Slavery, race, and segregation Green wrote that Campbell "enjoyed taking the '
devil's advocate' position in almost any area, willing to defend even viewpoints with which he disagreed if that led to a livelier debate". As an example, he wrote: [Campbell] pointed out that the much-maligned 'peculiar institution' of
slavery in the
American South had in fact provided the blacks brought there with a higher standard of living than they had in Africa ... I suspected, from comments by Asimov, among others – and some
Analog editorials I had read – that John held some
racist views, at least in regard to blacks. However, Green also said about this stance that "rapidly increasing mechanization after 1850 would have soon rendered slavery obsolete anyhow. It would have been better for the USA to endure it a few more years than suffer the truly horrendous costs of the Civil War." In a June 1961 editorial called "Civil War Centennial", Campbell argued that slavery had been a dominant form of human relationships for most of history and that the present was unusual in that anti-slavery cultures dominated the planet. It's my bet that the South would have been integrated by 1910. The job would have been done – and done right – half a century sooner, with vastly less human misery, and with almost no bloodshed ... The only way slavery has ever been ended, anywhere, is by introducing industry ... If a man is a skilled and competent machinist – if the
lathes work well under his hands – the industrial management will be forced, to remain in business, to accept that fact, whether the man be black, white, purple, or polka-dotted. According to
Michael Moorcock, Campbell suggested that some people preferred slavery. He also, when faced with the
Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were 'natural' slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the
moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were 'against' emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in 'leaderless' riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles. In 1965, he continued his defense of segregation and related practices, critiquing "the arrogant defiance of law by many of the Negro 'Civil Rights' groups". On February 10, 1967, Campbell rejected
Samuel R. Delany's
Nova a month before it was ultimately published, with a note and phone call to his agent explaining that he did not feel his readership "would be able to relate to a black main character". All these views were reflected in the depiction of
aliens in
Astounding/Analog. Throughout his editorship, Campbell demanded that depiction of contact between aliens and humans must favor humans. For example, Campbell accepted
Isaac Asimov's proposal for "
Homo Sol" (in which humans rejected an invitation to join a galactic federation) in January 1940, which was published later that year in the September edition of
Astounding Science Fiction. Similarly,
Arthur C. Clarke's "
Rescue Party" and
Fredric Brown's "
Arena" (which formed the basis of the
Star Trek episode
of the same name) and "
Letter to a Phoenix" (all first appeared in
Astounding) also depict humans more favorably than aliens.
Medicine and health Campbell was a critic of government regulation of health and safety, excoriating numerous public health initiatives and regulations. Campbell was a heavy smoker throughout his life and was seldom seen without his customary cigarette holder. In the
Analog of September 1964, nine months after the
Surgeon General's first major warning about the dangers of cigarette smoking had been issued (January 11, 1964) Campbell ran an editorial, "A Counterblaste to Tobacco" that took its title from the
anti-smoking book of the same name by
King James I of England. In it, he stated that the connection to lung cancer was "esoteric" and referred to "a barely determinable possible correlation between cigarette smoking and cancer". He said that tobacco's calming effects led to more effective thinking. In a one-page piece about automobile safety in
Analog dated May 1967, Campbell wrote of "people suddenly becoming conscious of the fact that cars kill more people than cigarettes do, even if the antitobacco alarmists were completely right..." In 1963, Campbell published an angry editorial about
Frances Oldham Kelsey who, while at the FDA, refused to permit
thalidomide to be sold in the United States. In other essays, Campbell supported crank medicine, arguing that government regulation was more harmful than beneficial and that regulating
quackery prevented the use of many possible beneficial medicines (
e.g.,
krebiozen).
Pseudoscience, parapsychology, and politics In the 1930s, Campbell became interested in
Joseph Rhine's theories about
ESP (Rhine had already founded the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University when Campbell was a student there), and over the following years his growing interest in
parapsychology would be reflected in the stories he published when he encouraged the writers to include these topics in their tales, leading to the publication of numerous works about
telepathy and other "
psionic" abilities. This post-war "psi-boom" has been dated by science fiction scholars to roughly the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, and continues to influence many popular culture tropes and motifs. Campbell rejected the
Shaver Mystery in which the author claimed to have had a personal experience with a sinister ancient civilization that harbored fantastic technology in caverns under the earth. His increasing beliefs in pseudoscience would eventually start to isolate and alienate him from some of his writers, including Asimov. He wrote favorably about such things as the "
Dean drive", a device that supposedly produced thrust in violation of
Newton's third law, and the "
Hieronymus machine", which could supposedly amplify
psi powers. He wrote of L. Ron Hubbard's initial article in
Astounding that "[i]t is, I assure you in full and absolute sincerity, one of the most important articles ever published." Campbell continued to promote Hubbard's theories until 1952, when the pair split acrimoniously over the direction of the movement. Asimov wrote: "A number of writers wrote pseudoscientific stuff to ensure sales to Campbell, but the best writers retreated, I among them. ..." Elsewhere Asimov went on to further explain Campbell championed far-out ideas ... He pained very many of the men he had trained (including me) in doing so, but felt it was his duty to stir up the minds of his readers and force curiosity right out to the border lines. He began a series of editorials ... in which he championed a social point of view that could sometimes be described as far right (he expressed sympathy for
George Wallace in the 1968 national election, for instance). There was bitter opposition to this from many (including me – I could hardly ever read a Campbell editorial and keep my temper). == Assessment by peers ==