L. Ron Hubbard Part I

 

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986) was an American author and the founder of Scientology. A prolific writer of pulp science fiction and fantasy novels in his early career, in 1950 he authored Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and established organizations to promote and practice Dianetics techniques. Hubbard created Scientology in 1952 after losing the intellectual rights to his literature on Dianetics in bankruptcy. He would lead the Church of Scientology – variously described as a cult, a new religious movement, or a business – until his death in 1986.

Born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911, Hubbard spent much of his childhood in Helena, Montana. While his father was posted to the U.S. naval base on Guam in the late 1920s, Hubbard traveled to Asia and the South Pacific. In 1930, Hubbard enrolled at George Washington University to study civil engineering but dropped out in his second year. He began his career as an author of pulp fiction and married Margaret Grubb, who shared his interest in aviation.

Hubbard was an officer in the Navy during World War II, where he briefly commanded two ships but was removed from command both times. The last few months of his active service were spent in a hospital, being treated for a variety of complaints. In 1953, the first churches of Scientology were founded by Hubbard. In 1954 a Scientology church in Los Angeles was founded, which became the Church of Scientology International. Hubbard added organizational management strategies, principles of pedagogy, a theory of communication and prevention strategies for healthy living to the teachings of Scientology. As Scientology came under increasing media attention and legal pressure in a number of countries during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hubbard spent much of his time at sea as "commodore" of the Sea Organization, a private, quasi-paramilitary Scientologist fleet.

Hubbard returned to the United States in 1975 and went into seclusion in the California desert after an unsuccessful attempt to take over the town of Clearwater, Florida. In 1978, Hubbard was convicted of fraud after he was tried in absentia by France. In the same year, 11 high-ranking members of Scientology were indicted on 28 charges for their role in the Church's Snow White Program, a systematic program of espionage against the United States government. One of the indicted was Hubbard's wife Mary Sue Hubbard; he himself was named an unindicted co-conspirator. Hubbard spent the remaining years of his life in seclusion, attended to by a small group of Scientology officials.

Following his 1986 death, Scientology leaders announced that Hubbard's body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research on another plane of existence. The Church of Scientology describes Hubbard in hagiographic terms, though many of his autobiographical statements were fictitious. Sociologist Stephen Kent has observed that Hubbard "likely presented a personality disorder known as malignant narcissism."

Life

Before Dianetics

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on March 13, 1911, the only child of Ledora May Waterbury (1885–1959), who had trained as a teacher, and Harry Ross Hubbard (1886–1975), a low-ranking United States Navy officer. Like many military families of the era, the Hubbards repeatedly relocated around the United States and overseas. After moving to Kalispell, Montana, they settled in Helena in 1913. Hubbard's father rejoined the Navy in April 1917, during World War I, while his mother worked as a clerk for the state government. After his father was posted to Guam, Hubbard and his mother traveled there with brief stop-overs in a couple of Chinese ports. In high school, Hubbard contributed to the school paper, but was dropped from enrollment due to failing grades. After he failed the Naval Academy entrance examination, Hubbard was enrolled in a Virginia Preparatory School to prepare him for a second attempt. However, after complaining of eye strain, Hubbard was diagnosed with myopia, precluding any future enrollment in the Naval Academy. As an adult, Hubbard would privately write to himself that his eyes had gone bad when he "used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy".

Hubbard was sent to the Woodward School in D.C., as graduates qualified for admission to George Washington University without having to take the entrance exam. Hubbard graduated in June 1930 and entered GWU. Academically, Hubbard did poorly and was repeatedly warned about bad grades, but he contributed to the student newspaper and was active in the glider club. In 1932, Hubbard organized a student trip to the Caribbean, but amid multiple misfortunes and insufficient funding, the passengers took to burning Hubbard in effigy and the trip was canceled by the ship's owners. Hubbard did not return to GWU the following year.

