The sabbatical, part 3: Who was St. Clair Switzer assisting during the 1956-57 academic year?

Hi guys. As you may recall, I mentioned in a recent post that the podcast Bizarre Butler County would be airing an upcoming episode on Ron Tammen, which was scheduled for release sometime in October. As it turns out, they’ve been experiencing technical difficulties, and likely won’t be posting that episode until December. During our July interview, I provided Taylor Powers and Sarah Kennel with some breaking news about how I think St. Clair Switzer was spending his sabbatical during the 1956-57 academic year. I was planning to release this blog post shortly after the Tammen episode had dropped so I wouldn’t be stepping on their scoop. However, Taylor and Sarah have graciously given me the green light to post it now, before the Tammen episode airs. I’ll be sure to give you the heads up as soon as it does.

So…what’s the big reveal that I’ve been sitting on since July?

It has to do with the two letters

It all starts with those two letters we’ve discussed in past posts. The letters are dated December 6, 1956, and February 8, 1957, and, even by MKULTRA standards, I’m sure they’ve raised their fair share of eyebrows over the years. In the December letter, one researcher poses a dozen questions on the topic of hypnosis to another researcher. These aren’t your typical questions that might be posed by someone interested in using hypnosis in a clinical setting to help a patient improve his or her life. These are jarringly bold questions about using hypnosis to control people, and they get more and more outrageous as they go, beginning with (1) how to produce amnesia in someone on a regular basis and (2) how to induce hypnosis in someone without their knowing it, all the way to (11) possible experiments that might be considered “too dangerous, too shocking, too ‘unusual’ for routine testing” and, finally, (12) how to hypnotize someone by force. Ostensibly, nothing was out-of-bounds. Everything was on the table. 

In the February letter, the writer thanks the recipient for his responses to those jarringly bold questions, which, sadly, aren’t included within the MKULTRA documents that have been released to the public. He is also hoping to schedule some additional time with the recipient. In both letters, the writer cautions the recipient to destroy the letters on his end because the topics are “most sensitive and are very highly classified” (letter 1) and “highly sensitive” (letter 2). Fortunately for us, someone decided against destroying the two letters on the writer’s end of things; otherwise we wouldn’t have the evidence that I’m about to present.

But first, I’d like to take this moment to express my gratitude to the CIA for allowing us to see in letter 1 that the recipient was a professor at Rutgers University and in letter 2 that he suffered from arthritis, thus enabling us to claim with 100 percent certainty that the recipient was Griffith Wynne Williams, an esteemed psychology professor and prolific hypnosis researcher. (The Rutgers info is an obvious giveaway, and I’d learned about Williams’ health condition from someone who knew him.) See how good it feels to embrace transparency in government, CIA? Let this be an inspiration for you to continue down this path! 

If, on the other hand, those two tidbits of PII were left uncovered as a mistake, well…words can’t express the joy one feels when an agency that considers itself untouchable stumbles a little. God Bless Human Error!

I’m also convinced that the letter writer is St. Clair Switzer. I believe this because:

A) Switzer had known Griffith Williams during his days working under Clark Hull at the University of Wisconsin, when Williams was a doctoral candidate and Switzer was a master’s student.

Something Switzer was known to do while he was a professor at Miami was to ask for occasional assists from the superstar psychologists he’d met during his days with Hull. These included M.A. (Gus) Wenger (no relation), E.R. (Jack) Hilgard (also no relation), and Hull himself (if we were related, I would’ve told you that a long time ago). It makes total sense that Switzer would ask Williams for guidance about some uncomfortable, dare I say unethical, questions regarding hypnosis, now that Williams had become renowned in the field. I mean…he couldn’t exactly go to a total stranger with those sorts of questions, could he? 

B) The letters contain telltale Hull-isms.

One example is his use of the opening “My Dear” in letter #1 when addressing his colleague, which is pure Clark Hull.

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That’s how Hull began every single letter to Drs. Switzer and Patten, whether typed or handwritten, and probably to everyone else he knew, including Williams.

Here are just several of Hull’s “My dears” over the years. I have many more examples on my laptop.

