Daniel W. VanArsdale
�1998, 2002, 2007, 2014, 2016
2.92 MB
Abstract: Apocryphal letters claiming divine
origin circulated for centuries in Europe. After 1900, shorter
more secular letters appeared in the US that promised good luck
if copies were distributed and bad luck if not. Billions of
these "luck chain letters" circulated in the the next 100 years.
As they replicated through the decades, some accumulated copying
errors, offhand comments, and calculated innovations that helped
them prevail in the competition with other chain letters. For
example, complementary testimonials developed, one exploiting
perceived good luck, another exploiting perceived bad luck.
Twelve successive types of paper luck chain letters are
identified which predominated US circulation at some time in the
twentieth century. These types, and their major variations, are
described and analyzed for their replicative advantage. In the 1970's a luck chain letter from South America
that touted a lottery winner invaded the US and was combined on
one page with an indigenous chain letter. This combination
rapidly dominated circulation. In 1979 a postscript concluding
with "It Works" was added to one of these combination letters,
and within a few years the progeny of this single letter had
replaced all the millions of similar letters in circulation
without this postscript. These and other events in paper chain
letter history are described, and hypotheses are offered to
explain advances and declines in circulation, including the near
extinction of luck chain letters in the new millennium.
Perhaps the most dramatic event in chain letter history was the advent of money chain letters. This was spawned by the infamous "Send-a-Dime" chain letter which flooded the world in 1935. The insight and methods of its anonymous author, likely a woman motivated by charity, are examined in detail in a separate article titled "The Origin of Money Chain Letters." This constitutes Section 4.1 below, where its link is repeated. It can be read independently from this treatise.
The online Paper Chain Letter Archive contains the text and documentation of over 900 chain letters. Most of these texts have been transcribed from collected physical letters, but many come from published sources including daily newspapers present in online searchable archives. Some unusual items in the archive are: an anonymous 1917 chain letter giving advice on obtaining conscientious objector status; a 1920 Sinn Fein revolutionary communication; rare unpublished scatological parody letters from 1935; a bizarre chain letter invitation to a suicide from 1937; and a libelous Proctor and Gamble boycott alleging satanism from 1986. An annotated index provides easy access to all chain letters in the archive. An Annotated Bibliography on Chain Letters and Pyramid Schemes contains over 425 entries. A Glossary gives precise definitions for terms used here, facilitating the independent reading of sections.2. Luck Chain
Letters
2-1 Predecessors
2-2 The Predominant Series
2-3 Outliers
3. How Chain
Letters Work
3-1 Population
Dynamics
3-2 Distribution Networks
3-3 Evolution
3-4 Retention
3-5 Compliance
3-6 Mainline Testimonials
3-7 Effective
Copying
3-8 Effective Distribution
4. Events
in Chain Letter History
4-1 The Origin of
Money Chain Letters (1933 - 1935) (Independent Article)
4-2 Divergence of
Luck and Money Chains (1935 - 1939)
4-3 Luck
Follows Money (1949)
4-4 The Media Chain Letter
(1948 - 1995)
4-5 The "It Works" Conquest
(1979 - 1982)
4-6 The
Death-Lottery Chain Letter Since 1980
I could not have conducted this study without the assistance and friendship of Dr. Michael J. Preston, University of Colorado English Professor and folklorist. He obtained scores of letters, gave me copies of his files and put me up in his home while I worked in the CU Boulder library. The help of Dr. William F. Hansen, folklorist and Head of the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University was also indispensable. He provided many useful chain letters and translations, and his interest and encouragement have been sustaining.
Special thanks also go to Alan E. Mays, who sent many chain letters, his bibliography on chain letters and the Himmelsbrief, and archived chain email. Paul Smith also provided scores of letters and an extensive bibliography. Anna Guigne sent a stack of chain letters and answered questions. Steve Glickman helped with microfilmed Denver Post articles at UC Boulder. Carol Petty copied local newspaper articles in Springfield, Missouri, where chain letters rampaged for a few days in 1935. John Burkhardt shared his thoughts early in the project and emailed digitized letters. James H. Patterson has provided photocopies of many rare chain letters from his collection of "unmailable" items. Sandy Hobbs sent photocopies of every chain letter that has appeared in the publications Dear Mr. Thoms and Letters to Ambrose Merton.
I have received much needed help with foreign language chain letters. Prof. Sarah E. Winter translated several chain letters and an entire article from French into English. Dr. Yana VanArsdale found several Russian chain letters and articles, and translated published letters in Polish and Russian to English. Dr. Jean-Bruno Renard has sent chain letters from France and Brazil, and a bibliography of French publications. Natalia Kasprzak sent two Polish articles on chain letters and translated a Polish letter into English. Bill Clark translated some chain letter Tagalog. Martinovich Vladimir Aleksandrovich provided Russian chain letters he collected, and has translated a Russian version of the Romance Game chain into English.
Though I am solely responsible for the approach and presentation here, this effort was sustained because a few people expressed interest. I am especially thankful for the encouragement of Richard Dawkins, who suggested I write "a book on chain letters, with all your detailed examples and analyses." This is not a book, but likely it is enough detail for most readers.
A partial list of those who provided one or more
paper chain letters appears on an information page for the archive.
1-1 Introduction.
Seeking paper chain
letters Overview
Auxiliary Files and
Conventions
Seeking paper chain letters.
If you have any information on where I may obtain paper
chain letters please email.
Any chain letters sent should be dateable, as by a postmarked
envelope. Are there any paper luck chain letters still
circulating, perhaps distributed by hand? The last one I
collected was almost ten years ago, in 2008. Foreign
examples, clippings, obscure or foreign references, beliefs and
rumors about chain letters, stories of receiving unexpected
money in the mail, or other personal experiences with chain
letters are welcome.
Overview.
Texts that appeal to superstition to encourage their copying or
publication have circulated for over a thousand years. For
English language letters, beginning around 1905, copy quotas and
deadlines appeared and claims of divine authorship and magical
protection were removed. These innovations probably began in
other languages and were translated into English. The resulting
"luck chain letters" eventually spread worldwide, and in over
four thousand generations of copying (with variation) they
accumulated ways to sustain and increase circulation that
challenge our understanding.
Using a collection of over 900 dated paper chain letter texts, I have identified types and variations that appear and disappear over the years. Unexpectedly, it was discovered that, repeatedly, a single letter bearing some new innovation had propagated so abundantly and rapidly that within just a few years its descendants replaced all similarly motivated letters in circulation.
Subtle methods that increase replication include the following.
Auxiliary Files and Conventions.
Listed here are files in the directory /chain-letter/ and
sub-directories /archive/, /e-archive/ and /photo-archive/ which
support this essay and are publicly available.
The following conventions may help the reader
decide whether to pursue a link.
1-2 Motivational Categories
Protection Charity Religion Luck Advocacy Money
Parody Exchange
World Record Chain Email
A chain letter explicitly asks a recipient
to make or purchase copies of itself and distribute them. It may
also instruct the reader to make some modification of the
letter, such as updating a list of senders. In this treatise I
will use the term "chain letter" exclusively to refer to paper
chain letters.
Examples reveal that the form and content of
chain letters are highly correlated with the principal motive to
distribute copies. I have classified each paper chain letter in
the archive into one of nine motivational categories which I
define here. Three of these categories (Protection, Luck, and
Money) are described in detail in following sections and hence
only briefly here. The order of the categories here is the
chronological order that English language examples first
appeared.
Protection.
The Letters from Heaven (German: Himmelsbrief) claim to
have been written by God or some divine agent. They often
command Sabbath observance and promise the bearer magical
protections.
Himmelsbrief have circulated in Europe and
elsewhere for many centuries. They do not exactly fit the above
definition of a chain letter since most do not ask that copies
be made, but instead ask the reader to "publish" the text. I
discuss them later (> Heaven).
The filenames for the Letters from Heaven begin
with the letter "h" in the Paper Chain Letter Archive.
Charity.
A charity chain letter requests money or some item be
sent to a fixed address, ostensibly for charitable, political or
memorial purposes.
Charity letters were common from 1888 up into the
1920's, and influenced early luck chain and money chain letters.
Apparently 1888 was a boom year for them, judging from newspaper
reports. There was even a parody that circulated [1888]. A
June 1887 newspaper article
found by Patrick Davison describes a "remarkable scheme" for
collecting donations by personal contact which uses a pyramid of
6,144 persons to collect $17,412. Participants were assigned one
of the six letters A through F depending on their role in the
scheme. Early charity letters may have been influenced by such
schemes.
A December, 1888
letter in the archive solicits dimes for the education of "the
poor whites in the region of the Cumberlands." This letter
states it is an adaption of a previous solicitation, and asks
that four copies be sent to friends. For compliance ". . . you
will receive the blessing of Him who was ready to die for us".
Excluding the Himmelsbrief, this may be the oldest chain letter
physically collected. An older charity chain letter from the
summer of 1888 is described by Paul Collins, and
likely some others circulated previously. A report of an 1881 charity
chain letter in the Washington Post is apparently false.
In an 1892
example, an American college student solicited dimes and ten
copies. This letter, like most early charity chains, claimed to
be self-terminating: recipients were asked to increment
a generation count at the top of the letter until it reached
some preset maximum at which time the donation was to be made,
but not more copies. This practice continued at least through
1916 [Billy].
Usually, a few years after a letter was launched, only those
circulated which had inflated this maximum (NYT 1917). For example,
there are two examples of a solicitation for used postage stamps
to build a children's ward in Australia (OED). The first is from 1900 and is
numbered 173 of 180 maximum. The second, highly modified, was
still in circulation ten years later [1910] and is
numbered 375 of 480 maximum. Many chain letters exaggerate the
loss if there is a single break in transmission [1895]. Apart
from intimidating recipients to comply, this may have been
influenced by certain mail frauds of the time (Thomas 1900). Chain
letters that did not state a termination number were called
"endless" for a few decades, and this language still appears in
some laws.
In 1989 the Craig Shergold appeal requested get
well cards for a dying child (since recovered), intending to
break a Guinness world record that existed at the time. It was
launched by FAX, email and chain letters. By December 1990 a
record 33,000,000 cards had been received (Guigne). Despite
efforts to stop the appeal, hundreds of millions have now been
sent. Charity chain letters were an influence on early luck
chain letters, and in 1935 enabled the advent of money chain
letters. They are common on the Internet but most of these are
hoaxes {Jessica
Mydek}. A revealing item in the archive is a nine page
chain solicitation for one dollar contributions to the 1950
campaign of anti-union Ohio Senator Howard Taft. These were
rescued from the discarded files of the Atlantic Coast Line
railroad police.
Archive filenames for charity letters begin with
"c".
Religion.
Religious chain letters promote religious beliefs, causes
or practices, but do not ask for money. If they do they are
classified as Charity chain letters.
In English speaking countries, religious chain letters circulated in small numbers throughout the twentieth century. Most of these have Roman Catholic themes. There is a single example in the archive of a chain letter which is titled "A Prayer to St. Joseph" which dates back to 1898. The text follows (format shortened, slightly edited):
Nellie Sullivan
A Prayer to St. Joseph.
Oh, St. Joseph
Whose protection is so great success so prompt before the throne of God. I place in you all my hopes, and confide to you all my interests. Deign Oh, St. Joseph to assist me by your powerful intercession and obtain for me from your divine foster son all spiritual blessings through Jesus Christ our Saviour.
So that after having enjoyed here below your heavenly favors, I may offer you my thanksgiving and homage to the most tender and loving of all fathers.
Oh, St. Joseph, I never weary of contemplating you with Jesus asleep on your arms; but I dare not approach while he reposes on your heart.
Press him in my name, kiss softly his forehead for me, and ask him to return that kiss when I draw my last breath.
St. Joseph, patron of despairing souls pray for me.
- - - - -
To obtain the request granted to this prayer it must be written and given to five different persons who will give it to five others. Repeat the prayer for nine days after distributing it. It has never been known to fail in any request.
Nellie Sullivan.
Mary Hennessey. [1898]
Note that only five copies are requested, but
the prayer is to be repeated on nine successive days as in a Novena devotion. In the last
paragraph it is revealed that the sender may have made a
personal "request" of Joseph, who is described as the "patron of
despairing souls." This and other features, including the claim
that "it has never been known to fail," suggest this letter may
be a distant source for personal appeals to St. Jude that appear
in the classified ads of present day newspapers in the U. S.
(>jude)
St. Jude also appears on subsequent English language luck chain
letters beginning around 1987 (much later than some have
supposed). One appositive for St. Jude is "Saint of things
almost despaired of."
Other religious chain letters that have been collected include a
solicitation for prayers [1905], and
Catholic devotional themes, one of which is called "A Little
Flower of Jesus" and claims to be approved by "the sisters of
St. Francis" [1937,
see also 1951].
Filenames for religious chain letters begin with
an "r" in the Paper Chain Letter Archive.
Advocacy.
Advocacy chain letters promote some cause other than
religion, and do not ask that money be sent. Often they involve
a petition. Also included in this category are announcements and
invitations.
A 1903
postcard, as well as asking that copies of itself be
distributed, asks that recipients send their name and address to
the "U.S. Moral Society" to be added to a petition to Congress
to prohibit the sale of cigarettes to minors. In subsequent
examples the initial communication itself could be a petition,
as in an attempt to draft Calvin Coolidge as the Republican
nominee for President [1927]. An example not involving a petition is an August, 1940 letter
advocating Republican Wendell Willkie for President and asking
that ten copies be sent. A 1917
chain letter with detailed instructions for establishing
conscientious objector status is a rare example of anonymous
advocacy. Other chain letter causes
include Czech independence [1949], nuclear
disarmament [1985],
protests of apartheid [1988], and a
libelous call for a boycott of Proctor & Gamble [1986] alleging
satanism. Recipients are invited to a party, and possibly a
suicide, in a 1937
chain letter. Advocacy chain emails are also common, such as a
perennial appeal to support National Public Radio [e1996].
Advocacy chain letters
have filenames beginning with "a" in the archive.
Luck.
Luck chain letters appeal primarily to superstition,
promising good luck if the letter is copied and distributed and
bad luck if it is not. They are often called "prayer" chains
because many prior types started with a prayer or Bible verse.
Luck chain letters may have developed either from
a requirement to distribute a prayer in a Roman Catholic Novena
devotion [1898], or as a
secularization of promises and threats in the Letters from
Heaven [1906],
possibly in a preamble. The English language paper luck chain
letters of the twentieth century will be my principal topic.
Most examples in the last few decades are highly traditional,
having gradually accumulated varied devices to promote
circulation. The lists of prior senders that often accompanied
luck chain letters have at times motivated replication in order
for one to display to others that a high status person sent them
the letter. Since this motive is not catered to by any language
in the host chain letter, I have not listed it as a separate
motivational category. Luck chains have also been common on the
Internet. Though originally these were simply digitizations of
paper letters, they subsequently specialized to the email medium
[e1995].
Filenames for paper luck chain letters begin with the letter "l" in the archive.
Money.
Money chain letters urge the recipient to send money to
one or more prior senders, claiming that one can likewise
benefit if sufficient copies are distributed.
The key innovation of money chain letters was a
list of names and addresses with the instructions to remove the
top entry, move the others up one slot, and add one's own name
and address at the bottom. I call any list with these
instructions a controlled
list. Money chain letters originated in the United States
in the spring of 1935 with the "Send-a-Dime" letter, also
called "Prosperity Club" [Denver]. A
prior luck chain letter [1933]
was used as a model for Send-a-Dime. These and other
details of the advent of money chain letters are presented in
the article The Origin of Money Chain
Letters which can be read independently of this treatise,
or read in sequence (section 4-1). Money
chain letters have influenced the content and distribution of
luck chain letters up into the 1950's and possibly beyond
(sections 4-2
and 4-3). Also included in
this category are pyramid schemes, which we define as not using
the mails to recruit (but they may, or may not, use the mails to
make payments). Money chain letters continue as an omnipresent
nuisance to this day, both in paper [2002] and as
E-mail [2001].
Money chain letters and pyramid schemes violate Federal and
State (West's
CA) laws.
Filenames of items in this category begin with "m".
Parody.
Parody letters mock the style and
methods of circulating chain letters. The request for copies may
not be serious, but parody letters have often circulated in the
mails.
There is a single example of an 1888
letter mocking charity chain letters which had just appeared in
large numbers at that time. This letter purports to seek "brutes
in pantaloons" to wed "old maids" in Massachusetts.
It was not until the money chain letter craze of 1935 that
parodies appeared in large numbers and many varieties. These
mocked both the language and geometrical progression of the Send-a-Dime letter, as
well as the exchange letters it had inspired. Examples mentioned
in the press include the "Liquid Assets Club" [1935]
(which may have actually been used to exchange liquor, as was
possibly the "Send-a-Pint" letter) and the "Drop Dead
Club" (shoot the first person on the list). I have
collected several complete texts of early parodies, including
some scatological examples [1935]. The familiar
"wife exchange" [1953]
was very common in the 1950's, and I recently found a bare bones
example from [1935]
using newspapers.com. These wife exchange letters
illustrate how punch lines can be topped successively. The early
1935 example simply states that one may receive 15,125
women for its humorous effect. Then a 1939 example
introduces the quip that one man broke the chain and got his own
wife back. Though illogical, this disappointing result was the
final punch line up into the early 1950's. A mimeographed 1953
letter notes in a postscript that at the funeral of a friend who
received 183 women, everyone remarked that "he had a smile on
his face for the first time in years." This in turn was topped
in 1954
by an account of the difficulties that three undertakers had in
removing that smile. The "Fertilizer Club ("go to the top
address on the list and crap on the front lawn") [1971] also
very likely goes back to 1935, but it is unlikely it would have
been published in a newspaper. The wife
exchange parody was commercially produced as a postcard [1954], and
an undated matchbook advertisement suggests even earlier
commercial production of chain letter parodies [1940?].
The wife exchange parody itself fell victim to parody in an
imitative husband exchange letter [1949].
Despite commercial publication, chain letter parodies circulated
in different versions like photocopied office humor. There is no
serious request for copies, thus technically they are not chain
letters. Parodies have probably served to educate the public on
the fallacies of money chain letters, and have influenced the
content of luck chain letters. They are very common on the
Internet [St. Paul].
Paper parodies of chain letters appear in the
archive with filenames beginning with "j" (for joke).
Exchange.
The exchange chain letters ask that an item of small
value be sent to one or more prior senders, promising that if a
specified number of copies are distributed the sender will in
turn receive many such items.
Within weeks after the proliferation of the first
money chain letter, Send-a-Dime, letters appeared which utilized
its controlled list method to exchange items other than money. [1935]
By 1937 the
text in these chain letters, as well as the number of names on
the list, had been reduced. Unlike luck chain letter types, the
copy quota on exchange chain letters varies considerably, as
does the number of names present in the controlled list. In
chronological order, items exchanged on archived chain letters
are: recipes, quilt patches, handkerchiefs, stamps, tea towels,
postcards, dish towels, aprons, wash rags, Turkish towels,
earrings, QSL cards, Tshirts, new panties, paperback books, dog
toys, collectibles, grocery coupons, lottery scratchers and
children's books. Exchange chains were still circulating in
paper in 1996.