For much of the 1920s and 1930s, Hubbard lived in Washington D.C., and he would later claim to have interacted with multiple psychiatrists in the city. Hubbard described encounters in 1923 and 1930 with navy psychiatrist Joseph Thompson. Thompson was controversial within the American psychiatric community for his support of lay analysis, the practice of psychoanalysis by those without medical degrees. Hubbard also recalled interacting with William Alanson White, supervisor of the D.C. psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeth's. According to Hubbard, both White and Thompson had regarded his athleticism and lack of interest in psychology as signs of a good prognosis. Hubbard later claimed to have been trained by both Thompson and White. Hubbard also discussed his interactions at Chestnut Lodge, a D.C.-area facility specializing in schizophrenia, repeatedly complaining that their staff misdiagnosed an unnamed individual with the condition:

There's a place by the name of Walnut Lodge... They don't see anything humorous in that, by the way... They sent three people to see me and every one of them was under treatment—and this was their staff! But anyway, very good people there, I'm sure... Didn't happen to meet any. Have some fine patients though! Anyway, they treat only schizophrenia. And so they take only schizophrenics. Now how do they get only schizophrenics? Well, anybody sent to Walnut Lodge is a classified schizophrenic. And they take somebody who is a dementia praecox unclassified or a more modern definition, a mania-depressive and they take him from Saint Elizabeth's and they take him over to Walnut Lodge and he goes onto the books as a schizophrenic. Why? Because Walnut Lodge takes only schizophrenics.

Pre-war fiction

In 1933, Hubbard renewed a relationship with a fellow glider pilot, Margaret "Polly" Grubb and the two were quickly married on April 13. The following year, she gave birth to a son who was named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr., later nicknamed "Nibs". A second child, Katherine May, was born two years later. The Hubbards lived for a while in Laytonsville, Maryland, but were chronically short of money. In the spring of 1936, they moved to Bremerton, Washington. They lived there for a time with Hubbard's aunts and grandmother before finding a place of their own at nearby South Colby. According to one of his friends at the time, Robert MacDonald Ford, the Hubbards were "in fairly dire straits for money" but sustained themselves on the income from Hubbard's writing.

Hubbard began a writing career and tried to write for mainstream publications. Hubbard soon found his niche in the pulp fiction magazines, becoming a prolific and prominent writer in the medium. From 1934 until 1940, Hubbard produced hundreds of short stories and novels. Hubbard is remembered for his "prodigious output" across a variety of genres, including adventure fiction, aviation, travel, mysteries, westerns, romance, and science fiction. His first full-length novel, Buckskin Brigades, was published in 1937. The novel told the story of "Yellow Hair", a white man adopted into the Blackfeet tribe, with promotional material claiming the author had been a "bloodbrother" of the Blackfeet. The New York Times Book Review praised the book, writing "Mr. Hubbard has reversed a time-honored formula and has given a thriller to which, at the end of every chapter or so, another paleface bites the dust."

On New Year's Day, 1938, Hubbard reportedly underwent a dental procedure and reacted to the anesthetic gas used in the procedure. According to his account, this triggered a revelatory near-death experience. Allegedly inspired by this experience, Hubbard composed a manuscript, which was never published, with working titles of The One Command and Excalibur. Hubbard sent telegrams to several book publishers, but nobody bought the manuscript. Hubbard wrote to his wife:

Sooner or later Excalibur will be published... I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned.

Hubbard found greater success after being taken under the supervision of Editor John W. Campbell, who published many of Hubbard's short stories and serialized novelettes in his magazines Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction. Hubbard's novel Final Blackout told the story of a low-ranking British army officer who rises to become dictator of the United Kingdom. In July 1940, Campbell magazine Unknown published a psychological horror by Hubbard titled Fear about an ethnologist who becomes paranoid that demons are out to get him—the work was well-received, drawing praise from Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and others. In November and December 1940, Unknown serialized Hubbard's novel Typewriter in the Sky about a pulp fiction writer whose friend becomes trapped inside one of his stories.

Military career

In 1941, Hubbard applied to join the United States Navy. His application was accepted, and he was commissioned as a lieutenant junior grade in the United States Naval Reserve on July 19, 1941. By November, he was posted to New York for training as an intelligence officer. The day after Pearl Harbor, Hubbard was posted to the Philippines and departed the US bound for Australia. But while in Australia awaiting transport to the Philippines, Hubbard was suddenly ordered back to the United States after being accused by the US Naval Attaché to Australia of sending blockade-runner Don Isidro "three thousand miles out of her way".

In June 1942, Hubbard was given command of a patrol boat at the Boston Navy Yard, but he was relieved after the yard commandant wrote that Hubbard was "not temperamentally fitted for independent command". In 1943, Hubbard was given command of a submarine chaser, but only five hours into the shakedown cruise, Hubbard believed he had detected an enemy submarine. Hubbard and crew spent the next 68 hours engaged in combat. An investigation concluded that Hubbard had likely mistaken a "known magnetic deposit" for an enemy sub. The following month, Hubbard unwittingly fired upon Mexican territory and was relieved of command. In 1944, Hubbard served aboard the USS Algol before being transferred. The night before his departure, Hubbard reported the discovery of an attempted sabotage.