Switzer had been known to use that opening as well, inspired, no doubt, by his graduate school adviser. In 1930, after earning his master’s degree under Hull, he used it in a saccharine letter to Alfred H. Upham, then-president of Miami University.

I think Switzer must have decided against using “My Dear” in letter #2 because it would have been too over-the-top for this purpose. I mean, good Lord, we’re talking about MKULTRA here. A little gentility is fine, but a double dose would have been too weird.

Another example is the writer’s use of the term “Ph.D. thesis” instead of “dissertation” in the paragraph following the jarringly bold questions. This was also a practice favored by Hull.

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Although the usage is correct according to Merriam Webster, the conventional practice is to call a person’s culminating research a thesis when they’re pursuing a master’s degree and to reserve the word dissertation for the Ph.D. That’s how most people talk, at least. I’ve found that users of the word thesis when applied to the doctoral degree are generally academics who probably have a Ph.D. themselves—including Drs. Switzer and Hull. Here are highlighted examples from both men.

I can’t help but think that, four years after Hull’s death, Switzer was trying to woo Williams with a little nostalgia for their former mentor’s endearing idiosyncrasies. It’s as if he’s saying: “Don’t worry too much about my newfound interest in controlling large groups of people by surreptitiously hypnotizing them. I’m the same old lovable Doc.”

C) The timing couldn’t be better.

Switzer was on a sabbatical from the fall of 1956 through May or June of 1957, a timeframe within which the two letters originate. Because the writer was a professor (per the “Ph.D. thesis” reference), there’d be no other time that someone in academia could commit to helping a major researcher with their “very highly classified” research than while they were on sabbatical. Otherwise, he’d be too busy with his own research, not to mention courses, office hours, faculty committees, and other demands related to the “teaching straight-jacket” that Switzer referred to in a letter to Gus Wenger (still no relation) when he’d begun making plans for his sabbatical. Those plans ultimately fell through, thus freeing up Switzer to work with someone else.

Was it Jolly? Was it George? 

As you probably know, I’ve struggled with the identity of the person whom I believe Switzer was assisting regarding the very highly classified research that year. In my first post on the subject of Switzer’s sabbatical, I suggested that he was working with  Louis Jolyon West, who by then was at the University of Oklahoma. At the youthful age of 32, West was becoming one of the foremost heavy hitters doing Artichoke and MKULTRA research at that time. And this is an important point: he was already doing it. He already was working on very highly classified research. In March 1955, he’d begun his infamous MKULTRA research project known as Subproject 43, Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility. According to Colin A. Ross, M.D., he was given Top Secret clearance for this work. In February 1956, he’d submitted a proposal for a continuation of that research. Although the CIA records don’t indicate it, I’m fairly sure he received the money. I feel this way based on notes that had been scribbled in response to the CIA’s receipt of West’s proposal. 

Here’s one of the more telling excerpts on the back page:

To me—The budget is out of line for what we have in mind, namely, testing effects and influences of certain drugs on hypnotizability.

In fairness to [REDACTED], all this should be gone over thoroughly with him—in detail. Will do within next 2-3 wks.

At the top of page one is the following sloppy note, circled and in slightly different handwriting, signed by S.G., whom I believe to be Sidney Gottlieb.

“Feel this should be [word??] to drugs & induction of hypnosis—and scaled down accordingly—”

Although the fifth word or words is maddeningly illegible—Is it limited to? Knocked to? Or maybe “less and keep” to?—I know what Sidney is saying. He wants Jolly West to stick to drugs and the induction of hypnosis and to scale things down, especially the budget. So it seems to me that Jolly West did receive a second year of grant money, especially since someone else was planning to go over the parameters thoroughly with him within the next 2-3 weeks. 

But, OK, just for fun, let’s say that West didn’t get his extension on Subproject 43. He still had plenty of research dollars coming in for sensitive, highly classified research. On July 1, 1956, he signed a $32,800 contract between the Air Force Personnel and Training Research Center at Lackland AFB and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. The contract was titled “Research Involving Psychological Reaction to Stresses Encountered in Military Captivity,” and he’d obtained a Secret clearance to conduct that research. 