Only one example in email form has been collected (a used
paperback book exchange).
Filenames for exchange chain letters begin with
an "x" in the archive
World Record.
The world record
chain letters motivate replication exclusively by claiming
distribution of copies will likely set a world record and that
participants will be acknowledged. They circulated primarily
among children after the new millennium, having developed from a
lineage of postcard exchange letters.
In 1976 a postcard exchange letter claimed that
it was approved by the US Postal Service as an "educational
game for children". It also claimed that it had never been
broken in over three years, and that just to delay sending
copies beyond three days constituted breaking the chain [1976]. A 1985 cognate,
said to have been started by "kids in Germany", asserted
that if the letter continued unbroken for a little longer it
would be in the Guinness Book of World Records. Later other such
letters promised that each person who participated in the chain
would get their name in the Guinness record book. But should the
recipient not send copies, or even delay doing so for more than
three days, the record would be spoiled and all the children "would
have to wait another nine years to be in the record book"
[1996-08].
This descent into absurdity had become inevitable when an
innovation that promoted the total exclusion of adults
replicated. On a 1999
letter the recipient is instructed to "... send it to six
kids." Soon this restriction to kids was
strengthened ("KIDS ONLY"), and was justified by saying it meant
"kids will do the longest chain letter" [2001-04]. Distributions to adults may not have changed the
text of the most irrational versions, but increased discard may
have curtailed their circulation.
A letter mailed in the new millennium [2000-11]
drops all mention of postcards and declares that "it is an
attempt to get into the world records." So a new
motivational category is necessary to cover this chain since
postcards are no longer exchanged. I call this motivational
category "world record". Our earliest example also claims that "the
post office is keeping track". Further, perhaps to make
this seem more plausible, the list of names and addresses, which
previously directed the flow of postcards, had now migrated to
the outside of the envelope. This in turn nurtured a grave fear:
the post office could determine "who broke the chain" [2005-04].
This is no small matter: "it has never been broken so please
don't spoil it for every one." An additional feature of
this letter was the claim that it would be delivered without a
stamp. Cognates collected in the next few years, most of them
claiming to have started in Australia, dropped this feature but
added the instruction that one should write on the envelope: "This
is the official Guinness Book of World Records chain letter"
[2001-04], or
something similar. Presumably this would allow the Post Office
to "track" the chain. This requirement of an external
declaration continued on most letters of the lineage, and on
these we see again the claim that a stamp was not required for
delivery. One only had to write the declaration where the stamp
would normally be affixed [2005-09].
This curious feature also appeared on "Lottery-Death"
type luck chain letters in 1974 ( > no stamp ), as well as in certain French chain
letters. The list of names was soon
dropped in the lineage [2001-07], but
the claim of Post Office tracking continued without it.
The exchange of postcards is the most logical use
one can imagine for a paper chain letter. This is because the
invitation to participate can itself be a collectible postcard.
Thus it is ironic that a variety of postcard exchange letter
gave rise to this most absurd of all chain letters. Most of the propagative innovations on the "kids"
type letters are likely accidental or naively motivated, but
many recipients must have believed them. A letter from a mother
describes her daughter's fear of being identified as one who
broke the chain [2007-01].
These "world record" paper chain letters may have been one of
the most abundant English language paper chain letters in the
first decade of the new millennium. But recently (2012) their
numbers may have been greatly reduced by computer searching on
text. As for all chain letters here, children's names and
addresses have been obscured in online transcriptions.
Filenames for the "world record" chain letters begin with a "w" in the archive.
Chain Email.
The primary focus of this treatise is on paper chain letters.
But it is sometimes useful to examine copying behavior on the
internet, particularly frequently forwarded email ("chain
email"). This has a large and growing number of motives for
replication. Hoaxes, humor and expressions of friendship are
prominent. The following is an alphabetic list of some of the
many topics observed since 1993: admonitions (duty to friends,
sobriety, safe sex), anti chain letters, aphorisms, ASCII art
and scrollers, communication experiments and demonstrations,
consumer warnings, friendship, hoaxes (virus warnings, charity,
giveaways, false quotations), human rights alerts, humor (single
jokes and lists, office humor items, stories), inspiration,
Internet protection (modem tax, phone charges, anti-censorship),
good luck (often in sex or romance), missing children, money
chains, number guessing tricks, parodies, patriotism,
personality tests, petitions, photographs and videos, poems,
political commentary, practical jokes (especially April Fools
Day), prayer requests, protests, rumors, school & exams,
seasonal (Christmas, St. Valentine's Day, Halloween,
Thanksgiving Day), speeches, surveys, tag (snowball fight,
mooning), urban legends (warnings, humor), voting recommendations, and Web
page suggestions. Many of these topics appear in combination,
such as a humor item with a short luck chain attached.
Many e-mail chains began as digitizations of
paper chain letters. A very early example is an exact
transcription of a circulating paper luck chain letter [e1982 - note
archaic address formats]. Paper office humor items were also put
online [e1995].
Once established, chain emails rarely surge in replication due
to an offhand change or copying error, as we will see occurs
within the paper medium. This is because an email is usually
reproduced exactly, and thus there are few if any variations.
However both luck chain emails and money schemes quickly
developed adaptions to the new medium through a series of
deliberate hoaxes or calculated modifications. A new restraining
factor manifested when email chains were posted on various lists
and group venues, provoking critical analysis and ridicule.
Recipients of a chain email (and chain letters) are now likely
to search the web on key text, particularly if money is
solicited. Such a search will discover naive postings and
attempts to recruit participants in money schemes. However, high
in the list of matches, one will also encounter critical
comments and disarming analysis, such as on some of the money
chain emails in the archive associated with this essay [me2009].
Email screening criteria by Internet Service Providers have, in
recent years, also become a significant factor in the survival
of email replicators.
< Start of above section
< Start of Chain Letter Evolution -
Contents
1-3 SOURCES
The collection of
letters Table
1 - Contents of the Paper Chain Letter Archive
Foreign
language letters
Publications Web Sites
Interviews
The Collection of letters.
I began collecting chain letters in 1973 with the hope they
would reveal an evolutionary sequence. This effort was renewed
several years later after discovering the folklore literature,
particularly Michael Preston's 1976 article "Chain Letters" (Preston). This
documented chain letters in a state of flux and presented
variations of the same letter. Subsequently I placed ads for
chain letters in collectibles magazines. Collecting large
numbers of more recent letters began in June 1995 when Dr.
Preston solicited chain letters for me from folklorists. In
recent years I have also purchased old chain letters on eBay,
the immense on-line auction. Sometimes copies were provided free
by the seller or buyer, or a transcript could be made from
auction photographs. I renewed collecting efforts in Dec. 2013
by subscribing to the commercial online newspaper databases newspapers.com
and newspaperarchive.com. These have provided over a
hundred chain letters for the archive and many entries for the
bibliography.
All of the dateable chain letters (except for some foreign examples and recent money chain letters) have now been digitized in HTML format and each is accessible on-line as a separate file in the Paper Chain Letter Archive. An index for the archive lists clickable file names of all items in the archive, each with a one-line annotation. There are now (2017) over one thousand items in the archive, the vast majority being chain letters in the English language. These are ordered by (1) motivational category, (2) language, and (3) date of circulation. This index provides an easy way to browse the archive. Transcriptions preserve the errors in the original letter unless otherwise noted.
Table 1 - Contents of the Paper Chain
Letter Archive.
English language chain letters presently (April, 2015) in the
Paper Chain Letter Archive are tabulated below by year of
circulation and motivational category. Himmelsbrief and
religious chain letters are excluded. Scores of additional
published letters, especially early luck and charity chains, can
be easily obtained from existing online newspaper archives.
Years | Luck | Charity | Advocacy |
Money | Parody |
Exchange | World Record |
1885 - 89 | 4 |
1 |
|||||
1890 - 94 | 2 |
||||||
1895 - 99 | 6 |
1 |
|||||
1900 - 04 | 5 |
6 |
|||||
1905 - 09 | 54 |
3 |
2 | ||||
1910 - 14 | 61 |
3 |
|||||
1915 - 19 | 35 |
9 |
3 | ||||
1920 - 24 | 42 |
1 |
3 |
||||
1925 - 29 | 38 |
2 | |||||
1930 - 34 | 24 |
2 | |||||
1935 - 39 | 12 |
1 |
4 |
59 |
12 |
20 |
|
1940 - 44 | 21 |
3 |
11 |
1 |
19 |
||
1945 - 49 | 15 |
2 |
2 | 3 |
13 |
||
1950 - 54 | 15 |
2 |
2 | 8 |
7 |
||
1955 - 59 | 12 |
1 | 1 | 5 |
2 | ||
1960 - 64 | 5 |
1 | 2 |
1 | |||
1965 - 69 | 11 |
1 | 1 | 1 |
2 | ||
1970 - 74 | 16 | 1 |
3 |
||||
1975 - 79 | 28 | 6 | 2 |
6 | |||
1980 - 84 | 37 | 3 | 2 |
4 |
|||
1985 - 89 | 35 | 1 (b) | 11 | 2 | 6 |
7 | |
1990 - 94 | 53 |
1 | 1 | 3 |
1 |
4 | |
1995 - 99 | 49 |
1 | 2 | 16 | |||
2000 - 04 | 5 |
1 |
1 |
5 |
|||
2005 - 09 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
9 |
|||
TOTALS | 569 |
40 | 42 |
95 (a) | 45 |
106 |
14 |
Luck | Charity | Advocacy |
Money | Parody |
Exchange | World Record |
(a) Over 100 money chain letters have been
collected since 1975 but most have not been digitized.
(b) The Craig Shergold appeal circulated widely beginning in
1989. Many are published (Guigne);
only two are archived here.
The numbers in the table may not be reliable
measures of relative circulation. Newspapers were much more
likely to print the text of a chain letter prior to 1960. The
large number of Ancient Prayer examples collected is because it
circulated largely on postcards, many of which were saved and
eventually offered for sale by dealers on eBay. Recent
correspondence is rarely offered for sale. Time gaps in the
number of money chain letters in the archive reflects a lack
collecting effort rather than circulation.
Foreign Language Letters.
Presently there are over thirty English
translations of foreign language chain letters in the archive.
Most of these are also presented in their original language as
well. There are several foreign language letters that have yet
to be translated.
Because of the ease with which letters are
transmitted internationally, chain letters are, and have always
been, an international phenomenon. Only by the extensive
collection of foreign language examples can an accurate
genealogy of chain letters be constructed. It is also revealing
to see how chain letters vary from one culture to another.
Sub-directories have been established in the archive for chain
letters in French, German and Russian.
In 2006 I was contacted by Martinovich Vladimir Aleksandrovich, head of the Center of New Religious Movements Studies in Belarus. He has collected many chain letters in the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Transcriptions of some have been entered in the sub-directory /archive/russian [content-ru].
Publications.
Of the 900+ letters in the Paper Chain Letter
Archive, 230 were found in publications. Early in the project
the New York Times Index located many texts of chain
letters, and a mention of a McKinley Memorial chain before it
was collected (NYT 1906).
As
mentioned above, I have found over a hundred texts of chain
letters using newspapers.com and newspaperarchive.com,
online archives of digitized microfilm images. This has filled
in many blanks in chain letter history, particularly with the
luck chain letters of the 1920's and 30's. Newspaper
transcriptions destroy formats and rarely report lists of names
adequately. Some French (Le Quellec) and
Polish (Robotycki)
publications contain many chain letters that have yet to be
entered into the archive or translated. Newspaper articles are
also frequent in the Annotated
Bibliography, which currently contains over 375 entries,
most of them from newspapers.
Web
Sites.
There are many thousands of WWW sites that match a search on
"chain letter." The vast majority of these are about "email"
chains, which are not my topic here. A useful list of annotated
links appears in Watrous,
and I will not duplicate this. To find the texts of luck chain
letters one can search for traditional text, such as "Dolan
Fairchild" or "Dalan Fairchild." A few
transcriptions of paper luck chain letters found this way have
been entered into the Paper Chain Letter Archive [1998]. Others are
present on the WWW, but it is difficult to judge if they are
complete and unedited. An article by Charles Bennett, Ming Li
and Bin Ma, titled "Chain Letters & Evolutionary Histories"
appears in the June 2003 issue of Scientific American
(Bennett). This
uses phylogenetic inference algorithms to construct a cladogram
for 33 DL type chain chain
letters. These are available on the web, and if dated I have
copied them to the archive here.
Interviews.
I have obtained some information about chain letters and
people's attitudes toward them by informal questioning of
acquaintances. Several inquiries about foreign circulation have
been made on USENET newsgroups. Much more could have been
learned by systematic interviewing. However, people who send out
chain letters, for luck or money, are often reluctant to reveal
their activities and motives. Nevertheless, some interview
material in newspapers and popular magazines has been very
useful for understanding replication (Marilyn Bender, New York Times, 1968).
< Start of above
section < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
2-1 PREDECESSORS
Ancient documents that
advocate their own perpetuation The Letters from Heaven
Transitions to
chain letters
Ancient documents that advocate their own
perpetuation.
Many ancient texts survive which provide diagrams, incantations
or prayers that claim to benefit those who learn them. Some come
close to our definition of a chain letter by urging that a
personal copy be made. The Ancient Egyptian "Book of that
which is in the Underworld" states (of a picture it
provides):
Another Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, is the oldest (868 AD) extant book printed by wood block reliefs. It promised great merit to those who "observe and study this Scripture, explain it to others and circulate it widely . . ." (Goddard, p. 96)
The Surangama Sutra states:
The Letters from Heaven.
The "Letters from
Heaven" (often called by the German "Himmelsbrief") claim to
have been written by God or some divine agent. Many authors
restrict the term to apocryphal Christian letters. These often
claim miraculous delivery to Earth, magical protection for the
possessor, blessings to those who "publish" them, and divine
punishment for disbelief of their claims. The original copies
are often claimed to have been written in gold letters, or with
the blood of Jesus. Many published versions were illuminated. An
early and frequent feature is the command for extreme Sabbath
observance, as in the Madgeburg Himmelsbrief [text].
A German authority on the Himmelsbrief, H. Stube, said the letters long predated Christianity (Oda). Examples in Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Syrian, and Ethiopic have been published with German translations. Jewish and Islamic Himmelsbrief are also reported (Hand). These may all derive from an early Greek source (Bittner). A letter which was said to have fallen from heaven existed in the third century AD (Hippolytos, Refutation of All Heresies). The oldest Letter from Heaven for which we have a full text is the Latin "Letter from Heaven on the observance of the Lord's Day," the original of which dates from the close of the sixth century (Priebsch). St. Boniface denounced this as a "bungling work of a madman or the devil himself." Eckehard (1115 AD) wrote that it had spread over the whole globe then known to man. It has circulated in English in many versions [1795 text, image].
Jacob, organizer of the Crusades of the Shepherds, claimed (ca. 1251) the Virgin Mary appeared to him and gave him a letter. While in public he always carried it in his hand. A cult of uniformed flagellants appeared in Germany in 1261 claiming to possess a heavenly letter that had descended upon the altar of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem before a multitude. The text has survived: God, angry at human sin, has decided to destroy all life, but the Virgin intercedes and God grants humanity one last chance to reform. Any priest who refused to pass on the divine message to his congregation would be eternally damned. During the Black Death (1348-9) the same letter, with a paragraph on the plague added, was used as a manifesto by a revived flagellant movement. At gatherings the manifesto was read publicly, the audience being "swept by sobbing and groaning." (Cohn)
Some Letters from Heaven specialized in protection, and accumulated long lists of weapons by which the possessor could not be harmed. The Count Philip Himmelsbrief [1895] granted protection against "spear, sword, sabre, cutlass, knife, tomahawk, rapier, helmet, burdon, . . . , and everything prohibited by holy writ, that is from all kinds of weapons, artillery, cannon, musket, rifle, gun or pistol." A preamble mentions its use in the American Revolution and claims that Count Philip of Flanders sponsored it after he was unable to execute a condemned prisoner who had secreted a copy on his person. Various Letters from Heaven in German were printed in Pennsylvania during the 19th and early 20th century (Oda), [1887 image1 & image2].
Letters claiming divine authority are also reported from India. Chain letters circulated in Shahabad in 1864 that condemned the breeding of pigs and consumption of alcohol. They were said to be from Heaven. In North Tirhut, 1872, cow protection was advocated by "strange papers" which "warned that Jaganath (Lord of the World) would curse any one who did not pay heed to this message and would burn down the house of any one who failed to pass it along to other people." Letters advocating cow protection in 1893 mandated recipients "make and then issue copies to at least five villages" - an early example of a copy quota. (Yang)
An email chain posted to an Islamic coins mailing
list [1999]
consists of: (1) an Islamic "Letter from Heaven," which likely
first circulated in paper, and (2) a reduced version
(testimonials only) of a paper luck chain letter I call the Lottery24 type. In II Chronicles 21:12 it is
said that Elijah sent a letter to King Jehoram. It has been
determined by scholars that Jehoram did not reign until 14 years
after Elijan's death and the text has been interpreted by some
clergy to mean that the letter came from Heaven. (1947)
It may be thought that the Letters from Heaven were a phenomenon
of centuries past. But searching online newspaper databases
reveals that probably hundreds of Jesus' Sabbath Letter have
been published in local newspapers in the United States in the
last two centuries, continuing up to the 1960's.
Searching on the text "fast five fridays" produced 25
matches using newspapers.com and 72 using newspaperarchive.com.
Most of these printings were responding to requests by faithful
possessors of the letter, heeding its command to "publish" it.
One columnist revealed: "It used to be sent to newspaper
editors, demanding that the passage be published in the paper
and setting out all sorts of dire consequences if the editors
failed to acquiesce." (1939) Usually a
brief succession of possessors is given, some of whom had bad
luck after they did not publish a letter in their possession.
Such claimed lineages may go back to the original legendary
possessor of the letter [1910]. The
Holstein Himmelsbrief, which features protection from weapons,
has gained favorable newspaper testimonials for its use in both
World War II and the Vietnam war: "He
kept track of those to whom he sent a copy of the letter and
every one of them returned unharmed from the war." [1968]
Transition to chain letters.
Edwin Fogel, writing in 1908, assumed that a luck chain letter [1908] was a new
version of a Letter from Heaven (Fogel). There is little
similarity in the texts, but perhaps Fogel was familiar with
transitional forms now lost. Speaking of the apocryphal Letter
from Jesus Christ [1915],
Edgar Goodspeed wrote "it is sometimes sent through the mail
with a request that the recipient send copies of it to three
others, as some great misfortune is likely to befall him if he
does not" (1931).
Such a practice must have long predated 1931. Thus luck chain
letters may have evolved from the preambles and postscripts to
Letters from Heaven. At some stage the divine communication may
have been replaced by a less pretentious "prayer," followed by
entreaties to copy it. This is the form of the "Ancient Prayer"
type [1905 - 1925]
discussed in the next section. Some versions of Ancient Prayer
promise deliverance "from all calamities" and threaten "eternal
punishment" [1906]
- as do some Letters from Heaven [Madgeburg].
Folklorists have generally followed Fogel in presuming that luck
chain letters derive from the Himmelsbrief tradition (Ellis), though transitional
examples have yet to be found.