In June 1942, Navy records indicate that Hubbard suffered "active conjunctivitis" and later "urethral discharges". After being relieved of command of the sub-chaser, Hubbard began reporting sick, citing a variety of ailments, including ulcers, malaria, and back pains. In July 1943, Hubbard was admitted to the San Diego naval hospital for observation—he would remain there for months. Years later, Hubbard would privately write to himself: "Your stomach trouble you used as an excuse to keep the Navy from punishing you." On April 9, 1945, Hubbard again reported sick and was re-admitted to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, Oakland. He was discharged from the hospital on December 4, 1945.

After the war

After Hubbard chose to stay in California rather than return to his family in Washington State, he moved into the Pasadena mansion of John "Jack" Whiteside Parsons, a rocket propulsion engineer and a leading follower of the English occultist Aleister Crowley. Hubbard befriended Parsons and soon became sexually involved with Parsons's 21-year-old girlfriend, Sara "Betty" Northrup. Hubbard and Parsons collaborated on "Babalon Working", a sex magic ritual intended to summon an incarnation of Babalon, the supreme Goddess in Crowley's pantheon.

During this period, Hubbard authored a document which has been called the "Affirmations", a series of statements relating to various physical, sexual, psychological and social issues that he was encountering in his life. The Affirmations appear to have been intended to be used as a form of self-hypnosis with the intention of resolving the author's psychological problems and instilling a positive mental attitude.

Parsons, Hubbard and Sara invested nearly their entire savings — the vast majority contributed by Parsons and Sara — in a plan for Hubbard and Sara to buy yachts on the East Coast and sail them to the West Coast to sell. Hubbard had a different idea, writing to the U.S. Navy requesting permission to undertake a world cruise. Parsons attempted to recover his money by obtaining an injunction to prevent Hubbard and Sara leaving the country or disposing of the remnants of his assets, but ultimately only received a $2,900 promissory note from Hubbard. Parsons returned home "shattered" and was forced to sell his mansion.

On August 10, 1946, Hubbard married Sara, though he was still married to his first wife Polly. Hubbard resumed his fiction writing to supplement his small disability allowance. In August 1947, Hubbard returned to the pages of Astounding with a serialized novel "The End is Not Yet", about a young nuclear physicist who tries to stop a world takeover by building a new philosophical system. In October 1947, the magazine began serializing Ole Doc Methuselah, the first in a series about the "Soldiers of Light", supremely skilled, extremely long-lived physicians. In February and March 1950, Campbell's Astounding serialized the Hubbard novel To the Stars about a young engineer on an interstellar trading starship who learns those months aboard ship amounts to centuries on Earth, making the ship his only remaining home after his first voyage. During his time in California, Hubbard began acting as a sort of amateur stage hypnotist or "swami".

Hubbard repeatedly wrote to the Veterans Administration (VA) asking for an increase in his war pension. Finally, in October 1947, he wrote to request psychiatric treatment:

After trying and failing for two years to regain my equilibrium in civil life, I am utterly unable to approach anything like my own competence. My last physician informed me that it might be very helpful if I were to be examined and perhaps treated psychiatrically or even by a psychoanalyst. Toward the end of my service I avoided out of pride any mental examinations, hoping that time would balance a mind which I had every reason to suppose was seriously affected. I cannot account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations, and have newly come to realize that I must first triumph above this before I can hope to rehabilitate myself at all. ... I cannot, myself, afford such treatment.

Would you please help me?

The VA eventually did increase his pension, but his money problems continued. In the summer of 1948, Hubbard was arrested by the San Luis Obispo sheriff on a charge of petty theft for passing a fraudulent check. Beginning in June 1948, the nationally-syndicated wire service United Press ran a story on an American Legion-sponsored psychiatric ward in Savannah, Georgia, which sought to keep mentally-ill war veterans out of jail. In late 1948, Hubbard and his second wife Sara moved from California to Savannah, Georgia, where he would later claim to have worked as a volunteer in a psychiatric clinic. Hubbard claimed he had "processed an awful lot of Negroes" and wrote of having observed a psychiatrist using the threat of institutionalization in a state hospital to solicit funds from a patient's husband. In letters to friends sent from Savannah, Hubbard began to make the first public mentions of what was to become Dianetics.