To the best of my knowledge, no remnants of the actual research studies he’d conducted exist online. Most notably, I can’t find a Materials and Methods section anywhere that tells us what research methods were being used on his POW subjects—not even in the contract itself, which I obtained from the UCLA Archives. Do I think that hypnosis was somehow used in conducting that research? I do! After all, that’s what interrogation research was all about—hypnosis and drugs. Even more convincingly, his Subproject 43 extension proposal discusses “a number of ways in which hypnotic suggestions can bring about states of marked psychological stress,” which was the focus of his Air Force contract.

Maybe Sidney Gottlieb and his gang weren’t all that impressed with Jolly’s “psychological stress” talk in part 3 of his proposal—someone labeled it as “meaningless” on the front page of their notes—but I, for one, am happy it’s in there. I’m also happy that the CIA redactors didn’t blacken it out.

Once again, thank you, CIA! This is what democracy looks like!

Therefore, at the time the two letters were written to Griffith Williams, Louis Jolyon West was swimming in research dollars and was conducting very highly classified research having to do with hypnosis, at least on POWs, but perhaps on a broader audience as well. 

But between you and me? I think he got the MKULTRA extension too.

I’m saying all of the above because of another document, this one written two days before the second letter to Williams, on February 6, 1957. The document is a proposal on developing a hypnotic messenger, and, initially, I thought it had been written by West. I thought this because a) its timing fits snugly between the two letters; b) I knew that West had an interest in developing a hypnotic courier; and c) the proposal’s author stated that he was being assisted by a man for the year—an academic who “is thoroughly familiar with hypnotism at the theoretical level”—which made sense if his assistant was on a sabbatical and which also sounded a lot like Switzer. But the proposal’s request of $10K seems below West’s going rate, and it was written in a more layperson-friendly sort of way than a West proposal.

It was after reading George H. Estabrooks’ book “Hypnotism” that I realized that Estabrooks had written the hypnotic messenger proposal. A few of the giveaways were his preference for the word hypnotism over hypnosis as well as his use of the term “hypnotic messenger” (also a favorite) and the early appearance of his most oft-repeated statistic that one in five adults can be hypnotized into a somnambulistic (deep hypnotic) state.

And that’s where things have stagnated for a while: with me feeling 99 percent sure that Switzer wrote the two letters to Griffith Williams, which means that he was potentially helping a big-deal researcher such as Louis Jolyon West on highly classified hypnosis research. However, it could also mean that he was potentially helping George Estabrooks on his hypnotic messenger project. I couldn’t determine which one it was. Or was it both? Adding to this conundrum is the fact that West was at the University of Oklahoma while Estabrooks was at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, which logistically seems tough to pull off for a guy living in Oxford, Ohio. Estabrooks would have been closer, but Switzer did have access to Wright Patterson AFB. He could have flown to Oklahoma now and again. Likewise, West could catch a flight to Dayton if need be.

The word that gives it all away

Then, as I was preparing to tape the podcast Bizarre Butler County with Taylor and Sarah, I decided to read through those two letters one more time.

In the second paragraph of the February 8, 1957, letter, the writer wrote this:

“The problem of the use of hypnosis by a public speaker or some related technique which could be used by an individual to control or influence a crowd is of considerable importance and as you have noted there is very little information along these lines anywhere. This area is particularly interesting to [REDACTED]. He told me that he will obtain [REDACTED]’s book immediately.”

“Hold on,” thought I. “Did he just say REDACTED’s book? If the REDACTED he’s referring to is the REDACTED I’m thinking it is, then that is an enormous clue!”

In February 1957, there was probably one book and only one book on hypnosis that would have been of utmost interest to a person seeking surreptitious ways to control a crowd through hypnosis. That would be George Estabrooks’ book “Hypnotism,” which, as luck would have it, was being published that very year as a new and revised edition.

“Hypnotism” first came out in 1943 and was written in a friendly, nontechnical, plain-language sort of way. It was a huge best seller. It was even recommended reading by the Book-of-the-Month Club. 