More collecting should clarify the transition to
chain letters. The first luck chain letters may also have been
influenced by early charity chain letters [1888],
which likely introduced the idea of a copy quota.
< Start of above section < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
2-2 THE PREDOMINANT SERIES
Features of 20th century luck chain letters
The Series of
Predominant Types Statement
Types
Ancient
Prayer Good Luck
Flanders Prosperity Flanders-Prosperity
Blind13 The Luck of London
Chain of Good Luck
Luck by Mail
Death20 Lottery-Death Death-Lottery
In this section I list characteristic features of English language luck chain letters, identify certain kinds of statements that are frequently seen on them, classify most of them into 12 sequential "types", and give a complete text and further information for each of the 12 types.
Features of 20th century luck chain letters.
After 1900 chain letters were influenced by increasing literacy,
international mail and postcards, and changing attitudes about
religion and miracles. Also chain letters themselves accumulated
new technologies for increasing replication. Whereas the prior Letters from Heaven
usually urged the reader to "publish" the letter, chain letters
gained more circulation by relying on individual copying with
specific copy quotas and deadlines. The following features
characterize luck chain letters of the 20th century.
(1) Brevity. The Letters from Heaven typically had over 500 words and were often elaborately printed. By contrast, the widespread luck chain letter from 1905-25, called "Ancient Prayer", had about 120 words and was usually distributed by handwritten postcards.(2) Secularity. Luck chains originating in the 1900's dropped claims of divine authorship, delivery from heaven to earth, granting protection from fire or weapons, divine punishment for disbelief, and miracles generally. A Saint, missionary or military officer may be attributed as the author of the letter, but never Jesus. Promises of good luck and threats of bad luck exploited vague popular superstitions rather than naive piety.
(3) Copy quota. Chain letters state a minimum number of copies that the recipient is encouraged to distribute.
(4) Deadline. This task is to be completed within a stated period.
(5) Waiting period. But according to most letters, one must wait a certain number of days before receiving good luck.
(6) Testimonials. All English language luck chain letters since the 1930's contain accounts of fortune and misfortune allegedly experienced by prior recipients of the letter. These testimonials are told in the third person, usually of a named individual.
(7) Circumnavigation. Almost all luck chains since 1910 have either (1) declared they are to go "all over" or around the world, or (2) claimed a certain number of completed circumnavigations.
(8) Lists. When someone signs their name on a chain letter, a recipient may faithfully copy this name, perhaps thinking this was the author of the original letter. Eventually another person may sign below the first name, suggesting to downline recipients that they should do the same. In this way chain letters often accumulated long lists of senders [1922], even though this behavior may not be solicited in the text of the letter. Initials, names of couples [1975], dates received [1982], and company letterheads [1990] have similarly accumulated. Lists often reached fifty or more names and became a burden to copy [1925] (Lardner). Some chain letters avoided this by instructing, for example, "Copy the above names, omitting the first, add your name last" [1933]. If this processing is always undertaken a controlled list of fixed length results. Other chain letters forbade "signing on" - notably postcard chains [1911] and Internet luck chains [e1994]. The presence of a list of senders on a luck chain letter may give it an advantage in circulation by displaying alleged celebrity participation, and also by enabling more effective distribution of copies since the list can used to avoid duplicate receipts.
No. | Type | Sample Size |
Predominance Range |
Circulation Range |
Standard | No. Words |
Copy Quota |
Deadline (days) |
Wait (days) |
List? |
1 | Ancient Prayer | 166 |
1906-21, 1924 (a) |
1906-25, 1938 | Leeds |
119 | 9/7/10 | 9/7/10 | 9/10 | None |
2 | Good Luck | 34 |
1922-23, 1925-26 (b) |
1922-26 | Sanders | 66 | 9, 4/5 | 1 | 9/4 |
Most: X to Y |
3 |
Flanders |
28 |
1927-31 |
1927-31 |
Davenport |
114 |
4/5 |
1 |
4 |
None |
4 | Prosperity | 14 |
1932-35 |
1932-37 | Hyatt | 102 | 9/5 (c) |
1 | 9/4 | Most: controlled |
5 |
Flanders-Prosperity |
9 |
1939-40 |
1939-40 |
Shelby |
157 |
5 (d) |
1 |
4 |
All: controlled |
6 |
Blind13 |
17 |
1941 |
1936-45 |
Kingsport |
94 |
13 |
soon |
13 |
None |
7 |
Luck of London |
9 |
1942-44 |
1942-48 |
McKnight |
119 |
5 |
1 |
4 |
None |
8 |
Chain of Good Luck |
8 |
1949 |
1949-52 |
Burma |
184 |
12 |
1 |
4 |
All: controlled |
9 |
Luck by
Mail |
31 |
1950-64 |
1948-67 |
Halpert |
132 |
5 |
1 |
4 |
Most: controlled |
10 | Death20 | 18 |
1968-73 |
1959-77 | Bloomsbury | 193 | 20 | 4 | 4 | Most: controlled |
11 | Lottery-Death (LD) | 13 | 1974-75 |
1974-75 | Maryland | 383 | 24 & 20 (e) | 4 | 9 & 4 | All: controlled |
12 | Death-Lottery (DL) | 181 |
1977-2005 |
1973-05 | AFC | 351 | 20 | 4 | 4 | Early: Some (f) |
(a) Circulation in the US in 1924 was dominated
by quota ten versions of Ancient Prayer. Two items from England,
and one each from Australia and the US, had quota, deadline, and
wait all seven [1916,
1925, 1923,
1920].
(b) Augmented versions of Good Luck predominated from 1925-26.
(c) A 1937 reduced Prosperity chain on a postcard asks for ten
copies [1937].
(d) "Send this copy and four others" is on
Flanders-Prosperity, Luck of London and Luck by Mail types.
(e) On early examples 24 is the quota in the Lottery block and
20 in the Death block.
(f) Some early examples of DL had a senders' list between
the D and L blocks.
To recognize copying when there is high
variability, and to simplify descriptions of chain letter text,
it is useful to identify and name certain non-essential yet
common types of statements that appear on various luck chain
letters. I will capitalize these names to distinguish them from
conventional uses of the same word, and allow them to be both
nouns and adjectives.
Linkage. A statement on a chain
letter which describes one or two of the latest transmissions of
the letter in hand. If present, Linkage
statements usually appear at the start of a chain letter, and
can function as a declaration that the letter is a chain letter
(Dundes). They may
also be inserted when a list is removed. Linkage statements
appear on some Ancient Prayer examples and are near universal on
the Flanders type. Examples:
Dear Friend - I am sending you a prayer that I received with the request that it be sent to nine persons. [Ancient Prayer, 1906]
This was sent to me by a friend. [Ancient Prayer, 1909]
The above letter was received be me and I am sending it on to you. [Good Luck, 1922]
The Flanders Chain of good luck has been sent to me and I am sending it on to you. [Flanders, 1929]
Circumnavigation. A
request that the letter is to go all over the world, or that
it is to go around the world, perhaps more than once. Or a claim
that the letter has already gone around the world some number of
times. Examples:
This prayer ... is being sent all over the world. [1910]
It ... must go around the world three times. [1927]
It has been around the world nine times. [Death20 block, 1974]
Expectation. A
suggestion that the reader should "see what happens" after a certain number of days, implying that some joyous
event or good fortune will happen. Examples:
... copy it and see what will happen. [1909]
See what will happen on the fourth day. [1927]
Affirmation.
A statement which, speaking as an observer, affirms the validity
of the claims in the letter. It may attempt to explain how the
letter works, or restate a claim with different words. Affirmations are highly variable and are often
corrupted, rewritten, doubled or deleted. They are universal on the Flanders and Prosperity type letters.
Examples:
"It is positively remarkable
how many times this prediction has been fulfilled since this
chain was started." [1926]
"The theory is to set up a definite and
positive thought. [1933]
"Here is infinite proof of this progress"
[1940]
"That's proof for you." [1942]
"It works!" [1979]
Recycle. A statement which warns the
reader to get rid of the letter (often within a certain amount
of time), or to distribute it along with the copies that are to
be sent. Recycle statements first appeared on the Flanders
letters. If there is a list requiring updating, the received
copy is no longer a candidate for being sent out again and a
Recycle statement will usually not be present. A Recycle warning
has become universal on the mainline since 1940. Examples:
"Do not keep this letter in the house more
than 24 hours." [1927]
"Send this and four
others within 24 hours." [1930]
"Do not
keep this letter. It must leave within 96 hours after you
receive it." [1959]
1. Ancient Prayer.
Based on what has been collected so far, the "Ancient Prayer"
letter was the first "luck" chain letter to circulate in the US,
and this started abruptly in 1906. It likely circulated in other
countries many years prior. There is a mention from France that
it was denounced by the Bayonne Diocese in 1905. The earliest US
example is a letter postmarked in Leeds, Maine on January 6,
1906.
Note that the first sentence, a "Linkage," is probably a personal communication that has been incorporated into the text and copied. Here "He who will not say it will be afflicted . . ." implies that recitation of the prayer is sufficient to avoid punishment for noncompliance. "Bishop Lawrence" was the Episcopalian Bishop of Massachusetts and a well known author, at least among Protestants. Adaptive ambiguity was likely at work in the predominance of this attribution. Many Catholics would have presumed by his title that Lawrence shared their faith. He actively denied he had anything to do with the chain letter, but received complaints from all over the world for his alleged endorsement. (1926) Beginning around 1910 a persistent new version of Ancient Prayer developed.I received the other day a chain prayer.
Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, we implore Thee, O Eternal God, to have mercy upon mankind. Keep us from all sin and take us to be with Thee eternally. Amen
This prayer was sent by Bishop Lawrence, recommending it to be rewritten and sent to nine other persons. He who will not say it will be afflicted with some great misfortune. One person who failed to pay attention to it met with a dreadful accident. He who will rewrite it to nine other persons commencing on the day it is received - and sending only one each day will on or after the ninth day experience great joy.
Please do not break the chain. [1906]
This prayer was sent to
me. It is being sent all over the world. It was
said in Jesus time that all who would write it and pass it
on would be delivered from all calamities. Those who
would not write it on would meet with some misfortune. Those
who write it before nine days, stating the day
received, to nine of their friends will on the ninth day
receive some great joy. So do not break the
chain.
Received Oct. 6. Name
unsigned. [1910]
The "dreadful accident" and the false attribution to Bishop Lawrence have been dropped and will never return. The advantages to replication of "all over the world" is discussed later (> circumnavigation). The reward of "great joy" for compliance is present on nearly all examples of Ancient Prayer I have discovered (for Russia, see Viola, note 59). Around 1909 the playful suggestion to copy the letter and "see what will happen" was introduced. This "Expectation" became common (but not universal) on Ancient Prayer and persists in the mainline to the present day [2005]. Early versions of Ancient prayer reveal an influence from the Letters from Heaven. For example, a 1909 letter claims that its rewards and punishments were spoken of in "Jerusalem." This was subsequently replaced by in "Jesus' time", perhaps originating as a copying error.
An interesting feature
in the above 1910 text is the word "stating", seen
to be a copying error for "starting" by comparison to
other examples [1908,
1911]. A recipient
has responded to this error by writing the date (Oct. 6). An
abundant variation was soon established which contained "stating",
and the date of the prior receipt [1912, 1914, 1915]. The
advantage to replication of this variation was probably that it
reminded the recipient of the impending deadline, whereas
postcards lacking the date of receipt notation could be more
easily ignored until the recipient realized the deadline had
passed with no ill effect. The role of copying
errors in chain letter evolution can be overestimated, as
compared to deliberate innovations. But for any copying
error to produce a successful variation is remarkable, and
I will investigate other possibilities of this below (>
LD).
Some Ancient Prayer examples are self titled "The Endless Chain" [1911], or "The Endless Chain of Prayer" (Fogel, 1908) [1923, 1925]. Chain letters as we know them were originally called "Endless chain letters" (NYT, 1906) to distinguish them from the then familiar self-terminating charity chains. The title "Ancient Prayer" did not appear on American chain letters until around 1909.
With U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, Ancient
Prayer proliferated and differentiated. Some were exclusive
within various fraternal organizations; some prayed for "peace"
and others for "victory." An unmarried woman in Ohio received at
least three of the Victory postcards just in October of 1917. [1917A , 1917B] The
chain was so numerous that the editors of the New York Times
proposed that it originated as a German plot to clog the mails (NYT, 1917d). A wartime
postage rate increase, from one to two cents for postcards, may
have cooled the chain off and foiled the Huns. The same chain
postcard with substituted titles had also served the martial
spirit of the Central Powers. A German language version,
postmarked in Austria a year before the start of World War I,
begins "We Germans fear God, and Nothing else on Earth!"
[1913].
Immediately after the war Ancient Prayer declined in the U.S.
and England. Some resented that "during the First World War
they and many people they knew had received letters
threatening death or horrors to their loved ones in the
trenches of France if the chain was broken." (Simpson 2000). In
1924 Ancient Prayer revived in the US with a copy quota of ten
and a new prayer. One such letter has been collected which was
written in a fancy script [1924,
image].
Though Ancient Prayer continued to circulate for
many years after the end of World War I, and even had a boomlet
in 1924, the postwar worldliness was not a good fit for its
piety. The last Ancient Prayer chain letter to appear in the
archive was a much reduced version on a postcard mailed in 1938.
By 1995 the Ancient Prayer chain letter was nameless and all but forgotten. But the chain was preserved on postcards and letters, and these were old enough that they were offered for sale. Of the 165 examples of Ancient Prayer in the archive, about 50 are physical postcards or letters purchased on eBay.
According to some reports (1948, 1968) the Good Luck letter was started by an American soldier during World War I. However our earliest examples come from 1922, a boom year for the chain both in England and the U.S. Thorough searches and inquiries have failed to date the letter prior to 1921. The text was short and secular, and retained the request for nine copies as on Ancient Prayer. Many examples had long lists of paired names ("X to Y") at the top, sender to receiver [1922]. There is a physical example in the archive with 113 names [1926], and a newspaper report of 214 [1925]. Below is a prototypic example, a typed letter mailed from Birmingham, Alabama on June 8, 1922. The X to Y list had 30 entries (I have deleted 27 of them here). Though "Claude Sanders" leads the list, he was not the author of the letter, though recipients who had not seen this chain before may have presumed so.
.................................................................................................................No claim is made in the letter that it was started during World War I. "Smilin' Through" was a hit silent movie starring Norma Talmadge. It was released on Feb. 13, 1922. Many later Good Luck letters retained versions of this postscript, often simply updating the year.
Birmingham,Ala. June 8, 1922
Claude Sanders to Phil Gleischman
Phil Gleischman to M. H. Starr
...
...
...
A. A. Gambill to J. F. SuttleCopy this out and xxxxxx send to nine (9) people whom you wish good
luck. The chain was started by an American Officer and should go
three times around the world.DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN, for whoever does will have BAD
LUCK. Do it within twenty-four hours and count nine days and you will
have some great good fortune."Let all go smiling through 1922." [1922]
..................................................................................................................
Good Luck Augmented.
The 1922 Good Luck
chain letter was by far the shortest of all our predominant
types (<
Table 2). This seems to have invited the placement of
additional text both at its start [1924]
[1926]
and end [1926].
The following example was published by syndicated columnist
Helen Worth in 1925.
This good luck chain letter has been sent to me and I am asking you, as I have been asked, not to break the chain. Copy this and send it to nine persons whom you wish good luck. The chain was started by an American officer and should go around the world three times. Do not break the chain, for whoever does this will have bad luck. Write nine letters and send them within 24 hours. Count nine days and have some good luck.Here a standard Good Luck letter (in bold above) has a Linkage statement added at the start, an Affirmation at the end, and perhaps what was an incorporated personal closing after that. This letter is reported to have had a list of 115 names, probably in the X to Y format. With that many names it is safe to assume that the letter had circulated well over a year. Changes can take place in the body of a chain letter while it is accumulating names on a list. [1925]
It is positively remarkable how many times this prediction has been fulfilled since this chain was started.
Much success to you and yours. Let us go smiling and happy through 1925. [1925]
Flanders Chain of Luck.The "American officer" of the Good Luck letters has now been placed in Flanders, famous for World War I battles. Either the title on the prototype, or "Flanders Chain of Good Luck", were almost always present. Other key innovations were: (1) the reduction of the copy quota from nine to four (or five) copies, (2) a leading Linkage statement, (3) a Circumnavigation declaration, usually to "go around the world three times", (4) an Affirmation (highly variable), (5) an Expectation, usually "see what happens on the fourth day", and (6) a Recycle statement at or near the end. Lists of any type are universally absent from the Flanders type, as are testimonials.
This letter was sent to me by a friend and I am sending it to you, so as not to break the chain. Copy this off and send it to four persons, within 24 hours, in whom you wish good luck. This chain was started by an American officer in Flanders and should go round the world three times. Do not lose it as you will have BAD LUCK. It is positively remarkable how this prediction has been fulfilled since the chain started. Send this copy away as soon as possible and see what happens on the fourth day.
Pass this on and DO NOT KEEP IT IN THE HOUSE. [1927]
4.
Prosperity.
Folklorist Harry M. Hyatt reported in 1935 that "during
the latter part of 1933 a 'chain letter' fad appeared" and
he gave a complete text except for two towns and two names in
the list that he withheld to protect privacy.
We trust in God. He supplies our needs.Mrs. F. Streuzel,*****........Mich.
Copy the above names, omitting the first. Add your name last. Mail it to five persons who you wish prosperity to.
Mrs. A.Ford, Chicago .........Ill.
Mrs. K.Adkins, Chicago . .....Ill.
Mrs. R.Arlington,*****........Ill.
Mrs. ********...,Quincy.......Ill.
Mrs. ********...,Quincy.......Ill.
The chain was started by an American Colonel and must be mailed 24 hours after receiving it. This will bring prosperity within 9 days after mailing it.Mrs. Sanford won $3,000.
Mrs. Andres won $1,000.
Mrs. Howe who broke the chain lost everything she possessed. The chain grows a definite power over the expected word,
DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN
See what happens on the 9th day.
Hoping it brings you luck.
J.E.K. [1933]
There are fourteen Prosperity type chain letters in the archive, all but three from publications. Most of the standard versions have: (1) the presence of a controlled list, (2) copy quota 5, deadline 24 hours, wait 9 days, (2) a title that mentions God, (3) attribution to an American colonel, (4) win-win-lose pecuniary testimonials, and (5) an Affirmation after the testimonials. Notably absent are Circumnavigation, Expectation and Recycle statements. Nor are there any Linkage statements, as we should expect since a list of recent senders is usually present. Linkage, Circumnavigation and Recycle statements were near universal on the predecessor Flanders type.
This is a concatenation of a quota five Flanders letter on top and a Prosperity letter below it. Let me argue the case for this.The good luck of Flanders was sent to me and I am
sending it within twenty four hours. This chain was
started by an American Officer in Flanders and is
going around the world four times- and one who breaks
it will have bad luck. Copy this letter and see what
happens to you four days after mailing. It will bring
you good luck. Send this copy and four others to
people you wish good luck. Do not keep this letter.
It must be in the mail twenty four hours after receiving it.Mrs. Gay Field received $5000, five hours after mailing.