In the Dianetics era

Inspired by science-fiction of his friend Robert Heinlein, Hubbard announced plans to write a book which would claim to "make supermen". Hubbard announced to the public that there existed a superhuman condition which he called the state of "Clear". He claimed people in that state would have a perfectly functioning mind with an improved intelligence quotient (IQ) and photographic memory. The "Clear" would be cured of physical ailments ranging from poor eyesight to the common cold, which Hubbard asserted were purely psychosomatic.

Hubbard and Sara moved into a cottage at Bay Head, New Jersey, to finish writing Dianetics. The cottage at 666 East Avenue is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Hubbard's son Nibs later claimed the number '666' had special significance for his father.

To promote his upcoming book, Hubbard enlisted his longtime-editor John Campbell, who had a fascination with fringe psychologies and psychic powers. Campbell invited Hubbard and Sara to move into a New Jersey cottage. Campbell, in turn, recruited an acquaintance, medical doctor Joseph Winter, to help promote the book. Campbell wrote Winter to extol Hubbard, claiming that Hubbard had worked with nearly 1000 cases and cured every single one. The birth of Hubbard's second daughter Alexis Valerie, delivered by Winter on March 8, 1950, came in the middle of the preparations to launch Dianetics.

The basic content of Dianetics was a retelling of Psychoanalytic theory geared for a mass market English-speaking audience. Like Freud, Hubbard taught that the brain recorded memories (or "engrams") which were stored in the unconscious mind (which Hubbard restyled "the reactive mind"). Past memories could be triggered later in life, causing psychological, emotional, or even physical problems. By sharing their memories with a friendly listener (or "auditor"), a person could overcome their past pain and thus cure themselves. Through Dianetics, Hubbard claimed that most illnesses were psychosomatic and caused by engrams, including arthritis, dermatitis, allergies, asthma, coronary difficulties, eye trouble, and bursitis, ulcers, and sinusitis and migraine headaches. He further claimed that dianetic therapy could treat these illnesses, and also included cancer and diabetes as conditions that Dianetic research was focused on.

Accompanied by an article in Astounding's May 1950 issue, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was released on May 9. Although Dianetics was poorly received by the press and the scientific and medical professions, the book was an immediate commercial success and sparked "a nationwide cult of incredible proportions". Five hundred Dianetic auditing groups were set up across the United States, and Hubbard established the "Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation". Financial controls were lax, and Hubbard himself took large sums with no explanation of what he was doing with it.

Dianetics lost public credibility on August 10 when a presentation by Hubbard before an audience of 6,000 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles failed disastrously. He introduced a woman named Sonya Bianca and told the audience that as a result of undergoing Dianetic therapy she now possessed perfect recall, only for her to forget the color of Hubbard's necktie. A large part of the audience walked out, and the debacle was publicized by popular science writer Martin Gardner. On September 3, psychologist Erich Fromm publicly derided Dianetics as a "mixture of some oversimplified truths, half-truths and plain absurdities"; Fromm criticized the writing as "propagandistic" and likened it to the quack field of patent medicines. By late-1950, Hubbard's foundations were in financial crisis. Hubbard's publisher Arthur Ceppos, his longtime promoter Joseph Campbell, and medical doctor-turned-Dianetics endorser Joseph Winter all resigned under acrimonious circumstances.

In late-1950, Hubbard began an affair with employee Barbara Klowden, prompting Sara to start her own affair with Miles Hollister. On February 23, 1951, Sara and her lover consulted with a psychiatrist about Hubbard, who advised that Sara was in grave danger and Hubbard should be institutionalized. The trio telephoned Jack Maloney, the head of the Hubbard's foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to request funding for the hospitalization. Maloney informed Hubbard of the plans to institutionalize him. That night, Hubbard and two trusted aides kidnapped Hubbard's one-year-old daughter Alexis and wife Sara and attempted unsuccessfully to find a doctor to examine Sara and declare her insane. He let Sara go but took Alexis to Cuba. Hubbard denounced Sara and her lover to the FBI, portraying them in a letter as communist infiltrators. An agent annotated his correspondence with Hubbard with the comment, "Appears mental".