But that doesn’t mean it didn’t get into the nitty gritty of how hypnosis could potentially be used in surreptitious ways. Whereas other hypnosis researchers would write about conventional issues pertaining to hypnosis, Estabrooks went straight to the controversial. You want to hypnotize someone without their knowledge? No problem! You want to give them a posthypnotic suggestion to do something that goes against their morals? Piece of cake!

One of the more noteworthy chapters is Hypnotism in Warfare, in which he discusses the creation of the Super Spy, not unlike the hypnotic messenger he was hoping to create in the summer of 1957. Another chapter titled Hypnotism and Human Affairs gets into how dictators employ the principles of hypnosis to get crowds of people to give them their allegiance and do their bidding.

Of course, George Estabrooks covered the less controversial topics in his book as well, but he made those chapters wildly readable too. By 1957, certainly other books had been published on the topic of hypnosis. But as I told Taylor and Sarah, two books that were sure to occupy the bookshelves of most hypnosis researchers were Clark Hull’s Hypnosis and Suggestibility, published in 1933, and George Estabrooks’ Hypnotism, first published in 1943. If you needed to consult a stodgy classic textbook about what hypnosis is, scientifically speaking, or how suggestibility can be measured in a laboratory, then you turned to Hull. If you were more in the mood for a lively book that describes all the possible ways in which hypnosis can be used out in the real world—in medicine, in criminal justice, and even in war—then Estabrooks was your guy.

Because the writer of the February 8, 1957, letter says that the major hypnosis researcher with whom he’s working will be obtaining the book “immediately,” it appears that it must already be out. So the question is: when was the publication date of the newly revised version of Hypnotism? My copy only says that it was published in the year 1957. When I spoke with Taylor and Sarah, I’d found sources that said it was published on January 1, 1957. I’ve since learned that a customary practice for when the date isn’t known is to use January 1 as a placeholder. 

Later, courtesy of the New York Times, I learned that the new and revised edition of Hypnotism was published on May 1, 1957. This was confirmed in a later printing of the second edition, which stated the publication date was May 1957. So we have our answer—May it was!

Granted, the major hypnosis researcher could go out and buy the book immediately, in February. However, it would be the first edition that he’d be buying, which had been out for 14 years. The most recent printing was in 1955. If he’s going to go to the trouble of buying a copy, I think he should wait till May….and I think he likely did.

One possibility is that the letter writer had some inside information about the new book that was coming out. Maybe he’d been in touch with Estabrooks and was letting Williams know about the book in an indirect way, though he got a little ahead of himself as far as when it would be available. 

But that’s not what I think happened. I think that in his response to the December 1956 letter, Griffith Williams probably gave a heads up to the letter writer that Estabrooks’ new and revised book was going to be coming out soon. Williams would have been on the inside track for information like that. I don’t know if Williams and Estabrooks talked much, but news of a forthcoming book would have made its way into newsletters of their professional societies and by word of mouth at conferences. So I can see Williams telling the letter writer (likely Switzer) that Estabrooks’ book will be out soon, and Switzer erroneously jumping to the conclusion that it would be available immediately. The sentence “He told me that he will obtain [REDACTED]’s book immediately,” sounds as if they’re promising to follow up on a recommendation that Williams had made to them.

What’s especially clear to me is that the major hypnosis researcher who is conducting very highly classified research from December 1956 through February 1957 and beyond is not George Estabrooks. Therefore, I think we can surmise two things:

1) I believe the two letters involve four men: the letter writer (likely St. Clair Switzer), the letter recipient (Griffith Williams), the major hypnosis researcher (still unknown, though possibly Louis Jolyon West), and George Estabrooks, the writer of the hypnotic messenger proposal and author of the book Hypnotism.

2) The letter writer—whom I believe was St. Clair Switzer—is working with the major hypnosis researcher. He might be helping Estabrooks too, since Estabrooks’ hypnotic messenger proposal fits within Switzer’s sabbatical and also was dated within two days of the second letter. But if we have to choose between the two researchers, I believe that St. Clair Switzer was working with the researcher with boatloads of funding and Secret or Top Secret clearance—the one who also had lots of questions about how far they could take hypnosis experimentation, no matter how dangerous, shocking, or unusual.

Interested in your thoughts.