Mrs. Ambrose received $4000, four hours after mailing.
Mr. Nevin broke the chain and lost everything he had.
Here is definite proof for the good luck sent prayers.
Good luck to you and trust in God. He who suffers our
needs.This brings prosperity to you in four days after mailing.
Do not send money. Cross the top name off and put yours
at the bottom.
J.H. Mason, Petersburg, Va.
B.B. Hoag, Louisville, Ky.
C. J. Lingenfelder, Chicago, Ill.
C. A. Woerner, Indianapolis, Ind.
E. M. Cunningham, Columbus, Ohio
J. D. Moore, Osborn, Ohio
Richard M. Hubbell, Indianapolis, Ind.
M E Berkley, Shelby, Ohio [1939]
Chain of St. AnthonySeveral other examples of this "Chain of St. Anthony" have been found in newspapers dating from 1936-37. But the chain did not dominate circulation until 1940-41 and by this time the item seems to have appeared on postcards exclusively, and had dropped any mention of "St. Anthony". Apparently identifiable Catholicism limits the circulation of a chain letter in the United States. This may be caused as much by denunciation by priests as it is by Protestant rejection. Here is a standard example of the abundant postcard version from Kingsport, Tennessee:
This chain must go around the world. It has been started by a sentimental person. You send it to 13 persons and wish them joy, prosperity and good fortune.
As soon as you receive this copy make one like it and send it to a friend, even out of the city. Make one every day for 13 days and you will receive unexpected grace. Be sure you mail this, and say the Apostles' Creed for 13 days.
A woman did this and on the thirteenth day received a letter containing $26. Another woman made fun of this and her daughter went blind. Another woman did not do this and her home and family were destroyed. Pay good attention to this and you will enjoy health and prosperity. [1936]
Since the threat of blindness in the family is near universal on these, and to note the odd and unvarying copy quota, I call the type "Blind13". It may be cognate to a published quota 13 Polish chain [1984] titled "Letter to St. Anthony", in which the major threat reads: "A Pole from America tore this letter and his son vanished after 13 days". Perhaps an ancestor of this Polish letter circulated among Eastern European immigrants in the 1930's, its English translation giving rise to the "Chain of St. Anthony", and that mutating to the non-Catholic postcards. Or the influence could be from "America" to Poland instead. Judging from the archive, the peak year for Blind13 was 1941. There is a French language letter from 1955 appealing to Saint Anthony of Padua that also may be cognate to Blind13. A Spanish language source is also possible; thirteen may have been a traditional quota for Mexican letters [1936]. St. Anthony chain letters may have appeared in many countries, always demanding 13 copies and always brandishing a harsh threat to a family member.Oh Lord, be merciful upon us and all nations. This is the prayer of safety. This must go around the world. If you fail to send it a misfortune will enter your home. As soon as you get this card, copy and send it to 13 persons and on the 13th day great happiness will fall upon you and you will receive $16.
One woman made fun of this and her daughter went blind. Pay attention and the Lord will bless you. Please don't let this die in your home. Read the 18th Psalm. [1940]
"The Luck of London" chain letter was said to have originated during the blitz (1940) and continued to circulate in Europe and America even after the war. (DeLys, 1948). A letter published in the Neosho Daily News on March 16, 1942 is our earliest example. Columnist Robert McNight described it as a "new type of chain letter".
This good luck of London was sent to me and I'm sending it to you within 24 hours. This chain was started by an American Officer. It has been around the world five times. The one who breaks it will have bad luck. Copy this and see what happens 4 days later, after posting it. It will bring good luck. So don't keep it. Send this and 4 others to people whom you wish good luck. Grace Fields received $40.00 after posting it. Dr. Arcrose won $1,000 but lost it because he broke the chain. This is proof for you to post it. It will bring good luck 4 days after posting it.
Do not send money. Good Luck [1942]
Clearly this chain letter is close to the
Flanders-Prosperity type with "London" replacing "Flanders".
Both types still have the leading Linkage, the same copy quota
five, four day wait, 24 hour deadline, a Recycle command, the
pecuniary testimonials followed by an Affirmation, then the "Do
not send money" command. And the two names in the testimonials
above are cognate to the names on the Flanders-Prosperity text
we gave: Grace Fields vs. Mrs. Gay Field and Dr. Arcrose vs.
Mrs. Ambrose.
Considering these similarities one could classify the Luck of London letters as a variation of the previous Flanders-Prosperity type. But there is a fundamental difference, besides the updating from World War I to World War II. All of the Flanders-Prosperity letters have a controlled list of names and often towns also. None of the nine Luck of London letters in the archive bear a list of any kind. Also the prior type promised prosperity as well as luck. The Luck of London letters have dropped the mention of prosperity and focus solely on luck. Luck was more needed than money during the war. The new chain letter, with its tribute to a city that survived an onslaught of the German air force, must have appealed to many who had family members at risk in the armed services. I rank the Luck of London chain letters as a new type, as columnist McKnight judged them to be in 1942.
8. Chain of Good Luck.
The letter below was handwritten and mailed from Sandoway, Burma
on June 17, 1949 to A. Logozorie at a Roman Catholic Mission in
Gold Coast, British West Africa.
Chain of Good Luck
This chain of good luck was send to me via United Press despatch and was sent in 72 hours. It was started in Africa by a French Officer under General De Gaulls and is going round the world for the first time. The person who break this chain will surely receive bad luck. Do not keep this letter. This must be mailed within 72 hours after your receipt here of. A private in the Philipine Army won the first prize in the sweeps takes for complying with this chain. Mr. Frankling D. Roosavelt was elected for the third term as president of the United States 52 hours after he mailed this letter. Captain Remero who broke this chain died 72 hours after he received this letter. Detective Segundo B. Villanueva of the city of Baguio who laugh at this chain of good luck met instantaneous death in an accident on June 14, 1948.
Instruction Cancel the first name and add your name to the last. Make 12 copies and mail it to your friends. Do not retain this letter.
1. Alfred .T. O.koo 2. Y.T. Chaung. 3. Paul A. Chang. 4. Olive Pan
5. K.H. Chan . 6. N. Lee. 7. E. Chu. 8. Franky Monk . 9. G.T. Aung
10. M.T.O. 11. M.K.N. 12. M.T.HCopy to:- A. Logozorie for information and necessary action. [1949]
There are just eight complete examples of the
"Chain of Good Luck" (COGL) in the archive, but this
international chain letter seems to have dominated the luck
genre in the US in the year 1949. They all attribute their
origin to a French officer serving under General DeGaulle in
Africa. Other universals for the type are: (1) the title "Chain
of Good Luck", (2) a leading Linkage statement, (3) a
declaration that the letter is to go around the world the first
time, (4) two Recycle declarations, (5) testimonials featuring a
Philippine army private, President Roosevelt, and two victims of
sudden death, (6) a controlled list of varying length.
In the leading Linkage statements, all but one
COGL reads like the standard example above, claiming the chain
was sent via "United Press Dispatch", or "United Dispatch", etc.
But a 1952
example, published in Syracuse, New York, reads: "This chain
of good luck was sent to me by Ronald Service, Essex, ...".
This may tell us that "United Dispatch", and similar business
names on the other examples of COGL, may have started as a
corruption of a personal name. COGL has structural similarities
to the Flanders type described above. And on a 1928 Flanders
example the Linkage reads in part: "The Flanders Chain of
Good Luck was passed to me by A. E. Blandfield ..." . So
there is a precedent for personal names in Linkage, and the
Syracuse COGL example may derive from one. Having a senders list
makes a Linkage statement redundant, so if there ever were a
personal name in the COGL Linkage it may not have been updated,
and instead subject to many generations of unguided copying and
corruption until finally someone miscorrected it to a more
familiar name - of a business.
Note also that the 1952 example of COGL gives the
city, Exeter, that the sender once removed lived in. None of the
four newspaper examples of COGL in the archive give the contents
of the list, but here we get a hint that the deleted list on
some published COGL examples may have contained both names and
towns. If a controlled list had enough entries - twenty would be
more than enough - one could prove that a chain letter had
actually gone around the world if the locations of senders were
on the list. The prototype example above contains only names and
initials, yet one might still infer that it was going around the
world in a westward direction, perhaps from mission to mission.
If there is one prime reason why the Chain of Good Luck gained so much sudden compliance in the United States it was likely because it contained a potent death threat. "Detective Segundo B. Villanova . . . met instantaneous death in an accident of June 14, 1948." Such detail! This looks like a news item that came over the wire from "United Press Dispatch".
The Prayer. Trust in the Lord with all thy heart and lean not on thy own understandance in all thy ways acknowledge him and he will direct thy path.
Please copy this and see what happens in four days after receiving it. Send this copy and four to someone you wish good luck. It must leave in 24 hours. Don't send any money and don't keep this copy. Gen Patton received $1,600 after receiving it. Gen Allen received $1,600 and lost it because he broke the chain. You are to have good luck in 4 days. This is not a joke and you will receive by mail. [1952]
The Luck by Mail type also introduces "this is not a joke" and the qualification that you will receive your luck "by mail." These are now mainline universals, and I judge the latter to have been the innovation most responsible for the predominance of this type in the 1950's. This hypothesis involves a possible relationship with money chain letters (> Luck Follows Money). The declaration "this is not a joke" is discussed in section 3-4. Around 1954 the geographical attribution to "the Netherlands" first appears and became near universal in the mainline. Lists are highly variable on the Luck by Mail type - those present are often trailing controlled lists of prior senders.
Luck by Mail continued to circulate well into the 1960's, in many variations. This is surprising since a potent innovation appeared in 1959.
10. Death20.
THINK A PRAYER"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and all will acknowledge Him and He will light your way."
This prayer has been sent to you for Good Luck. The original copy came from the Netherlands. It has been around the world nine times.
The luck has been sent to you. You are to receive good luck within four days after receiving this letter. It is no joke. You will receive it in the mail. Send 20 copies of this letter to friends you think need good luck. Please do not send money. Do not keep this letter. It must leave within 96 hours after you receive it.
A U.S. officer received $7,000.00. Don Elliott received $60,000.00 but lost it because he broke the chain. While in the Philippines, General Walsh lost his life 6 days after receiving his copy. He failed to circulate the prayer. However, before he died, he received $665,000.00 he had won.
Please send 20 copies and after see what happens to you on
the fourth day. Add your name to the bottom of the list, and
leave out the first one when copying this letter.Mr. Joseph Kushner
Mr. Irwin J. Cole
Mr. Barry L. Dahne Mr. Burnard Margoles
Mr. Nicholas H. Hope, Jr. Mr. Edmond Yandow
Mr. William H. Williams, Jr Mr. Sydney E. Tindall
Mr. Charles A. Knott Mr. Clarence Lusk
Mr. Martin D. Munger Mr. Jack Lumiere
Mr. William L. Morris Mr. Murray Sobel
Mr. Richard Jacoff Mr. James E. Pierce, Jr.
Mr. W. R. Rosensteil Mr. Lamar Wheat
Mr. George B. Garvey Mr. John L. Hutcheson, III
Mr. Elliott Guzofsky Mr. Jim Reilly
Mr. Arthur A. Pomper Mr. Paul Mako
Dr. Robert B. Jeffrey
Dr. James J. Sullivan [1959]
It is reasonable to suppose that chain letter copy quotas have increased because of the availability of photocopying. But in 1959 copiers were not readily available - this is the same year that Xerox introduced its first plain paper copier (the Xerographic 914).
The Death20 chain still circulates, but an entire chain letter has been added to it.
11. Lottery-Death (LD).
Apparently in the early 1970's a quota twenty-four chain letter was translated from Spanish into English and put into circulation in the U.S. or Canada. Abundant copies of this letter exist combined with Death20, but no examples of it in English as an independent letter have been collected. There are cognate forms in other languages, such as the French 1979 with a grisly testimonial. I name this type "Lottery24" because of the original copy quota and its introduction of the "Boss Wins Lottery" testimonial:
Constantine Diso received the chain in 1953. He asked his secretary to make 24 copies and send them. A few days later, he won the lottery of 2 million dollars in his country.State lotteries were spreading in the U.S. in the 1970's and this letter must have appealed to those holding lottery tickets. Since Lottery24 by itself is an outlier that has never been collected in North America, I do not include it as a predominant type. Probably it did circulate abundantly in South America in both Spanish and Portuguese versions, and it was there that it acquired its testimonials adapted to office culture and state sponsored lotteries.
Around 1973 Lottery24 (L) letters were combined with Death20 (D) on single pages in the two orders LD and DL. This event was documented with unedited multiple examples by Michael Preston (1976). With the appearance of these two high copy quota types in the 1970's, the use of photocopying as a means of reproducing paper chain letters totally dominated. Hand copying all but disappeared. Perhaps a motive for initially combining two chain letters was to reduce photocopying costs after some one received both at about the same time. Our earliest example of the combination Lottery-Death (LD) is a letter mailed from Maryland in 1974.
Take note of the following:
Constantine Diso received the chain in 1953. He asked his
secretary to make 24 copies and send them. A few days
later, he won the lottery of 2 million dollars in his
country. Carlos Brandt, an office employee, received the
chain. He forgot it and lost it. A few days after,
he lost his job. He found the chain, sent it out to 24
people, and nine days later, he got a better job. Zerin
Berreskelli received the chain, not believing in it he
threw it away. Nine days later he died.
For no reason whatsoever should this
chain be broken!!!!!! Make 20 copies and send them.
In nine days you will get a surprise. Write F.E.G.E.
in the right hand corner of the envelope instead of a
stamp.
THINK A PRAYER
Trust in the lord with all your heart and all will
acknowledge that he will light the way. This prayer has been
sent to you for good luck. The original copy came from the
Netherlands. It has been around the world nine times. The
luck has been sent to you. You are to receive the good luck
within four days after receiving this letter. It is not a
joke! You will receive it in the mail. Send 20 copies of
this letter to people you think need good luck. Please do
not send money. Do not keep this letter. It must leave
within 96 hours after you receive it.
A U.S. officer received $7,000. Don Elliot received $68,000, but lost it because he broke the chain. While in the Philippines, General Walsh lost his life six days after he received this letter. He failed to circulate the prayer. However, before his death, he received $775,000, which he won.
Please send 20 copies and then see what happens the fourth day after. Add your name to the bottom of this list and leave off the top name when copying this letter.
[A four column list of 33 names follows, six struck out, several in different hands] [1974]
The above device, "Write
F.E.G.E. in the right hand corner of the envelope instead of a
stamp," appears on many LD chain letters. Various
initials were recommended (some without the instruction to omit
the stamp), and examples also come from France (Bonnet and
Delestre) and the USSR. The instruction to omit a stamp
seems severely counter-replicative. However, in the US the
original initials may have been "F.M.B.H" standing for "Free
Matter for the Blind and Handicapped." Current postal
regulations allow free postage for legitimate purposes if the
quoted sentence is written where normally a stamp would appear.
Presumably the initials suffice, though I have not verified
that. Someone in the early 1970's may have used the privilege to
mail chain letters for free. Most recipients would be baffled by
the suggestion above, but if the letter they received had no
stamp many would try it since they could easily convince
themselves that all their stampless letters also got delivered.
After all, with no return address there was no way to ever find
out otherwise. Since the initials were meaningless to almost all
copiers, they would quickly be corrupted. In disbelief, some
copier dropped the instruction to omit a stamp and advised the
initials be written on the upper left hand corner of the
envelope. These versions may have benefited by being opened more
often than a letter with nothing at all where one expects a
return address. Meaningless initials ("cryptoids") often appear on
grimoires and chain letters. Dr. Jean-Bruno Renard has collected
an interesting chain letter in France that revives the use of
initials as a substitute for a stamp [2000].
Posting without a stamp is also a feature of many of the recent
(2006) World Record chain letters that circulate among children.
Post Office automation, rather than deliberate indulgence, may
explain why many of these stampless envelopes were delivered.
Yet such delivery supports the absurd claims in these letters of
Post Office involvement with verifying a world record, and even
with identifying a person that broke the chain.
The LD type was prolific in 1974 - 1975, and also circulated in the U.K (Times, 1974). Some Hungarian chain letters [1983], though much reduced, reveal descent from an LD source. By 1980 the Lottery-Death letters had been completely replaced in North America by our final mainline type, the "Death-Lottery" letters.
12. Death-Lottery (DL).
The following letter was collected by the
American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, in October, 1974.
It was typed, except for the last three names in the
second column.
This prayer has been sent to you for good luck. The original copy came from the Netherlands.
It has been around the world 9 times. The luck has been sent to you. You are to receive good
luck within 9 days of receiving this letter. It is no joke. You will receive it in the mail.Send 20 copies of this letter to people you think need good luck. Please do not send money.
Do not keep this letter. It must leave within 95 hours after you receive it.A B.S. Officer received $70,000. Don Elliot received $160,000, but he lost it because he
broke the chain. While in the Phillipines, General Walsh lost his life six days after
he received this letter. He failed to circulate the prayer. However, before his death,
he received $775,000 which he won.Please send 20 copies and then see what happens on the 4th day after. Add your name to the
bottom of the list and leave the top name off when copying this letter.This chain comes from Venezuela, was written by St. Aptine de Cade a missionary from South
America.Since the chain must make a tour of the world, you must make 20 copies identical to this one
and send it to your friends, parents, or acquaintances, and after a few days you will get
a surprise. This is true, even if you are not superstitious.Take note of the following: Constantine Dies received the chain in 1953. He asked his
secretary to make 20 copies and send them. A few days later he won the lottery of $2
million in his country.Carlos Brandt, an office employee, received the chain. He forgot it and lost it. A few
days later he lost his job. He found the chain and sent it out to 20 people. Nine days
later he got a better job.Zorin Barrachilli received the chain. Not believing it, he threw it away. Nine days
later he died. For no reason whatsoever should this chain be broken. In nine days
you will get a surprise.
Judy Van Aalten
E. & W. SchmalzArline Robbins
P. & H. Lic [?]M. Buynovsky
G. & D. KalmanB. Robichaud
P. & M. Edelstein A. Boudreau
H. Kirsner M. Bevis
M. Lambert S. Battaini
J. Lambert P. Battaini
P. Brown S. B [?]
C. Beasley C. Con [?]
E. Spindel E. Eff
Phyllis Proctor
John Dyer Morgan
Modesto Antonio Guerra
Carlos Guerra
C. Rosen
Susan Honig [1974]
This is a Death20 letter placed above a
version of the Lottery24 letter (without a title) - the reverse
of the LD concatenation. This
Death-Lottery (DL) type first appears in the archive with an
example [1973]
published by the well known Canadian author John Robert Colombo
(1975). However,
since that example is missing a testimonial I have chosen the
above letter as a standard for the type. Like LD, the DL type
was first described by Michael Preston (1976).
One feature of the above letter is atypical - the list starts at the end of the letter. Most DL letters up to 1978 had a list of prior senders like the above, but they were "internal" in the letter, since they originated with the Death20 block and were bounded below by the added Lottery letter. Superstitious recipients may copy a list with the same diligence that they give to the text of a letter. With little room to expand, the internal lists on early DL letters may have been exactly copied for a few years. But by 1979 both these and all the LD letters stopped circulating. As photocopying had became more frequent, there was greater reluctance to comply if one thought some modification of the letter, such as updating a list, was required.