On April 12, Sara's story was published in the press, leading to headlines such as "Ron Hubbard Insane, Says His Wife". Hubbard's first wife evidently saw the headlines and wrote to Sara on May 2 offering her support. "Ron is not normal... Your charges probably sound fantastic to the average person—but I've been through it—the beatings, threats on my life, all the sadistic traits you charge—twelve years of it." In June, Sara finally secured the return of her daughter by agreeing to a settlement in which she signed a statement, written by Hubbard, declaring that she had been misrepresented in the press and that she had always believed he was a "fine and brilliant man".

During the Dianetics and Scientology era, Hubbard regularly relocated across the country, living in Elizabeth, New Jersey (1950); Los Angeles (1950–51), Wichita (1951–52), Phoenix (1952–53), Philadelphia (December 1952), Camden, New Jersey (1953–55); and D.C. (1955–59). In 1959, after losing tax-exemption in the US, Hubbard relocated to England.

The Dianetics craze "burned itself out as quickly as it caught fire” and the movement appeared to be on the edge of total collapse. However, it was temporarily saved by Don Purcell, a millionaire who agreed to support a new Foundation in Wichita, Kansas. In August 1951, Hubbard published Science of Survival. In that book, Hubbard introduced such concepts as the immortal soul (or "Thetan") and past-life regressions (or "Whole Track Auditing"). The Wichita Foundation underwrote the costs of printing the book, but it recorded poor sales when first published, with only 1,250 copies of the first edition being printed. The Wichita Foundation became financially nonviable after a court ruled that it was liable for the unpaid debts of its defunct predecessor in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The ruling prompted Purcell and the other directors of the Wichita Foundation to file for voluntary bankruptcy in February 1952. Hubbard resigned immediately and accused Purcell of having been bribed by the American Medical Association to destroy Dianetics. Hubbard emptied the Wichita foundation's bank accounts, in part through forgery.

Pivot to Scientology

Having lost the rights to Dianetics, Hubbard created Scientology. At a convention in Wichita, Hubbard announced that he had discovered a new science beyond Dianetics which he called "Scientology". Whereas the goal of Dianetics had been to reach a superhuman state of "Clear", Scientology promised a chance to achieve god-like powers in a state called Operating Thetan. Hubbard introduced a device called an "electropsychometer" (or e-meter), which called for users to hold two metal cans in their hands to measure changes in skin conductivity due to variance in sweat or grip. In 1906, Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung had famously used such a device in a study of word association. Rather than a mundane biofeedback device, Hubbard presented the e-meter as having "an almost mystical power to reveal an individual's innermost thoughts".

Hubbard married a staff member, 20-year-old Mary Sue Whipp, and the pair moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Hubbard was joined by his 18-year-old son Nibs, who had become a Scientology staff member and "professor". Scientology was organized in a different way from the decentralized Dianetics movement — The Hubbard Association of Scientologists (HAS) was the only official Scientology organization. Branches or "orgs" were organized as franchises, rather like a fast food restaurant chain. Each franchise holder was required to pay ten percent of income to Hubbard's central organization. In July, Hubbard published "What to Audit" (later re-titled Scientology: A History of Man), which taught everyone has subconscious traumatic memories of their past lives as clams, sloths, and cavemen which cause neuroses and health problems. In November 1952, Hubbard published Scientology 8-80, followed up in December with Scientology 8-8008, which argued that the physical universe is the creation of the mind.

"I'm going to send him back a letter. Uh... so... uh... you say you have some connection with the Prince of Darkness out there and you're very worried about this.

Who do you think I am?"

~Hubbard in December 1952.

In December, Hubbard gave a seventy-hour series of lectures in Philadelphia that was attended by 38 people in which he delved into the occult. In the lectures, Hubbard connects rituals and the practice of Scientology to the magickal practices of Aleister Crowley, recommending Crowley's book The Master Therion. During the Philadelphia course, Hubbard joked that he was "the prince of darkness", which was met with laughter from the audience. On December 16, 1952, Hubbard was arrested in the middle of a lecture for failing to return $9,000 withdrawn from the Wichita Foundation. He eventually settled the debt by paying $1,000 and returning a car belonging to Wichita financier Don Purcell.

In April 1953, Hubbard proposed setting up a chain of "Spiritual Guidance Centers" as part of what he called "the religion angle". On December 18, 1953, Hubbard incorporated the Church of Scientology in Camden, New Jersey. The religious transformation was explained as a way to protect Scientologists from charges of practicing medicine without a license. The idea may not have been new; Hubbard has been quoted as telling a science fiction convention in 1948: "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion."