the secret of the French Revolution was audacity, and audacity, and again audacity, but what you need today is vigilance repeated ad infinitum. I am placing you in communication with some of the most far-reaching minds of the past hundred and fifty years. The psycho-phone is new, and we are using it for the first time.
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Francis Grierson
Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard (September 18, 1848 – May 29, 1927) was a composer, pianist, and writer who used the pen name Francis Grierson.
Biography.
Jesse was born in Birkenhead, England, to Joseph Shepard and Emily Grierson Shepard, and his family migrated to Illinois, United States, while he was still a baby. He was present at the Lincoln–Douglas debates in 1858 and later incorporated his reminiscences into his fictionalized autobiography The Valley of Shadows (1909). He worked as a page for John C. Frémont as a youth. In his youth, he was “Jesse Shepard” or “Ben Shepard,” but in 1899, he adopted the pen name and was primarily known as “Francis Grierson” after that date.
Grierson wrote on spiritualist topics throughout his life, from the early Modern Mysticism and Other Essays (1899) to his last book, Psycho-Phone Messages (1921). In his fictionalized autobiography The Valley of Shadows (1909), Grierson describes the antebellum world of the American Midwest. It characterizes Abraham Lincoln as a mystic prophesied by the appearance of the Comet Donati in 1858. He later expanded this view in Abraham Lincoln, the Practical Mystic (1918). In his works, such as The Invincible Alliance (1913), Grierson supported stronger Anglo-American ties, which, after the alliance developed in World War I, caused many authors to praise his work retroactively.
To Grierson, this alliance was necessary to protect “Anglo-Saxon civilization in the West” against “the menace of the yellow races,” furthering the racist ideology of Yellow Peril. Grierson also held anti-German views and often denigrated German culture and the “Teutonic race” in his works. He presented the “Celtic race” as the foil to the “Teutonic race.” In The Illusions and Realities of the War (1918), Grierson describes how only Anglo-American unity could prevent another world war.
Francis Grierson