Though I make little use of formatting to infer
relatedness, the most common paragraphing of a DL letter
trespasses on the unity of the Lottery24 block, placing the last
sentence of the Death20 block ( "Please send 20 copies of the
letter and see what happens in four days") as the first
sentence in the new paragraph starting the Lottery block (right
before "The chain comes from Venezuela and was written by . .
.") [1983].
This may aide circulation by disguising the compound nature of
the letter and its resulting redundancy and contradictory claims
of origin.
The early DL type was temporarily eclipsed by LD letters during 1974-75, but a hyper-competitive DL variation captured the entire luck chain letter niche before the end of the decade (the It Works postscript described in > Section 4-5). Thus all mainline luck chain letters since 1980, certainly over a billion, have been the DL type. Within this type are variations that compete with each other for the attention and resources required for replication. The advantages of some of these variations are explained in the sequel (> Section 4-6).
The DL type luck chain letter not only dominated circulation in the United States for decades, it also took hold in many foreign countries. That it originated in the US or Canada, around 1973, is fairly certain since this region nurtured the circulation of the Death20 component as an independent chain letter, and also spawned many early variations, including the unsyncretized 24 copy quota in the Lottery24 component (in LD letters only, as < above). From North America it has spread to many countries. Examples so far collected are listed below; most of the foreign language texts cited are supplied with an English translation.
< Start
of above section <
Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
2-3
OUTLIER LUCK CHAIN LETTERS
Cross Crossings
Cautiously Chain Letters from
France The
Luck of St. Thomas Sick Girl Performs
Miracles
Every one will get
thousands The
Brill Letter Chain Letters from
Mexico The
Media Chain Letter Romance
Game
Medium Jumpers
There are over ten "types" of English language
luck chain letters in the archive that did not dominate
circulation in the US in any year. Some of these types are
represented by only one example. I briefly discuss these outlier
types here in their chronological order.
1. Cross
Crossings Cautiously
A 1926-01
quota nine advocacy chain letter is titled "Cross
Crossings Cautiously" (CCC) and states: "I have resolved that
from now I will practice 'safety first', preach 'safety first'
and do all in my power to save life or prevent any injury to
my fellow men." The CCC slogan and the resolve also appear
above a 1926-12
Good Luck block that warns against breaking the chain.
A 1930
luck chain letter has retained CCC but dropped all other mention
of safety. It concludes with an X to Y list of 15 names, mostly
famous, beginning with Sen. Heflin, Bernard Shaw, Henry Ford,
and Colonel Lindbergh. James Thomas Heflin was a white
supremacist Senator from Alabama, 1920 - 1931.
2. Chain Letters from France.
The following handwritten letter, titled "The Fortune
Chain", was mailed in Okeechobee, Florida in 1931.
When a chain letter asks you to "continue" it, it is probably a translated French letter, for many of them ask you to "Continuez la chaine". Other text in this letter is obviously cognate to two French language letters that circulated in Geneva, Switzerland in 1928. These were published by W. Deonna in a folklore journal that same year, and both the French text and an English translation by Prof. Sarah E. Winter are provided in the archive. [1928a, 1928b]. The Swiss letters do not have a list of names, like the Fortune letter above, but this could have been edited off by Deonna. Note that all (except possibly the first) names on the above letter are of married women. The concluding testimonial, about Pola Negri, is likely an American invention and appears on all four of the Fortune chain letters in the archive. Pola Negri was a Polish born film actress well known for her liaisons with Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino, the Italian heart-throb who died young in 1926.The Fortune Chain.
Jean Fulcher to Mrs Stewart Stanley
Mrs Stewart Stanley to Mrs Wm Conley
Mrs Wm Conley to Mrs E. F. Coverly
Mrs E. J. Coverly to Mrs L. W. Estes
Mrs L. W. Estes to Mrs R. W. Howell
Mrs R. W. Howell to Mrs J. H. Estlinger
Mrs J. H. Estlinger to Mrs C. B. Flanders
Mrs C. O. Flanders to Mrs J. S. Haddock
Mrs J. S. Haddock to Mrs J. L. Hall
Mrs J. L. Hall to Mrs H. L. Hazellies
Mrs H. L. Hazellies to Mrs C. A. Hilliard
Mrs C. A. Hilliard to Mrs E. N. Hilliard
Mrs E. N. Hilliard to Mrs Walter Brantley.Good luck and good health. Continue this chain and send nine copies to nine of your intelligent friends to whom you wish happiness. This chain was started in Flanders by a General in the American artillery and must go around the world 3 times.
Forward it if possible within twenty four hours of its acceptance.Do not break this chain it might give you bad luck. During the nine following days after you have sent the copies a happy event will take place and fill you with joy. The predictions are always true. If you take this as a joke and do not send the copies correctly bad luck may befall you.
Mrs Barnes of Victoria won the big prize in lottery of 20,000 golden liars on the Ninth day.
Mr. Wilcox's home was destroyed on the eight day owing to not taking serious notice of the chain.
Mrs Hux lost her only son three days after receiving this chain without forwarding copies.
Mrs May and Sacha Genty won $250,000.
Pola Negri owes her fortune to having carried out instructions in a most conscientious way.
3. The Luck of St.
Thomas
The following luck chain letter was published in an Iowa
newspaper in 1949: "The luck of St. Thomas has been sent you -- it has
been around the world four times. Copy the letter and forward
it to five other people. Do not keep the letter in your
possession. It must leave your home within 24 hours after
receiving it. You will have good luck four days after
receiving the letter."
4.
Sick Girl Performs Miracles
The following luck chain letter was
published in an Ottawa, Canada newspaper on Jan. 21, 1970: "This is a chain letter from Landers. Someone
sent me this and now I am sending it to you. Do the same for
people you know. This letter comes from a little, sick girl in
Landers. Whoever breaks the chain will have neither luck nor
happiness. This has already happened. The sick girl performs
miracles unexpectedly. Happiness will befall you in 48 hours.
This letter must not be destroyed or lost. Copy it seven times
and send it to seven people. Don't put a stamp on it. Observe
what happens to you in 48 hours." [1970]
5.
"Every one will get thousands of copies."
A composed chain letter from
December, 1975 declares: "... the
ironclad science of Mathematics demonstrates conclusively that
on the last Good Thursday before Christmas 1976 ... 882,922,240,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 copies of this letter will be in the mails. [1975].
7. Chain Letters from Mexico.
English translations of Mexican letters circulate in the U.S. in
low volume. A 1984
example from Oxnard, California has a brief Tagalog addition at
the end, and a comment on this in English. The letter has a
quota of twenty-four copies, a deadline of nine days, and a
thirteen day waiting period. A recent related letter has two
blocks of Tagalog and much transformation of the testimonials [2004].
An English only example [1995], from North
Carolina, represents a separate tradition. It states: "This
chain would be sent with five cents which will be donated to
the church." There was a nickel taped head up on the
letter. This request was also present in an untranslated Spanish
language letter mailed from Pasadena [1980]. A dime was
taped on this letter. This sending forward of money seems to be
unique with Mexican luck chain letters and is a striking
contrast to U.S. mainline letters since 1939 which instruct "Do
not send money." This command functioned to differentiate
luck chain letters from the money chain letters that
flooded the mails in 1935 (> Section 4-2).
Thus this forwarding of a small coin may date from the 1930's
also, and may be a different solution to the same discard
problem that English language luck chain letters faced.
Hopefully older Mexican chain letters will be recovered that can
explain the origin of this feature.
8. The Media Chain Letter
Beginning in 1989, a quota five luck chain
letter much like the then long extinct "Luck by Mail" type was
revived by providing a pretext for a status display. I describe
this widely reported "Media Chain Letter" in Section 4-4.
9.
Romance Game.
I have four English language examples of a classroom note
typically passed between young teenage girls. The following was
intercepted from a 13 year old girl by a teacher in California
in 1995.
< Start of
above section < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
This estimate of 2.2 billion received for 30 years (1567 weeks) implies an average of 1.3 million receipts per week. As determined above, the DL mainline luck chain letters during these years had an average generation time of one week. Assuming that all receipts occur within a week, the circulation of the DL type will be 1.3 million at any time. Presume for each letter, three days of the seven days between receipts were spent in the mail. Since 3/7 * 1,300,000 = 550,000, on a typical day during 1970-2000 there were probably over a half million luck chain letters in the mail. We have reduced this estimate some to account for many chain letters being distributed by hand.
The
Great Advantage of a Small Advantage.
The conceptual tools
introduced above are now used to demonstrate that the
appearance of a seemingly minor innovation on a
predominant type chain letter can have a significant
effect. Suppose the active
circulation of a mainline luck chain letter type is stable:
for every 100 received, enough of these hosts will comply
with the request for copies that about 100 copies of these
letters will in turn be sent out and received. Suppose John
Doe gets a degenerate photocopy of one of these letters and
retypes it before making copies. He happens to add the postscript
"Do not send money!" thus creating a variation V,
makes 20 copies, and distributes them.
When Jane gets a copy of a chain letter in the mail she habitually glances at it and throws it away without reading the body of text, figuring it asks the reader to send money. When she gets a copy of V she glances at the title and at the bottom of the letter where one might look to see who the sender was. There is no sender listed, but the words "Do not send money!" appear prominently. This communicates at once that this letter does not ask for money. Jane reads the full text and, since she is waiting to hear if she got a desirable job, she decides not to take a chance on bad luck and complies with the demand for 20 copies.
Others may react as Jane did: say the new postscript induces just one additional person per hundred to fully and effectively comply to the demand for 20 copies. So after one week, the circulation will increase from 100 to 120. This is a weekly growth factor of f = [120/100]1/7 = 1.0264. With this growth factor, the population will more than double every month since using equation (2b) we find t = ln[200/100] / ln(f)= 26.6 days to double. After 18 months out, equation (1b) gives V(540) = 20*(1.0264)540 = 26 million active letters. This is 15% of the adult population of the United States in 1980 (170 million), which means this off-hand variation, which started with 20 copies, could have replaced most of the previously circulating luck chain letters.
The scenario employed in this example is based on an actual event in chain letter history. The sentence "Do not send money" did appear on a Flanders-Prosperity type luck chain letter around 1939, and has remained ever since (> Section 4-2). It was repeated in a postscript in 1979 and this likely contributed significantly to the rapid predominance of the new variation that bore it, and to the demise of the prior variation. (> Section 4-5).
Immunization
In an example above we presumed a population of chain
letters was doubling every month. Obviously such growth
cannot be sustained very long. The number of possible
recipients is limited, and there is an immunization
effect whereby receiving more than one chain letter of the
same motivational category makes one less likely to comply
with copy demands. If one variation of a luck chain is
abundant, another variation may be deprived of the attention
and resources required for making and distributing copies.
Eventually the abundant variation will foul its own nest by
the same process. Thus for population booms, the exponential
growth model applies until a variation has been received by
a significant percentage of the subject population. More
sophisticated mathematical models of growth with limited
resources are available, but it would be difficult to verify
their applicability for chain letters. Exponential "growth"
may also apply when a variation is in terminal decline, as
we discuss next.
The One-in-a-Hundred Rule.
The above calculated examples, and
tabulations using the Paper Chain Letter Archive, allow
formulation of the following rule of thumb.
Consider a stable population of quota 20 mainline luck chain letters with a generation time of one week. If a variation arises that gets just one extra person in a hundred to fully comply, the circulation of this variation will initially double every month. Within a couple or so years it will be the only mainline luck chain letter still circulating.Such captures of circulation by new variations are a common and striking feature of chain letter history. Analysis of why a new variation predominates may be difficult, especially if several innovations are present on a single letter. Because of the One-in-a-Hundred Rule, this replicative advantage could derive at least in part from infrequent or unknown factors in the recipient population, such as paranoia, minority ethnic identification, or participation in money chain letters.
3-2 Distribution Networks.
Chain Letter
Distribution Core
Networks Efficient
Flow
I will consider in Section 3.8 how certain chain letter content influences the selection of recipients (> Effective Distribution). Here I speculate about the flow of chain letters through a population, how flow patterns may persist and change, and how this may affect the circulation of variations.
Chain Letter Distribution.
The following individual behavior holds with regard to certain
social replicators, and affects their overall pattern of
distribution. This applies to photocopied office humor, jokes,
rumors, and luck chain letter variations.
(1) Single source: New items are first distributed by only one source: all subsequent receipts of this item derive from this initial source.These facts are clearly true when the replicator is photocopied office humor. These are far too complex to be invented independently; and likely just one person is the source of a new item (an exception may be "Useful phrases to know when traveling in Moslem areas" [1995], which was rumored to have been launched by the CIA while American hostages were being held in Lebanon). Almost all the photocopied office humor I received came from just one secretary, who reported that she got most of it from one other secretary. I showed these to the same friends each time; some often made copies and others never did. No one person ever gave me the exact same item twice. Likewise replicative oral jokes are extremely difficult to invent, except for substituting ethnic or national identities in an existing joke - for example, search for "it's a local call from here". And each is likely the creation of a single imagination. In the office, the same few people told me jokes, and did so over the years. One male in particular, who claimed he had been in every bar in the county, was the source of most of the jokes I heard. I either forgot his jokes or told them to certain friends and not others. No one told me the same joke twice unless they had forgotten the first telling. Upon reminding them of this they immediately stopped.
(2) Habitual transmission: If two people are exposed to the same replicator and the first person distributes it and the second does not, then the first person is more likely than the second to distribute a subsequent similarly motivated replicator.
(3) Habitual targeting: And this subsequent distribution is likely to include many of the same people to whom the prior distribution was made.
(4) Repetition taboo: But people are unlikely to distribute the exact same replicator to anyone whom they know has already received it.
For luck chain letters, "single source" is generally true for significant changes except, possibly, deletions. Evidence for "habitual transmission" can be found in some interviews (NYT, 1968). This may begin when an individual correlates some good or bad luck with receipt of "the letter." "Habitual targeting" can be a matter of convenience, and also compliance with targeting instructions in the letter, which may suggest copies be sent to "people who need good luck." In a hoard of nine linen exchange letters received by one person, the lists of senders contain 22 names and addresses but there are only 12 different ones [xe1940]. Finally, "repetition taboo" is in part a restatement of the immunization phenomenon, which explains the cessation of chain letter crazes. Immunization is understandably a refusal to expend one's own time and money on repeated demands for copies. But when transmission is not anonymous a respect for one's recipients will be a factor. This may still operate for anonymous distribution, though not as strongly. From about 1922 to 1977 the majority of luck chain letters contained lists of the most recent senders. After 1978 there is not a single mainline chain letter in the archive that bears such a list, and almost all the envelopes these chain letters were mailed in did not have a return address. So there was a dramatic shift to anonymous distribution. However most transmissions were still probably from friend to friend, with the prior "known friend to friend" networks still active.
Imagine the complete flow of a social replicator V through a population. We can represent this by a network of transmissions whose points (nodes) and directed connections (arrows) between pairs of nodes are specified as follows.
(1) Each person who sent or received V specifies one and only one node.The network of transmissions ignores variations of V, considering them all the same replicator. For a popular item, such a diagram might comprise millions of nodes and many more connections. "Habitual transmission" and "habitual targeting," particularly targeting of "friends and associates," suggest that such transmission networks have an independent existence rooted in social and work contacts, and the distribution of prior replicators. A subsequent variation will be passed along to many of the same people. Perhaps these networks have differentiated parts or "structures" that also persist and that affect the circulation of resident social replicators. An interesting possibility arises if the same "single source" of V produces another successful replicator V'. If the network of transmission is fairly constant, as suspected, then even far out in the network from the source, replicators V and V' should usually be received in that order. Recording such sequences could be used to infer encore creations and the constancy of the network of transmission.
(2) If person A transmitted V to person B then node A is connected to node B.
(3) With each such connection there is associated the time of receipt of V.
Core
Networks.
The core of a chain letter network of transmission can
be roughly defined as the largest subnetwork of mutually
connected habitual senders. Several formal definitions of the
core of a network are given in Doreian and Woodward (Social
Networks, 1994), but I have so little data compared
to the number of participants that computational methods would
be very approximate. I suspect this core, as defined, is more
numerous and richly connected than would result from random
linkages because:
(1) Various forms of social stratification (gender, age, race, religion, class) suggest the existence of different chain letter transmission networks, particularly when senders are identified. Some evidence of this can be found on chain letters and in newspaper accounts [gender: 1922, 1933], [race: 1935, 1936 see Rule 7] [religion: 2001]. Given that different chain letter transmission networks co-exist, the success of a chain letter variation depends not only on its text, but also on the state of the network that delivers it. These transmission networks are not static entities, but change with changing conditions such as participant age and interaction with other distribution networks. Thus competition between chain letter variations is, in part, competition between the established transmission networks that deliver them. Such competition makes a case for the existence of core networks, since the dense linkage of hundreds of people who habitually and rapidly comply would accelerate exponential growth and sustain circulation by recycling. Transmission networks with a smaller or less cohesive core would more likely disappear or be captured by a rival transmission network.
(2) For over a half century, most luck chain letters had a senders list. And money chain letters require a controlled list to function. Very early in the 1935 Send-a-Dime craze, women called friends to make sure they would re-transmit the chain letter and take the same precaution in choosing their recipients (DRMN-1). Such successful oral recruitment techniques would replicate along with the paper text. About the same time, this quest for prior consent appeared as a postscript in a Send-a-Dime letter [1935-04]. Such selection of recipients will link enthusiastic participants. And though the Send-a-Dime bubble soon burst, the transmission network that developed for money chain letters in 1935 probably partly survived for decades and influenced luck chain letter distribution as well (> Luck Follows Money).Rapid changes in the circulation of a chain letter, up or down, may relate to events in networks that are not modeled simply by exponential growth and immunization within in a large population. Two networks will share some participants. A sudden increase could follow the incorporation of a rival core network by a new letter. Rapid decline of a letter may follow if the core of its transmission network loses connectivity, as by participant aging or immunizations by a rival letter.
Efficient
Flow.
The "repetition taboo" implies that there will be an avoidance
of duplicated arrows (A to B and A to B) in a chain letter
transmission network. And short cycles (such as the dyad A to B
and B to A) will be less frequent. This especially applies to
letters with a senders list. If the list contains the last n
senders, all cycles of length n + 1 or less can be avoided if
one simply avoids distributing to anyone on the received list.
Possibly, competition between networks will also develop this
"efficient flow" since receipt of multiple copies by one person
within a few weeks is wasteful. Those networks with long cycles
should be favored. This could also involve a general westward
movement of letters, or a tendency to move between three major
cities in the same cyclic order. If cyclic flow is in both
directions there will be more duplicate receipts, hence more
discards. A very large sample would be needed to check for such
patterns, nor should we expect that the repetition taboo and
immunization alone could bring them about. But my guess is that
more persistent structure exists in the transmission networks of
folklore than is presently observable. Perhaps some systematized
method of sampling will eventually enable the observation of
flow patterns.
< Start
of above section <
Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
3-3
EVOLUTION
Descent Variation Differential Replication
Chain Letter
Evolution Linked
features Cladistics
Behavior
that Affects Circulation
Descent.
