Do the Hardy Boys Hate Redheads?
As a child, I loved the Hardy Boys mysteries. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that they were the 1920s equivalent of a boy band — carefully constructed and marketed to a very specific audience by one Edward Stratemeyer with a view to maximizing profits — I couldn’t resist. And could I really have been expected to do so?Stratemeyer had been in the publishing business for decades by the time that he invented the Hardy Boys, and he knew how to reel in his audience. Frank and Joe are the last in a long line of boy adventurers like the Rover Boys, Dave Fearless, Don Sturdy, the Speedwell Boys, and Tom Swift.
Although Stratemeyer was a prolific author (Wikipedia says that he authored over 1300 books), with the exception of the Rover Boys he outsourced the writing of these books to ghostwriters. They worked according to Stratemeyer’s plot outlines; some of them could crank out a book a week. In my peak bookworm era, I probably read them at the rate of at least one a week. Maybe even three, if I could get my hands on them from the library. Last week I read 6. What can I say? The simplicity of life in the Hardyverse appeals more than ever in this mad world.
In case you don’t know, Frank and Joe are all-American WASP boys from a middle class home. Their mother Laura is a homemaker and their father Fenton is “a famous detective who had made a national reputation for himself while on the detective force of the New York Police Department and who had retired to set up a private practice of his own” in Bayport, New York. Frank and Joe aspire to follow in his footsteps but in the meantime they do their homework and their chores, zip around the countryside on their motorcycles, and play practical jokes on inept police officers. When hot on the trail of nefarious actors, they proceed with a touching naiveté, as if they know that they’ll live happily ever after no matter what dangers they might encounter. And so they can afford to make assumptions, chief among them that clean, well-dressed people are honest and that slovenly, unshaven people are crooks.
In addition to lacking personal hygiene skills, the Hardy boys’ foes frequently have “surly expressions,” “unsavoury looks,” and “villainous countenances” — and red hair. Already on page 9 of The Tower Treasure (Book 1 in the series), a man in a speeding car tries to run them off the road. As the vehicle races past, Frank notices that the driver “had a shock of red hair blowing in the wind.”
This reckless gentlemen turns out to be John Jackley, “commonly known as ‘Red.’” Strangely, Red Jackley does not actually have red hair. As Fenton Hardy explains to his sons, Jackley acquired his nickname “because he hasn’t red hair. … This fellow…has a fondness for wearing red wigs.” Jackley, of course, is guilty (in this case of stealing jewelry and bonds from a eccentric but stupendously wealthy stamp collector). The connection between crime and hair colour is thus established.
Hardy Boys ghostwriter Leslie McFarlane recalled that, in Stratemeyer’s original outline, the main miscreant in the second book, The House on the Cliff, bore the name Red Snackley. That’s right — the first and second books originally featured villains nicknamed Red, who both had red hair, and whose surnames rhymed. McFarlane mused that his boss “was, obviously, prejudiced against redheads” and imagined that Stratemeyer must have once been traumatized by a terrible vaudeville act featuring a Red Snackley and Red Jackley, over whom he was now exercising his revenge by casting them as baddies in his new series.1
Red Snackley didn’t make it into the published version of The House on the Cliff. Someone — McFarlane, Stratemeyer, or perhaps an editor — excised Snackley’s red hair and nickname before the book went to print, transforming him instead into Ganny Snackley (a name that, in my humble opinion, is hardly an improvement). Ganny resembles a generic villain: “very tall” with a “tanned and weatherbeaten” face and “lips [that] were thin and cruel.” Nevertheless, a redhaired baddie, or rather minion, still makes an appearance in the form of the stout and mustachioed Redhead Blount.
In the third book, The Secret of the Old Mill, the boys are about to board their motorboat when a man “stout and thick-set, florid of face and red of hair” rushes up and asks them if he can hitch a ride. He turns out to be Paul Blum, a counterfeiter who is wanted by police. One book later, in The Missing Chums, the boys observe a man with a “scant thatch of carroty hair.” His hair colour gives him away already on page 7: Red Hawkins, together with two other “unsavory-looking fellows,” later kidnaps the Hardy boys’ pals Biff and Chet.
In Book 5, while on the hunt for hidden gold, Frank and Joe encounter three men. One is a “tall, surly chap.” The others are “short and husky of build. One was clean-shaven and thin-featured, the other had a reddish mustache. … The three were villainous in appearance.” Naturally, these men turn out to be criminal associates of Black Pepper, the book’s Big Bad.
The ginger prejudice subsides in the following books. Only in The Great Airport Mystery does red hair make a comeback:
There were other numbers on the program, including a violin solo by lola Morton, an exceedingly vigorous recitation by Biff Hooper, an accordion solo by Tony Prito and — to cap it all — the antics of a burlesque orchestra organized by Chet. In this, Chet was in his element, wearing a fireman’s hat and a huge false mustache. Frank and Joe Hardy, wearing stovepipe hats and red wigs, alternated at a bass drum…
Whether intentionally or not, Frank and Joe’s red wigs echo Red Jackley’s in The Tower Treasure and the scene becomes all the more burlesque because the Hardy boys — avatars of all that’s honest — have costumed themselves as villains.
The red-haired villains of the Hardyverse are not unique in the Stratemeyer syndicate’s series. While the company’s series from the turn of the twentieth century like the Rover Boys, Bobbsey Twins, and Speedwell Boys didn’t feature an abnormal number of red-haired baddies (or any at all), that changed with the launch of the Tom Swift series in 1910. Tom’s nemesis is a redhead called Andy Foger. In Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat, he is introduced thusly:
Andy Foger, a rich lad of Shopton, was a sort of bully. He had red hair and squinty eyes, and was as mean in character as he was in looks. He and his cronies, Sam Snedecker and Pete Bailey, made trouble for Tom, chiefly because Tom managed to beat Andy twice in boat races.
Andy is described as a “red-haired coward” or, more frequently, as a “red-haired bully.” Eventually, Tom outgrows Andy as an opponent and he simply disappears from the narrative. However, other red-haired villains crop up in his place. In Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, our hero travels to Africa, where he is warned about the red pygmies:
“…they’re a tribe of little creatures, about three feet high, covered with thick reddish hair, who live in the central part of Africa, near some of the best elephant-hunting ground. They are wild, savage and ferocious, and what they lack individually in strength, they make up in numbers. They’re like little red apes, and woe betide the unlucky hunter who falls into their merciless hands. They treat him worse than the cannibals do.”
Another ginger baddie appears in Tom Swift and His Chest of Secrets, although after the “red pygmies” this otherwise unremarkable adult is somewhat of a letdown:
“When I got back I found the office in confusion, and Eradicate, staggering about with a badly cut head, was telling some story about a big red-haired man who had burst in on your father and had tried to take some papers away from him.”
We need not despair, however, for such a run-of-the-mill redheaded villain. In Tom Swift and His Television Detector, the anarchist Alex Kalhofski is said to be “more dangerous than he looks, not so much physically as mentally”:
“He is small and thin, hardly larger than a good-sized boy, and he has a peculiar shade of red hair and beard. Of course, he may dye both, but you can spot dyed hair and beards. Also, he has a livid scar on his left cheek, the result of a premature bomb explosion.”
Kalhofski is the last of his kind in the Tom Swift series. However, for nearly a quarter of a century — from 1910 to 1933 — Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys met and bested redheaded adversaries. Were these redheaded villains all a coincidence? Or was there a reason for their red hair?
Let me digress a bit. As a modern scholar (whose name I no longer recall) of Dostoevsky once said, “we no longer have the Bible at our fingertips,” which means that our lack of knowledge makes our reading experience very different than that of the audience for whom Dostoevsky originally wrote. I do not mean to compare the Hardy Boys to The Brothers Karamazov, but the point stands. Lacking knowledge of Christian traditions, it took me a while to figure out that Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, is often depicted as a redhead in Christian art. The Spanish and French phrases “pelo de Judas” and “poil de Judas” (the hair of Judas) even refer to red hair.
From the Middle Ages onward, Europeans associated red hair not only with Judas but also with Jews. While this link seems to derive from the historical Christian belief that Jews were in league with the Devil and connected via their assumed treachery to Judas, there are actually significant numbers of Jews with red hair — approximately 3.5% of Ashkenazi women and 10% of Ashkenazi men. Yiddish folklore also contains references to “di royte yidn” or Red Jews, who, it was said, would one day liberate their co-religionists from Christian and Muslim oppression. Medieval German Christians twisted this legend to claim that red-haired Jews descended from Gog and Magog, lived in the Caucasus mountains, and secretly worked in tandem with European Jews to cause the Black Plague.
Do red-haired villains make their way into the Hardyverse via Red Jews? After all, the Christian version of the story originated in Germany and Edward Stratemeyer was the first-generation American son of German immigrants. However, the Red Jews were no longer culturally current as bogeymen in Germany after the sixteenth century. So while I think it’s possible that Stratemeyer could have made the link between red hair, Judas, and Jews in general, I find it unlikely that he would have been familiar with this specific form of anti-Jewish-ginger prejudice.2 Additionally, he specified that the Hardy Boys number Phil Cohen, “a diminutive black-haired Jewish boy,” among their chums. Phil never features as prominently as other pals like Chet Morton, Biff Hooper, or Tony Prito, but his inclusion was striking at a time when prejudice ran high against Jews in American society.3
If the idea of medieval Christian imagery influencing the appearance of Hardy Boys villains sounds far-fetched, let me offer a more prosaic explanation. The popular press consistently drew parallels between red hair and criminality. In a study from the late 1940s, anthropologist Hans von Hentig noted the prevalence of red hair in descriptions of nineteenth-century outlaws in the western United States. Although von Hentig was quick to make the point that “because of their striking appearance, they might have been remembered rather than ordinary men who killed and were killed,” he also notes that contemporaries described them as impulsive, heedless, quarrelsome and revengeful.4 Newspaper articles from the 1920s suggest that these stereotypes prevailed. Pieces like “Science and the Popular Beliefs about Red-Headed People” argued that “there are no scientific foundations for the legends concerning red hair.” Others tried ostensibly to defend redheads (“red hair is no disgrace”) but ended with a sucker punch: “You can trust redheaded persons — you can trust them to do as they please.” These attitudes towards redhaired people continue to this day, and studies show that redheads are deemed, among other things, less attractive, less successful, clownish, and hot tempered.5
In addition to its association with Jews, red hair is also strongly identified with Irish people. 10% of the Irish population has red hair, compared to 2% in other European countries. In 1859, just a few years before Stratemeyer was born, Irish-born people made up 55% of arrestees in New York City. (For context, 25% of the city’s police force was also Irish-born.)6 As the nineteenth century wore on, the Irish continued to not enjoy a good reputation in New York. They were overrepresented in riots, violence, and general disorderliness, and the press often contrasted them unfavourably with well-behaved industrious Germans.7 This stereotype began to diminish in the early twentieth century, but Irish gangsters still made headlines in the 1920s as Irish and Jewish (and Italian) street gangs vied for power in American cities. Perhaps some of them served as inspirations for Red Jackley, Red Hawkins, and Red (later Ganny) Snackley.
In the Hardyverse, ginger villains cease making regular appearances after Book 5. Redheads obviously had a terrible track record against Frank and Joe, but so did “dark and swarthy” men. So why did only the red-haired criminals call it quits?
The archives of the Stratemeyer syndicate may well hold the answer to that question, but they are not particularly accessible for a blogger in Norway. So I resort instead to speculation. Maybe Edward Stratemeyer got over his redhead-induced trauma. Maybe his daughter married a red-haired man (although this seems doubtful given that she created Tom Swift’s red-haired anarchist foe Kalhofski). Maybe the Irish had assimilated so well into American life that they could no longer be othered quite so convincingly. Maybe criminal stereotypes changed as Italian-American mobsters rose to nationwide prominence. Whatever the case, let’s hope that the Hardyverse’s redheaded malefactors went on to better things.
1 McFarlane, L. (1976). Ghost of the Hardy Boys. Methuen.
2 Alex Kalhofski, the red-haired villain brought to justice by Tom Swift, may be an Eastern European Jewish anarchist. In 1903, a study in Poland found that 5% of Polish Jewish men had red hair. Americans closely associated anarchy with Judaism at that time and Kalhofski’s red hair is, excuse the pun, the cherry on top of the stereotype.
3 Connelly, M. (2008). The Hardy Boys mysteries, 1927–1979: A cultural and literary history. McFarland.
4 Von Hentig, H. (1947). Redhead and outlaw: A study in criminal anthropology. J. Crim. L. & Criminology, 38, 1.
5 Guéguen, N. Hair Color and Courtship: Blond Women Received More Courtship Solicitations and Redhead Men Received More Refusals. Psychol Stud 57, 369–375 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-012-0158-6
Clayson, D. E., & Maughan, M. R. C. (1986). Redheads and Blonds: Stereotypic Images. Psychological Reports, 59(2), 811–816. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1986.59.2.811
Heckert, D. M., & Best, A. (1997). Ugly duckling to swan: Labeling theory and the stigmatization of red hair. Symbolic Interaction, 20(4), 365–384.
6 Ernst, R. (1994). Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863. Syracuse University Press.
7 O’Rourke, H. E. (2001). Irish immigrant involvement in collective violence in New York from 1845 to 1875. City University of New York.