Until the 1970's most paper luck chain letters were copied by
hand or typed. When photocopiers became more common there was
some debate if one could use them for chain letters and still
receive good luck (NYT, 1968).
One chain letter innovator declared "may Xerox" in a footnote [1975].
Predictably, the mainline photocopiers won this debate [but not
for one outlier],
and almost every letter that has circulated since 1980 is a
photocopy, including originally hand written ones. But late
generation photocopies must eventually be retyped because of
image degeneration. In recent years this retyping is usually
done with a word processor.
The word "copy" here allows that there may be errors, deletions, innovations, and even translation. But let us require that most of the parent letter is carried forward on the copy with matching details. On extremely rare occasions a chain letter may not have a parent, for example the founder of 1975. Or it may be the concatenation of two letter, for example the very first Death-Lottery type letter - a hybrid. It is convenient to exclude such letters in what follows, and consider only those chain letters that have exactly one parent. A first generation copy may itself be copied, producing a second generation copy, and so on. A letter M is a descendant of letter L if M is some nth generation copy of L, and then L is an ancestor of M. All descendants of chain letter L, plus L itself, constitute a descent group (or clade), with L the founder. The ancestry of a letter M within a descent group is the sequence beginning with M, then the parent of M, the parent of the parent of M, etc. until the founder of the clade is reached. Any two distinct chain letters in a descent group have a unique "most recent common ancestor." This is the first member of the ancestry of one which is in the ancestry of the other. Because of the convention that a letter begins its own ancestry, this means the unique "common ancestor" of M and its ancestor M' is M' itself.
Two chain letters are regarded as identical if they have the exact same text, character for character, as well as the same text styles and formatting. Usually when chain letter L is photocopied, and possibly when retyped, an identical copy is formed, called a clone of L. It might be possible that two letters could be identical but had different parents, but we can disregard that unlikely possibility. A replicator is not considered to be a clone of itself. For any letter L not a clone, the clone group with founder L is constituted by L and all its clones. Clone groups are the natural unit to consider when describing the descent of variations.
The Paper Chain Letter Archive provides overwhelming evidence that chain letters inherit text from their ancestors. From a "Luck of London" letter we read "It has been around the world four times" [1944]. Over 50 years later we read on an Australian letter "It has been around the world nine times" [1997]. From a letter mailed in 1959 from Bloomsbury, New Jersey we read about money won but life lost in the Philippines [1959], just as we do on the 1997 Australian letter.
Inherited details strongly suggest that the letters in the "types" I have identified are descended from a single founding letter for each type. If we start with the Good Luck letters [1922], these and all subsequent mainline letters form a single descent group that extends to the present, and whose founder may have been written in Europe soon after World War I. This descent group numbers in the billions of letters and some of its ancestries contain thousands of generations (over four thousand, if there is an average of one generation per week).
All luck chain letters since 1900 are probably influenced by the first letter with both a copy quota and a deadline. Present day familiarity with these devices masks their ingenuity: copy quota probably began with a single letter and the concept spread only with the distribution and translation of this letter. The same is likely true for deadlines, dropping claims of divine authorship, statements that the letter is to go around the world and non-miraculous testimonials. Such innovations distinguished luck chain letters from the Letters from Heaven with which early luck chain letters were once identified, though perhaps mistakenly (1908). The Letters from Heaven in turn probably have a conceptual founder, perhaps a Greek letter in the first century, and this in turn a pagan predecessor. If we presume there existed spoken rituals that demanded their own repetition, these may all have begun with a communication that claimed divine origin and contained an instruction for periodic repetition. As if echoing this primal origin, many of the Letters from Heaven emphasized rigid Sabbath observance. [1863]
Variation.
Hand written letters are often difficult to read and thus many
variations are introduced as the copier tries to guess what is
written. Many errors can also be introduced on chain letters
that are typed. For examples of the corruption of names see 1926.
With photocopying, after some 15 or so generations the text
becomes wiggly, spotted and unreadable in places. Titles and
other text at the margins may be lost because of misplacement of
a sheet in a photocopier or image expansion [1991]. Thus
photocopied chains, to survive, must be retyped periodically,
which introduces errors and wrong guesses at illegible or
missing words [e.g. "faxed" for "faded" in 1997]. Lines of
text are often omitted when copiers lose their place in the
source letter [compare Newark1
to the close Newark2
- the later has omitted "of receiving this letter" and "He
failed to circulate the letter"]. Or the copier may notice
the omission, and enter the missing line in a new position in
the letter. For example in 1979
"Do not keep this letter" has been transposed with "It
must leave your hands . . ." In 1985 a misplaced
period has shifted an important ethnic cue (the Philippines)
from one testimonial to another. A few changes are the result of
copying what was not intended to be copied, such as a personal
comment to the recipient [1906], a
date, a casual postscript, or signed name.
In addition to such copying errors, there are many intentional changes. The testimonial of The Unbeliever's Death is often deleted, presumably for ethical reasons [1981]. Attempts to improve the writing style are seen [1995], and reformatting is common [1991]. Often a brief salutation [1989] or postscript [1997] is added, usually never to appear on another letter in our sample. Sometimes a whole new title [1997], sentence [1991], or testimonial appears [1975]. Both with hand copied letters [1939], and photocopied letters (Preston 1976), a recipient of two chain letters may combine them on one page producing a new and subsequently abundant type.
Probably there are thousands of major innovations every year, but most do not replicate sufficiently to find their way into our sample. There are so many variations, accidental and deliberate, that most retyped letters differ from their parent. I have never collected two identical luck chain letters. Paradoxically, ancestors can still be identified after hundreds of generations, and across translations and subsequent cultural modification. Compare the ancestral 1974 to Hungary 1986, or to the second part of 1999.
There is convincing evidence in the archive that on rare occasions, in copying parent letter X to copy Y, text from a third letter (the "donor") is also placed on copy Y. This process, and the text involved, is called a transfer. Here are some examples.
Differential Replication.
Very clear evidence that chain letter content affects
replication is present in Table 4 and
Table
6. These show that letters bearing certain variations have
greatly increased in frequency over a few years, and letters
without those features have totally disappeared from the dated
collection. The succession of luck chain letter types (< Table 2)
is also proof of the effect of content on circulation. The range
of years in Table 2 records the earliest and latest year of
circulation so far collected. Thus all the Good Luck type letters in
the archive were received during the 1920's, and you are no more
likely to receive one today than to be asked to dance the
Charleston at the senior prom.
For many variations we can be fairly sure that after some initial appearance, all subsequent appearances of this variation within some group of letters under discussion are descendants of the initial example. Or if the variation re-appears as a result of a transfer or re-invention, we may always be able to verify this by analyzing other variations present. I call such a variation a feature (or character). Features are variations that can be used, at least in part, to infer that two letters bearing the variation had a common ancestor that also bore it.
Some variations are not features, or at least their use in diagnosing ancestry poses difficulties. For example, deletion of the Unbeliever's Death testimonial occurs independently in separate lineages. Certain corruptions and varying forms of numbers may also appear and re-appear, such as $755,000, $755,000.00, $755000.00 or $75,500,000. The words "Philippines," "receive" and "ignore" are frequently misspelled in the same way. "St. Jude" may be added to a letter, and also removed.
Descent groups (clades) are often considered when their presence significantly increases or decreases in our dated sample. Members of a descent group are recognized by the presence of shared features. Some of these features may have a positive effect on circulation, others neutral, and some may have a negative result. Features that are neutral or negative in an increasing clade are called riders, since they proliferate without themselves motivating replication. Usually there is one key feature judged to be primarily responsible for the increase of the group. Sometimes it may be difficult to select a key feature from two or more positive features present.
Small copying errors will generally be neutral, but some may have had a positive effect on circulation and increased in frequency as a result. Here are three candidates for this curious phenomenon:
The descendants of a single letter have repeatedly replaced all other mainline letters in our sample. I call such a descent group (or its founding letter, or the key feature) hyper-competitive. For example, all mainline letters after 1983 are the descendants of a single letter that first appeared around 1979! This descent group numbers over two billion letters. The key feature responsible for this spectacular replication was probably a new postscript (> It Works). We say this "It Works" postscript (or the first letter bearing it, or its clade) captured the mainline. Such striking examples of differential replication are surprisingly common in chain letter history.
The term "funneling event" from population genetics may be applied to captures, since they reduce the inheritable variation present in a population. These events not only establish highly replicative innovations, but also reset details of text with the features that happen to be present on the founding letter, for better or for worse. Chain letter evolution is characterized by a succession of funneling events through single letters. If a variation, a "small improvement," is merely increasing in the population of letters, it is subject to total elimination by the next hyper-competitive variation. Nevertheless, small improvements do appear to accumulate on chain letters, for example with the mix of testimonials (> Office) or with instructions on to whom the letter should be sent (> Effective Distribution). This appearance requires explanation.
(1) Small improvements may be needed to increment the effectiveness of a letter bearing a key innovation to hyper-competitive power.Explanations (1) and (2) are apparently active in the frequency shifts documented in Table 4 for the sequence of innovations leading to the full It Works postscript. Explanation (4) may apply to the many seemingly concurrent changes that appeared with two new titles in the early 1980's (> Kiss and Love).
(2) Variations that are more frequent because of small improvements are more likely to receive a hyper-competitive innovation.
(3) A universal feature that appears to be a "small" improvement may have previously been hyper-competitive, perhaps during a period of low circulation. Low circulation events are difficult to detect.
(4) The author of a key innovation may have also composed small improvements, or selected and transferred them from other letters.
Chain Letter Evolution.
I have described the descent and variation of chain letters, and
their differential replication depending on copied features
present in the text. These processes assure that chain letters
"evolve" - that is, they accumulate inheritable features that
increase or sustain circulation. It is this evolution that
ultimately explains "how chain letters work," and why they
worked even as public attitudes and beliefs changed over
generations. This success is even more remarkable considering
the universal condemnation of chain letters from both secular
and religious authorities, and the lack of any real service they
provide to their hosts apart from dealing with the false hopes
and empty threats that chain letters themselves created.
Richard Dawkins describes the mechanics of chain letter evolution in River Out of Eden, while also emphasizing that chain letters "are originally launched by humans, and the changes in their wording arise in the heads of humans" (1995, pp 146-150). Our collection reveals that there are a great many such changes but very few that significantly increase circulation. And very few of those that do are the result of an innovation designed to work in the way it does. Indeed, some successful changes are the result of accidents in copying. As in biological evolution, successful chain letter "mutations" are rare events that can exploit an opportunity for replication in a variety of unpredictable ways. So chain letters do "evolve," and apart from computer simulations, are probably the best documented and simplest example of evolution known. Yet, unlike computer simulations, chain letters are readable documents that exploit human hopes and fears. This provides chain letter evolution an unlimited palette of invention, and makes their history intelligible in human terms.
Are the similarities between chain letter evolution and genetic evolution worth our attention? In the previously mentioned article "Chain Letters & Evolutionary Histories" (Bennett, Li, Ma), algorithms used for genetic sequences are applied to reconstruct the ancestry of 33 DL type luck chain letters. The authors state " . . . if algorithms used to infer phylogenetic trees from the genomes of existing organisms are to be trusted, they should produce good results when applied to chain letters. Indeed, their readability makes them especially suitable for classroom teaching of phylogeny (evolutionary history) free from the arcana of molecular biology."
The following biological phenomena suggested or prompted guesses about chain letter adaptions.
There are, however, significant differences between chain letter evolution and biological evolution, and how each can be examined. In addition to the presence of deliberate and calculated human innovations in chain letter texts, note:
(1) Chain letters usually replicate by the production of exact copies (photocopies) of a single parent letter. A successful new variation may begin with over a thousand such clones (>3-7).Linked Features.(2) There is no natural way to define a "species" (type) of English language luck chain letter. Incremental variations are rapidly dispersed throughout the English speaking world. By contrast, most biospecies reproduce sexually within intra-breeding groups (species) that have geographic boundaries. Biological species are "real entities of nature."
(3) At least in part because of their asexual reproduction, chain letter history is characterized by the phenomenon of hyper-competition - the quick capture of an entire niche by descendants of a single letter. Presumably this does not occur with the genomes of biospecies, where funneling is through a taxon such as a genus or species.
(4) The text of a luck chain letter is analogous to the DNA of an organism, but is orders of magnitude shorter, comparable only to the length of a single gene, and like a gene has a beginning and end. Instead of being a sequence of nucleotides, a chain letter consists of readable sentences in a natural language.
(5) Not only can we read the entire "genome" of a chain letter, we can also make reasonable estimations of the effect on replication of any component.
(6) The raw data available for chain letters are far more complete than what are available for any biospecies. We have, in essence, the complete "DNA" for hundreds of examples, including accurately dated extinct forms.
If every letter in the archive which bears feature H also bears feature G, and visa versa, this does not imply they appear together on all letters ever produced (if so we say G and H were concurrent). It is quite possible that G could have appeared first and later H was added to a letter bearing G, but no example of G without H has been collected. For chain letters there is no way to deduce concurrence of two features solely from texts, unless one had every letter ever produced. If features G and H are both present in a group of letters under discussion, the following table lists the five possible ways they may appear with relation to each other. The symbol {G, GH}, for example, means that within the group of letters: (1) G appears without H on at least one letter; (2) G appears with H, in any order, on at least one other letter, and (3) H does not appear without G, otherwise I would have written {G, H, GH}. The five possible relationships between G and H are all hypotheses, subject to revision depending on subsequent collecting or verification of certain deletions or transfers. None of these relationships depend on recorded dates of circulation for letters, though dates may be used in arguing for or against spoiling exceptions. However, the pre-linkage of feature G to feature H implies that G appeared before H.
Table 3. Feature
linkage: terminology and consequences.
My terminology: G is _____ to H |
All known presences of G and H in the clade. |
Cladistic terminology: G is ____ relative to H |
If H becomes universal, G becomes _______ |
Possible Origin |
Spoilers |
1. unlinked |
{G,H} |
absent |
H was first
added to a letter with G deleted. |
GH exists but
is uncollected. |
|
2. pre-linked |
{G,GH} |
plesiomorphic,
or ancestral |
universal |
G was on the
letter that H was first added to. |
All G are by
deletion of H from GH. |
3. co-linked |
{GH} |
congruent |
universal |
G and H first
appeared on the same letter. |
G or H exist
but are uncollected. |
4.
post-linked |
{H,GH} |
apomorphic, or derived |
frequent if
GH came soon after H |
H was on the
letter that G was first added to. |
H was
transferred to a letter already bearing G. |
5.
transfer-linked |
{G,H,GH} |
homoplasitc, or conflicting |
frequent if
GH came soon after H |
G was transferred to a letter bearing H. |
All G or H
are by deletion from GH. |
Example 1: The
DL letters with an early It Works
postscript read "I, myself, now forward it to you." But
this never appears on a letter with a Kiss or Love title. "I,
myself, . . ." is thus unlinked to these titles.
When these Kiss and Love titles were introduced they were first
added to letters from which "I, myself, . . ." had been
deleted.
Example 2: Our earliest Death20 type letter [1959], and all thereafter, bear both the Death and Money testimonial and the demand for 20 copies. No letter has been found which bears either of these features singly. Thus we say these two features are co-linked. They would be concurrent, if, say, they were both transferred from a foreign letter at the same time. If not concurrent, then one appeared without the other. But only if such a letter is collected would we then say the first is pre-linked to the second.
Example 3: Around 1988 a new testimonial, "Car," was added to a letter bearing the title "With Love all things are possible" ("Love"). The Car testimonial proved to be hyper-competitive within the clade of Love titled letters. The earliest example of Car [1988] (and almost all thereafter) also bears a duplication of the admonition against sending money, a feature I call "send no money," which reads:
You will receive good luck in the mail. Send no money. Send copies to people you think need good luck. Don't send money, as fate has no price.
You will receive good luck in the mail. Send copies to people you think need good luck. Send no money, as faith has no price. [1996]This does not contain the duplicated admonition "send no money." However, probably this was the result of a copying error that misplaced "send no money" two sentences forward, replacing the usual "Don't send money, . . ." This letter contains details that were also present on early Love-Car letters which did have "send no money" (> Love gets a car). Thus some ancestor of this letter almost certainly had "send no money" in the usual place, and this was later deleted. We can thus say that "send no money" is universal in the Car clade, being a pre-linked rider.
While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife 51 days after receiving the letter. [1989]Here "51 days" has replaced the older version in which the wife is lost "six days" after receiving the letter. The "51 days" variation was very likely a miscopy of the word "six" from a degenerate photocopy (I have one in which the "x" is barely visible). Our earliest version of Car bears the "six days" version [1988]. There is no example in the archive of "51 days" that is not accompanied by Car. In the entire population these features appear only in the combinations {Car, (Car)(51 days)}. So "51 days" is post-linked to Car - it was first written on a letter that already bore Car. During the exponential growth of the Love-Car letters, "51 days" proliferated as a post-linked rider, possibly contributing very little to circulation, though such assessments are difficult. If it did give Car letters a boost, say by suggesting very late compliance, this was not sufficient to eliminate the (Car)(six days) letters, which survived well into the 1990's [1996, 1997].
Example 5: In the early 1980's two titles, called "Kiss" and "Love," captured the mainline (> in Section 4.7). For about 10 years a mainline letter bore either one or the other title, so during this time these features were unlinked. However around 1993 both titles began to appear together on single letters. They now formed the combinations {Kiss, Love, (Kiss)(Love)} which implies a transfer had occurred, since deletions from (Kiss)(Love) had certainly not produced all the single titled Kiss or Love letters. The Kiss title had been transferred to a Love titled letter at least two times. [1991, 1994]. There was also one case in which both the Love title and the Car testimonial were transferred to a Kiss letter. [1997] Kiss and Love were now transfer-linked.
We use the linkage of features to argue (with inherent uncertainty) for or against assertions of the following forms.
Cladistics is a method of classification
that utilizes a "sister" relationship between two "taxa" (named groups of
organisms), this holding when the two are more closely related
to each other (have a more recent common ancestor) than either
has to any third taxon. For cladistic analysis, a taxon must
be a clade - an ancestor and all its
descendants (a descent group). Sister relationships between
"nested" taxa (taxa contained in taxa) are expressed by a
bifurcating diagram called a cladogram. A sample of
taxa appear at the terminal nodes of a tree, and two are
connected to a hypothetical ancestor taxon if they are deemed
sisters. Often these relationships are determined using characters
(what I have called features)
present in some but not all of the taxa in the sample.
Cladograms are chosen which account for the distribution of
characters in the "simplest" way, a principle called parsimony.
In one approach, parsimony is defined as minimizing the
number of non-inherited appearances (transfers) plus the number
of losses (deletions) of features. Instead of using characters,
pairs of items may be compared by a numerical measure of their
"relatedness," and from these numbers a consistent cladogram is
constructed. This later method might apply when instead of taxa
we are comparing genomes.
(1) Each clone group V of C specifies one and only one node.The nodes of a tree of variations are clone groups, sets of identical replicators, generally more than one letter. There are no cycles in a variational tree because a replicator can never have served as the parent of one of its ancestors. Cladistics originally considered taxa, not individuals or clone groups. So even when the member organisms reproduce sexually, taxa are assumed to have but one parent taxon. This assumption simplifies analytic methods in calculating a parsimonious cladogram. One can consider samples of chain letters all being within a clade and each (except possibly the founder) having a unique parent. With this simplification no two arrows will point to the same node (clone group). Given any sample of chain letters within a clade C, their true cladogram can be easily constructed from the tree of variations for C by deleting nodes not in the sample and connecting each letter by an arrow from its nearest ancestor in the sample.
(2) If any member of the clone group V is the parent of a founder of clone group V' of C, an arrow connects node V to node V'.
Behavior
that Affects Circulation.
In 1966 Alan Dundes described these universal components of
chain letters: (1) a proclamation that the letter is a chain
letter, (2) an injunction to send a specific number of copies,
sometimes within a definite period of time, (3) a description of
desirable consequences of compliance with the injunction, and
(4) a warning of undesirable consequences if the injunction is
ignored or disobeyed (Dundes). Mainline luck letters contain
these components, though the method of identification may not be
by proclamation.
We first identify behavior of a recipient that promotes the circulation of a chain letter, isolating these six components:
3-4
RETENTION
Identification Differentiation Woe to scoffers
By retention of a received letter we mean keeping it in an undamaged state, accessible for copying. The bane of chain letters is immediate discard. If the recipient just saves the letter, as time passes it may work its will by playing on circumstances such as bad luck. The importance of first impressions for chain letters is revealed by the leading sentence in a version of the classroom Romance Game: "You touched this letter so you have to keep it!" [1998].
Identification.
Retention of a chain letter may depend on its identification as
a luck chain letter, and perhaps as a certain luck chain in
which the recipient believes. Quick recognition seems largely
based on what is at the top: titles, initial text or rarely,
images. Reputed authors and places of origin may also serve to
identify a letter. A Brazilian letter is titled "Oracao De Santo
Antonio" and a capitalized prayer follows [1994]. A 1996
English language letter originally from India has Sai Baba
devotional images at the top [text, image].
Two translated Mexican letters have the title "St. Jude
Thaddeus," one underlined, the other in a large font [1984, 1995]. Below this
title, both these letters begin with about the same sentence:
Before anything else, I would like to tell you that St. Jude Thaddaeus will help you in everything you encounter.This attempts a "locking" on the top spot of the letter by a declaration that is difficult to top without disrespecting St. Jude. Most successful new types of chain letter debut with new titles. In the transition from one type to another, apparently the ready identification of the waning type negatively impacts its replication. Perhaps periodically recipients are more likely to read the text of a letter that appears to be a novelty, or that may not be immediately identified as a chain letter.
The final words of a text likewise have added significance for quick identification, as shown by the replicative success of certain postscripts (> It Works). Placing "St. Jude" at the far bottom of a letter, a pretense of authorship, attempts to lock the conclusion [1996]. The Book of Revelations "seals" itself with: "If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book" (Rev. 22:18). Some interpret this as sealing the entire Christian canon. The apocryphal Jesus' Sabbath Letter attempts to discredit any other letter claiming to have been written by Jesus by having him say: "You shall hear no more from me except through the holy scriptures until the day of judgment." However most versions of this Himmelsbrief then conclude with this addition: "All goodness and prosperity shall be in the house where a copy of this letter is found." [1926] One astute editor observed that this was likely the words of the "glib tongued rascals who sold this rubbish ..." (1884).
If identification as a particular luck letter aids replication, then we may expect a highly adapted chain letter will have multiple identities, depending on who is reading it. Several years may have passed since the recipient received a previous chain, so only one or two highlights may be recalled. These might be leading text, alleged geographical origin, or one of the numerical specifications. New types typically retain some of these, and thus may appear as the traditional letter to some and a novelty to others. Neither recipient is wrong - in recent decades successful mainline innovations are notably conservative, most adding just one or two new features to an existing letter.
A clear advantage results if a letter is identified, rightly or wrongly, by an ethnic group as the "same" letter that circulated in the old country.
A private in the Philippine Army won the first prize in the sweepstakes for complying with this chain. [1949]
Dom Dimant, das Filipinas recebeu e nao deu importancia, mandou jogar fora, 9 dias depois morreu. [Brazil, 1994].
The question of where a chain letter originally came from usually has no single answer. Though North America has been a creative source for innovations, especially since 1935, still most of the text on contemporary mainline letters is likely from various other countries. Perhaps the question of origins has an answer if we limit it in a reasonable way. Since 1970 the high copy quota letters (20 and over) have dominated international circulation. Where and when did they first appear? The first appearance of a high copy quota in our collection is on a letter mailed from Bloomsbury, New Jersey [1959]. Its demand for 20 copies is associated with, and enforced by, another innovation that first appears on this letter, the "Death and Money" testimonial. The events in this testimonial are purported to have taken place in the Philippines.
Differentiation.
I have discussed the advantage for a letter to identify itself
with multiple traditions. It may also help circulation if a
chain letter prominently distinguishes itself from another
letter. The advantage of differentiation is very clear for post
1935 luck chain letters (for example, the Flanders-Prosperity
type). In section 4.2 I explain how the hyper-competitive
innovation "Do not send money" avoided immediate discard
by distinguishing the luck chains from the boom/bust money chain
of the day (> Divergence).
Another innovation of these post 1935 letters was movement
of the list of names from the top to the bottom of the letter,
where they remained until disappearing in the mid 1970's. This
provided a quick visual flag that the letter in hand may not be
the abundant Send-a-Dime. Money chain letters retained the list
at the top for several years (compare 1935 to 1941).
Woe
to scoffers.
We see in testimonials that if one breaks the chain because of
tardiness or unspecified reasons, misfortune may follow, but
rarely death. However, all behavior that makes subsequent
replication impossible is punished by a death.
Devices may be defined with varying comprehensiveness. The three testimonials above and the statement "For any reason, do not destroy or tear" [Mexico / U.S., 1984] might be considered together as exemplifying the single device: "Warn against destruction or loss of the letter."
If the recipient takes the letter as a joke, its promises and threats have no power, and this castrating perception may itself replicate. Possibly some previous types have succumbed to changing attitudes and derision. The pious Ancient Prayer postcard chain, which circulated from 1906 up through World War I, eventually disappeared during the irreverent and fun loving 1920's. The first three text examples below discourage disbelief. The last three discourage a more serious threat to replication - the expression of disbelief.
M. Francesco Monthey, not having taken this letter seriously, saw his home ruined nine days after having received this letter. [Translation, France, 1928]
El Presidente de Brasil las recivio y no le dio importancia y a los 13 dias se le muri su hija. [Mexican / U.S. , 1980]
One woman made fun of it and on the 13th day her daughter went blind. [U.S., postcard, 1941]
Detective Segunda B. Villa now of the City of Baguie who laughed at this Chain of good luck, met instant death in accident on June 14th, 1948. [International, 1949. Baguio is a city in the Philippines]
Don't make fun or laugh at this because something bad might happen to you or your family. [Philippine / U.S., 1984].
< Start of
above section < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
3-5
COMPLIANCE
Motives Origin of Testimonials
Classification
of Testimonials
In this section I presume one has received a luck chain letter and retained it, but has yet to comply with its demands for replication. By compliance I mean that the recipient effectively distributes at least one copy of the letter (perhaps the copy received) within a month of receipt - thus contributing to its circulation. If the entire copy quota is distributed as instructed within the deadline we have full compliance. But partial compliance may be very common. In the previous section on retention I examined features of a letter that affect a recipient's immediate response to it. Here the focus is on how chain letter content may influence the recipient's deliberations on whether to comply, particularly on his or her interpretation of ensuing circumstances.
Motives.
The Letters from
Heaven motivated possession and publication by the promise
of divine blessing or magical protection from various perils,
combined with threats of divine punishment for disobedience or
disbelief. These were identifiably Christian in Europe and Hindu
in India. After 1900 divine sanctions were downplayed, and by
1922 the mainline had only nonsectarian promises of good and bad
luck.
Below are listed motives for replicating luck chain letters. These are based on statements of those who send chain letters, chain letter content, and known motives for sending certain postcards.
Some testimonials probably start as hoaxes (> "Car" below); but I suspect most started as rumors that are subsequently incorporated into the body of a chain letter. Say a chain letter has spread through a town, so much so that most people have received it. This can happen without anyone realizing it, as initially with Send-a-Dime in Denver, until Post Office officials noticed increased mail volume. In such a situation, most people have either broken the chain or complied with it. Now say John Doe is hit by a train and killed. There is a good chance he broke the chain. Suppose the letter is found among John's papers. It may then be said that "He broke the chain and was hit by a train a week later," and this may become a local rumor. The rumor may travel with the chain letter, orally or by telephone, each promoting the replication of the other. In this phase the more effective versions of the oral rumor will be favored. However, the advantage of distant transmittal applies if the rumor is written. First it may be on an attached letter. Next it may be a postscripted note below the chain letter, and finally it could be incorporated into the body of the letter. This could have been the origin of: "one person who failed to pay attention to it met with a dreadful accident" in a 1906 Ancient Prayer letter. Good luck testimonials likely spread in the same way - again, that a lottery winner also complied to a chain letter is not as improbable as it may seem.
Further, events that are not at all remarkable may be perceived by the public as prophesy fulfilled. The familiar "Unbeliever's Death" testimonial (> Woe to Scoffers) states that a person died exactly nine days after discarding the letter in disbelief. A simple estimate reveals that this is certainly true, in fact, it could have happened around 36,000 times just in English speaking countries in the last 25 years. Using the above approximations, a typical person received about 10 DL type luck chain letters in the last 25 years (4 per decade). Let us estimate, conservatively, that 6 of those receipts were discarded in disbelief. Assuming a quarter billion English speaking adults, this gives 6 x 2.5 x 108 = 1.5 x 109 disbelieving discards for the last 25 years. According to the The World Almanac and Book of Facts, the U.S. death rate per 100,000 population in year 1999 was 877. This gives the probability that a person will die on a random day as .00877 / 365 = .000024. Multiplying this by the number of times a person discarded a luck chain letter in disbelief gives 36,000 estimated deaths on the ninth day following!
Once a testimonial is established on a luck chain letter, details may vary considerably over the years, such as names and amounts of money won or lost. But the basic structure of the story is surprisingly persistent, suggesting that traditional testimonials play a major role in winning compliance.
Classification of Testimonials.
To analyze how testimonials promote replication, I classify them
by the following five structures: Win, Comply-Win, Lose,
Win-Lose, and Lose-Win.
(1) Win: person X received the letter and
had good luck.
Example: General Patton received $1,600 after receiving it.
[1952]
The Win testimonials are consistent with a belief that luck
chain letters are a "charm" whose mere receipt brings luck, much
as possession of a Letter from Heaven might grant a woman an
easy delivery. They suggest a recipient interpret good luck as
caused by the letter, creating an obligation to pass the charm
on to others. A Win testimonial may thus recruit a previous
nonbeliever who has good luck. Alternatively, readers may assume
that a Win testimonial is about someone who previously complied
with the letter's demands, as in our next structure.
(2) Comply-Win: X distributed the quota
of copies within the deadline and received good luck.
Example: Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected for the third
term as president of the United States 52 hours after he
mailed this letter. [1949]
Comply-Win testimonials promote the belief that dutiful
replication of a chain letter will bring good luck. This
particularly appeals to those who hope for gain from some
forthcoming event, such as a lottery drawing.
(3) Lose: X failed to circulate the
letter and after the deadline passed had bad luck.
Example: Mr. Nevin broke the chain and lost everything he
had. [1939]
Lose testimonials promote the belief that only replication of
the received letter can save one from bad luck. They
particularly exploit those who feel that this is not a time they
can risk bad luck. This insecurity could be due to a life
threatening illness in the family, a job interview or a son in
the military during war.
(4) Win-Lose: X received the letter and
had good luck. But X failed to circulate the letter and lost
what was gained, or much more.
Example: Dr. F. A. Anderson won $25,000 but lost it because
he broke the chain. [1944]
A Win-Lose story promotes the belief that receipt of the letter
brings good luck, but in return one must circulate the letter or
lose what they received, or much more. It reports two
connected events that imply the letter is a causal agent, in
contrast to Win and Lose testimonials that can much easier be
dismissed as coincidences. Win-Lose is persuasive with those who
perceive themselves to have received good luck but have yet to
comply. Such good luck could be escaping injury, recovering from
sickness, success in an examination or winning a bet (Renard, 1987).
(5) Lose-Win: X received the letter and
procrastinated or forgot to comply within the deadline. X had
bad luck. X belatedly distributed the quota and received good
luck.
Example: Mr. ASC received this letter. He forgot to
post. A few days later he lost his job. After that he
understood the significance of this letter and he sent 30
copies. He found a new job within 3 days. [India/UK, 1996]
The Lose-Win device encourages the belief that failure to comply
causes bad luck, but this can be reversed, even after the
deadline, if one complies in full to the copy quota. Like
Win-Lose, the reversal of fortune points doubly to the letter as
a cause. Lose-Win preys on those who perceive that they have had
bad luck since failing to meet the deadline. Such bad luck could
be an accident, loss of a bet or sale, illness, car trouble or
not being hired.
< Start of
above section < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
3-6 Mainline Testimonials
Early Versions Officer Wins Elliot Wins and Loses
Death and Money
Boss Wins Lottery
Lost Job - Better Job
The
Unbeliever's Death Car
Early
Versions.
On an early Ancient Prayer chain letter we read that "one
person who failed to pay attention to it met with a dreadful
accident" [1906].
This is the only testimonial, win or lose, that I have collected
on the Ancient Prayer
type or the following Good
Luck letters of the 1920's. Testimonials reappeared in
North America during the Great Depression with brief accounts of
gain and loss of money. The Prosperity
letters usually have three, with the pattern Win / Win / Lose.
Most versions of the World War II Luck of London type [1944]
introduces the familiar pattern Win / Win-Lose, possibly having
combined the last two testimonials from the Prosperity type.
From our earliest Luck by
Mail type:
"Gen Patton received $1,600 after receiving it. Gen Allen received $1,600 and lost it because he broke the chain" [1952].Of course Patton is the famous World War II tank commander, but "Allen" may be a corruption. Patton was soon transposed to the loser's position [1958], but was spared further indignity when his name was corrupted to Bratton [1960] and never restored.
Officer
Wins. Elliot wins and loses.
With the remarkable Bloomsbury letter of 1959, our early example
of the Death20 type, we get the canonical versions of these two
testimonials. Likely by some unknown path of corruption, the
chain breaker "Gen Allen" has been transformed to the civilian
"Don Elliot".
"A U.S. officer received $7,000.00. Don Elliott received $60,000.00 but lost it because he broke the chain." [1959]Note that someone has given up on the name of the winning officer. He will eventually join the "RAF" (Royal Air Force), but apart from the expected noise of copying names and numbers, these leading Win and Win-Lose testimonials have persisted for decades.
Death
and Money.
This Win-Lose testimonial first appeared in North America on the
Death20 founder around 1959 and was associated with inflation of
the copy quota from five to twenty copies. It was the first
implied death threat in the mainline.
The variant "wife" (for "life") first appeared around 1975, possibly as a corruption, though it is curious that this 1975 letter had a list of names of 17 couples. It was present on the Kiss-Love founders in the early 1980's and thus became universal. We have no examples of corruption or correction back to "life." Whether "wife" was simply a rider on the successful new titles, or instead carried some replicative advantage over "life," is a difficult question whose answer could be revealing. The "wife" version of Death and Money has been translated and transferred to a Spanish chain letter.
Win-Lose testimonials like Death and Money exploit those who perceive themselves to have received good luck since receipt of the letter. If a gambler wins big at the track after receiving the letter, he may comply to avoid being jinxed his next time out.
We now consider the three traditional testimonials that first appeared in the Lottery24 (L) block of the "DL" and "LD" compound letters of the 1970's. Like the Death and Money testimonial, we have no prior history of these invaders.
Boss Wins Lottery.
This Comply-Win testimonial provided the first mention of a
lottery in an English language letter.
Constantine Diso received the chain in 1953. He asked his secretary to make 24 copies and send them. A few days later, he won the lottery of 2 million dollars in his country. [1974]Many state sponsored lotteries began in the United States in the 1970's, the same decade in which Lottery24 became an established chain letter (in combination with Death20). In 1975 twelve states (all Eastern) had lotteries, three of them starting that year (US News). Canada already had the Quebec lottery. But in Latin America publicly sponsored lotteries had existed continuously since Spanish colonial times. Thus Boss Wins Lottery was "pre-adapted" to the new gambling environment in the United States. Gamblers are notoriously superstitious, lottery players included. A recent edition of Books in Print, under the subject "lottery," listed about 50 books on how to pick lottery numbers, none of them of any more utility than complying with a luck chain letter. The time gap between purchase of a lottery ticket and the drawing favors the replication of chain letters received during this time. A larger and less geographically biased sample of chain letters than we now possess could be used to test if luck chain letters circulated in larger numbers in lottery states.
The above phrase "in his country," apparently an early North American addition, disappeared in the 1980's, thus allowing the recipient to believe the lottery was won in his own region. However this deletion was first present with some potent innovations (It Works, Kiss, Love) and hence prevailed in part, if not entirely, as a rider. Other changes have been minor, including the more usual "Diaz" for "Diso" and the syncretization to 20 copies.
The so called "sweepstakes" promotions likely also increase chain letter circulation. These are sponsored by American Family Publishers, Publishers Clearance House and other firms. Tens of millions participate in these, hoping to win a fortune. Promotion is by television advertising in conjunction with a direct mail campaign of incredible magnitude - almost all adults in the U.S. get this pitch (1998). Recipients are led to believe that they have already won a huge prize, and that they only need send in an application to receive it. For example, I received a letter from American Family Publishers that displayed through a cellophane window a formal looking document decorated with eagles on each side. It proclaimed:
In addition to its appeal to gamblers, Boss Wins Lottery makes compliance easy for some by suggesting they have a secretary prepare and distribute copies. And it assures them that the good luck still belongs to the boss. This testimonial, and the next one I discuss, show that Lottery24 was well adapted to an office environment.
Lost Job - Better Job.
The following Lose-Win testimonial appears after Boss Wins
Lottery on Lottery24.
From the above scenario, we see that Boss Wins Lottery and Lost Job - Better Job function together in dealing with an office environment. The concerns of both supervisors and subordinates are dealt with by example. Just as quota 20 first appeared in the U.S. in association with Death and Money, perhaps copy quota 24 first developed in Latin America in association with these complementary office testimonials.
The Unbeliever's Death.
After the Lost Job - Better Job story we usually find the
following "Lose" testimonial:
Car.
The following Lose-Win testimonial first appeared around 1988 on
DL letters with the Love title. Thus it is not a traditional
part of the Lottery24 block, but is usually formatted continuous
with it.
In 1967 the letter was received by a young woman in California; it was faded and barely legible. She put it aside to do later. She was plagued with various problems, including expensive car repairs. The letter had not left her hands within 96 hours. She finally typed the letter and, as promised, got a new car. [1988]Here "1987" ( instead of "1967") is the usual reading, and may well be the year of the first appearance of this testimonial. Within a year, all DL letters titled "With Love . . . " bore this testimonial. However the Kiss clade continued without it. Variations of the testimonial are incidental, arising mainly from botching the compound sentences. Car has appeared on over a half a billion letters since its debut.
I have mentioned the image degeneration that results from successive photocopying. In my experiments, after 15 generations (all with the same photocopier) there was significant loss of legibility. However, more recently, packets of forwarding letters with the Media chain letter are often legible after 25 or more generations (different photocopiers). In any case, contemporary chain letters are creatures of photocopying, and they must be retyped from time to time. This testimonial is the only one we have seen that explicitly encourages retyping. Evidence that it succeeds in this is present on a DL letter from 1995, which adds to the Car testimonial: "I have retyped it again today in 1995." Another letter gives 20 alleged retype dates, including ten just in the year 1992 [1995]. Presumably, the propagative success of Car is due to this more frequent retyping. Similar letters without it would more often become partially illegible, and therefore more likely to be discarded, or to be retyped with fatal mutations. With a larger sample I could test this by comparing image quality of Love titled letters with and without Car. Our present sample is inconclusive on this.
Though less appealing theoretically, the most effective feature of this testimonial may be its use of the automobile. If someone holds the letter past the deadline, there is a fair chance they too may be "plagued with various problems, including expensive car repairs." Car repairs often occur unexpectedly, always seemingly at the worst time, thus evoking the specter of bad luck. Like any Lose-Win testimonial, Car implies that no matter how late you may be, compliance will turn bad luck to good. By using car trouble as its example of bad luck, this testimonial may be particularly effective in activating late compliance.
Further, for many the desire for a new car is greater than their respect for reason. Suppose John Doe plays the lottery. Then likely he has already given careful consideration to which vehicles he will purchase after winning. The Car testimonial, in its original form, is clever in not specifying how the young woman gets a new car. She may win it, or win the money to buy it, or perhaps receive it as a gift from a man she is to meet. Thus this testimonial may activate compliance by interacting with the fantasies of lottery players and others.
Notes that one has retyped a chain letter occasionally appear as postscripts. This appears on a Brill parody letter:
< Start
of above section <
Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
3-7 EFFECTIVE COPYING
Faithful copying Send out the Clones
Self-correcting
text Copy quotas
Copy First
versus Copy Later
Faithful
copying.
Successful replication of a chain letter requires copies be
legible, accurate and complete. I examined in the last section
how the Car testimonial suggests retyping, and thus upgrades the
legibility of a photocopied chain that contains this
testimonial. The following instructions also promote faithful
copying of text.
P = 20 + 20r1 + 20r2 + . . . + 20r13 = 20[r14- 1] / [r-1]where r is the weekly rate of growth. I have used a familiar formula to sum the powers of r. For the hyper-competitive r = 1.2 this gives P = 1,184 total letters. These constitute a clone group with founder the initial letter containing the innovation. Of course some early photocopies may have misalignment deletions, or someone may retype long before the thirteen generation. These events will lower the number of clones. But most photocopies are perfectly legible after 15 or more generations, and a retype may be a clone (this then producing hundreds of more clones). So a rough approximation of a thousand clones seems reasonable. If we lower the weekly rate of growth to r = 1.1 we still estimate 560 clones.
Names and numbers are usually highly variable on chain letters because if partly illegible there is no context for the copier to infer the correct form. But as they vary they may at some time assume a form that allows the whole to be reconstructed from a part. I call such text self-correcting. Consider:
Names may also be self-correcting, as by widespread familiarity.
Mr. Owen, from Sordt (Victoria), won the first prize of the Michigan lottery, 1,200,000 ... [Switzerland, 1928, translated French]Here the word "Victoria" is internationally well known, and likely to be recognized even if sloppy handwriting makes a few of its letters illegible. Copying errors have severely altered the first names of the lottery winner - rather amusingly when comparing the second example above to the third. Yet amid this corruption the name "Victoria" survives untouched, except for the last example where the "F" for "V" looks like a typing error, possibly even by the Berkeley Daily Gazette which published the chain letter.
Mr. DeAlverdyde Cuiba de Victoria, six days after, did obtain the first prize of 26,000 pesetas at Michaelbaum. [Indiana, 1930]
Mr. Deasespyde Gubiaco Victoria, eight day he did obtain the first prize in the National Lottery [Pennsylvania, 1930]
Mrs. Barnes of Victoria won the big prize in lottery of 20,000 golden liras on the ninth day. [Florida, 1931]
Mr. Haress of Victoria on the ninth day won the big prize of 200,000 lire. [New York, 1933]
Mr. Brown of Fictoria won $250 on the ninth day. [California, 1934]
Below is a list of variations on the name of the victim in the Unbeliever's Death testimonial.
Zarin Berrachille [1973],
Zerin Berreskilli, Zarin Rurreasville
Zorin Barrachilli, Zerij , Berreskilli Caren Wichile, Zerim
Berreball
Zarin Borracbilt [1975],
Brian Barbialle, Brian Barabiaila
Dalin Nairchild [1979],
Colin Holschild, Darinn Meirchild,
Dalan Fairchild (Kiss-Love
founder) [1983],
Darin Hairchild, Dolon Fairchild
I pause here to note that the family name "Fairchild" is self-correcting since it is a compound of two familiar English words and a familiar name. Fairchild predominated from 1983 onward. I designate it by "F" below, and continue with the tortuous transformations of the first name, which never settled.
Dalon F, Delan F, Sobon F, Dalah F, Dallan
F, Davan F, Galan Pairchild
Bolan F, Blaine F, Olean Lauchild, Dales F, Dallas F, Galan
Paircheild
Dian F, Dilan F, Daln F, Darlene F, David F, Delri F, Mr.
Fairchild
Deian F, Delea F, Dala F, Karen F, Nolan Foarohald, Darron F,
Mellisa Horton [1994]
Carl Daddit (name from the prior testimonial, which was
deleted), Colan Fatchild [France, 1997]
Brian Fairchild [2003]
Despite the great initial variation in the family name, and continuing variation of the first name, clearly almost all copiers are trying to get it right. Some are probably working with a highly degenerate photocopy. Perhaps "Fairchild" has more going for it than just self-correction. It is an innocent and virtuous sounding name, yet this seeming virtue offers no protection if one destroys the letter. On a translated Mexican letter: "Isabel Buena lost her copy and lost her life" [1984]. Again the family name is a word in Spanish, and a virtuous one (Buena = good). Such a tactic may boost circulation slightly, but recall that chain letter evolution is characterized by the rise of new variations that eliminate their cousins and establish their incidental features on every letter. If the founder of the Kiss & Love titles [1983] had read "Zarin Rurreasville" instead of something close to "Dalan Fairchild," Zarin would have been everywhere until obliterated by copy errors. And if "Rurreasville" had ever stumbled on a self-correcting form, it would not have been "Fairchild." Self-correcting text does not increase circulation, it only preserves itself from corruption. Its only chance for predominance is to ride a successful innovation, self-correction preserving it where an unfamiliar name would soon disappear in the copying noise. This is how "Fairchild" became near universal - by riding the hyper-competitive Kiss-Love founder and, like a rainbow in a waterfall, transcending chaotic disruption.
The name "Elliot" (as in the Elliot Wins and Loses testimonial) also appears to be self-correcting. This may be due to the scarcity of common surnames that begin with the letters "Ell." Also it seems some letters remain more legible in late generation photocopies than others; upper case "E" for example.
Self-correction applies to most of the text of a chain letter, since there is inherent redundancy in language. Some words and phrases are often corrupted, others rarely. Spoken replicators transform to a more memorable form; written replicators to a more self-correcting form. However, it is difficult to formulate general principles to assess the self-correcting power of any given text. I will rarely make use of self-correction, instead focusing on text whose meaning increases circulation. If there were any analagous phenomenon in biological evolution to "self-correcting text" it would be that certain genes are chemically more durable, more immune from mutation, than others. This seems unlikely.
Copy
quotas.
All known luck chain letters specify a fixed number of copies
that the recipient is directed to produce.
This prayer was sent by Bishop Lawrence, recommending it to be rewritten and sent to nine other persons. [1906]In rough chronological order, we have examples (from various countries) with copy quota: 5,7, 9, 8, 5, 4, 13, 12, 20, 24, 30, 25, 29, and 28. The higher the copy quota, the higher will be the percentage of recipients who immediately discard the letter or who simply pass on the original. But full compliance with a high quota may more than make up for this. Thus for new types, probably the copy quota has adjusted so total circulation is near a maximum. However with time the copy quota becomes a known tradition for the type which rarely changes unless other key changes are also made.
Send this one and 4 others. [U.S., 1929]
Make 12 copies and mail it to your friends. [International, 1949]
Voce deve fazer 24 copias . . . [Brazil, 1994]
Photocopiez la ou copiez en 28 fois. [France, 1995]
Do luck chain letters threaten punishment if you distribute fewer copies than the quota? I have yet to find an example. Often the only implied threat is for "breaking the chain," which could be interpreted as requiring only that one pass on the received letter to avoid bad luck. Partial compliance to the copy quota may account for many distributions. Thus it would probably reduce circulation for a chain letter to explicitly threaten this behavior, since then some may reject the letter entirely as too demanding. Yet it is essential to get recipients to produce the full quota of copies as often as possible. This dilemma has resulted in the survival of chain letters that are ambiguous on this issue. You are told "you must make twenty copies." And after his secretary made twenty copies and sent them out, Constantine Dias won a lottery. But in the same letter, bad luck comes only to those who distribute no copies at all, as in Death and Money where life is lost after one "failed to circulate the letter." An explicit statement of this option appears on a Russian chain letter [Homily, 1990], where just passing it on is considered a "neutral" act.
Copy First versus Copy Later.
So by just passing on the original letter, perhaps one may avoid
bad luck. How many copies must one distribute to get good luck?
Again chain letters are ambiguous; by one reading you need not
distribute a single copy! The contemporary mainline letter is a
compound of two differing folk beliefs or susceptibilities: Copy
First views the work of replication as bringing subsequent
good luck, Copy Later sees the letter as a charm whose
mere receipt brings luck.
COPY FIRST text requires one first distribute copies of the letter before receiving good luck, as if in compensation. "You must make twenty copies . . . and after a few days you will get a surprise." One cannot refuse to send copies just because no luck is received: "For no reason whatsoever should this chain be broken!" However, ambiguously, bad luck may be reversed by late compliance to the letter's demands, as in Lost Job - Better Job.
The Copy First orientation places the recipient subordinate to Fate. Hope for good luck and fear of bad luck are about the only motives for replication. Copy First testimonials are of the Lose, Comply-Win, and Lose-Win structure. Much of the text of Lottery24 is Copy First.
The Copy First structure also appears on other social replicators. Devotional messages have been placed in the classified advertisements of U.S. newspapers for many years. Here is an example (my italics) from the "Religious Announcements" category of The Los Angeles Times (Nov. 25, 1991):
In the Copy Later orientation, one is almost bargaining as an equal with Fate. If no good luck is received in the stated interval, the charm has failed, and perhaps no copies need be distributed. If luck is delivered, the motives for replication now include gratitude and benevolent transmission of the charm to another. Hope and fear are less active, though not absent. The great taboo is to receive luck but then neglect your side of the bargain and fail to distribute the letter. You may lose what you received: "Don Elliot received $60,000 but lost it because he broke the chain" - or you may lose much more " . . . before his death, he received $775,000 which he had won." Copy Later testimonials are of the Win and Win-Lose type. The notion of simply passing on the original letter to avoid misfortune is associated with the Copy Later belief (as expressed by Boris Pasternak in 1959, see also lr1990). The chain is a chain of benevolence, not of fear. Equity is maintained by granting it to one more person. In the Death and Money testimonial a life is lost after General Walsh "failed to circulate the prayer (letter)." But this is not punishment solely for not complying, rather it is for not complying after receiving a large sum of money. Thus the letter grants luck by mere receipt, but exacts a dreadful toll from ingrates who do not then pass it on. This view of chain letter magic is outside the mindset of some revisers. Two letters collected by folklorist Paul Smith modify Death and Money to read: "Before her death he received $7,775.00 after circulating it just prior" [England, 1992]. This attempts to cast the events in a Copy First frame, but implies the wife died despite prior circulation of the letter. A North American revision fails in the same way [1991].
Other social replicators display the Copy Later structure. The following example (my italics) was published in The Los Angeles Times classifieds (Feb. 7, 1990):
Copy First and Copy Later may not be folk beliefs, but rather susceptibilities to one or the other side in a branching that naturally develops when supernatural promises compete for replication. A currency chain is a short message on paper money that encourages the reader to copy it on other bills (Olbrys). These varied replicators have appeared on U.S. bills for several years. Here are two examples:
Anyone that receives this bill will be blessed with lots of money. Then write this on ten other bills. (U.S., $10 bill, June 1998)
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3-8 Effective Distribution
Targeted distribution
Deadlines
The manner in which chain letters are distributed may significantly affect circulation, but chain letters have little to say about it. Mainline letters have always just said to "send" the copies. In practice they are sent by mail, placed in work mail slots or left where they will be found, such as on car windshields or desks. In Brazil they may be left in elevators and on doorsteps. When a choice of recipients can be made, the persons selected obviously will affect the number of second generation copies produced. Chain letters have evolved instructions for this choice that probably work better than anything a mere mortal could devise.
Targeted distribution.
By targeted distribution I mean any preference or
exclusion in the selection of recipients. Chain letters usually
have something to say about targeting. The most common
recommendation is "send these to your friends" [1902]. This
may seem of little help to circulation, but note that at the
least it discourages sending to a celebrity - an almost sure
waste of a copy. The next major innovation in mainline letters
appears on Good Luck: "Copy this out and send to nine people
whom you wish good luck" [1922]. Though
this opens the door to celebrity distributions, it may also
target people who need good luck. During the Great Depression "whom
you wish good luck" was changed to "whom you wish
prosperity to" [1933].
During the perils of World War II "prosperity" changed
back to "luck" [1944]. With
the Death20 letter this was improved to read ". . . to
friends you think need good luck" [1959]. With this
targeting the chain letter will seek out those in a desperate
situation and who are thus more vulnerable to its promises and
threats. But some recipients may give up on the letter if they
have fewer than twenty friends. On the It Works innovation of
1979 "friends" has changed to "people," giving
the current and stable reading "Send copies to people you
think need luck" [1997].
The Lottery block originally stated: " . . . send it to your friends, parents or acquaintances." With new titles in 1983, "parents" was deleted, and "friends and associates" now appears (> Section 4-6). The classroom Romance Game addresses girls, so "Send this to 7 people, no boys" [1998]. There is, however, an Internet version that is genderless [e1995]. The same letter also specified "You can't send it to the original person" meaning the sender. Others chains specify the copies are to be sent to "diferentes personas" [1980]. When a list of prior senders is present this by itself aids in effective targeting since one may avoid sending a copy to any of these people. This may be explicitly instructed: "Important: Do not address your letter to persons already on the list" [International, 1949].
I should emphasize again that evidence from the dated collection shows that chain letters do NOT evolve by a series of small (secondary) improvements. Instead, a killer variation comes along every few years, swamps all its rivals, and universal details are set by what was linked to it. But small improvements can still accumulate for reasons previously discussed (< in Section 3-3).
All the above targeting instructions likely increase circulation over no suggestion at all. However, the following, which appeared on a luck chain letter, seems counter-replicative: "Limited to Masons" [1954]. A similar restriction arose in the course of the Springfield, Missouri pyramid craze (1935), and during World War I the Ancient Prayer split into specialized versions that circulated within various fraternal organizations (NYT, 1917). The Send-a-Dime craze manifested letters that were restricted to people with last name "Smith," another for "Johnson" (DP, 1935). This "over-specialization" phenomenon probably arises when there is a chain letter boom and a recipient has many versions to choose from. One which then makes a personalized appeal may be chosen over others. But this is a recipe for extinction since targeted groups will be the first to overdose on the letter. The last three examples of over-specialization were definitely during chain letter booms; perhaps "Limited to Masons" is evidence that there was a luck chain boom around 1954, soon after the innovations of the Luck by Mail type appeared.
In Section 2.2 I listed Circumnavigation as a near universal feature on luck chain letters and later gave three examples. Here are some more.
This prayer was sent to me and must be sent all over the world. [1912]What replicative advantage does this "Circumnavigation" device bestow? Is it merely a tradition whose only advantage to propagation may be that it gives the letter an appearance of respectable longevity? This does not explain the success of the early forms of Circumnavigation, beginning around 1910, though it may have some validity in recent decades. I propose that these statements influence targeting, resulting in more copies being sent to distant places. Chain letter versions that bore this device were less likely to die off in an immunized local population. They were more likely to take hold in foreign countries. This device is comparable to the hooks and parachutes present on some seeds. Awareness of this need for dispersion appears on two composed advocacy chain letters from the beginning of the 20th century.
The chain was started by an American Officer and should go three times around the world. [1922]
Prayer of Safety must go all over the world by card. [Postcard, 1941]
It has been around the world four times. [1944]
Since this chain must make a tour of the world, . . . [Lottery24 block, 1974]
This was sent by a priest from Columbia around the world . . .
This started in Malabon and spread throughout the world. [Mexico / Philippines / U.S., 1984]
Cette chaine a fait 7 fois le tour de la terre. [France, 1995]
I furthermore pledge myself to make at least two copies of this letter, and mail one copy to some sister in the State in which I reside and the other copy to some sister in some other State. [Aug. 1900]The 1905 letter had been circulating for around four years, and according to a number present, had gone through 209 generations! An early version does not have the dispersion request [Dec. 1901].
It would be advisable to send one to a nearby friend and the others to friends as far away as possible, in order to send the plan broadcast. [Oct. 1905]
Deadlines.
Chain letter events in the 20th century reveal that for
propagative success it is not enough merely to reproduce in
quantity - it must also be done quickly. Repeatedly a new
variation will flood potential senders, thus starving out
competing variations for the attention, energy and respect
needed for compliance.
The following four quotes reveal the development of deadlines on American chain letters.
(1) "If you will help, please make two copies of this letter and soon as possible ..." [1888]
(2) ". . . he who will write it for nine days, commencing the day received, . . ., and sending one each day . . ." [1908]
(3) Do it within twenty-four hours and count nine days and you will have some great good fortune. [1922]
(4) Copy this and send it within 24 hours to four persons you wish good luck. [1927]
Example (1) is from an early charity letter that solicited a dollar to help the campaign of Benjamin Harrison for President of the United States. It expresses a need for haste, but the history of chain letters reveals that specificity works best, whether it is in requesting multiple copies or rapid execution. No charity letters in the archive state a deadline. In (2), the Ancient Prayer method of a copy a day is prescribed. Most examples of this prolific type ask that this be done for nine days, as in a Roman Catholic Novena devotion. An implicit deadline is set by asking that this copying commence on the day the letter is received. On (3), a Good Luck chain letter, we find a pure deadline of 24 hours to complete nine copies. The nine day period is retained by asking it be counted out in expectation of some benefit. This could suggest to Catholic readers that the letter is still in the domain of a Novena. In example (4), from a Flanders luck chain letter, all trace of a daily duty is abandoned.
Can one still receive good luck, or escape bad luck, by distributing copies after the deadline? The answer is a clear "maybe." Considering first the "Copy Later" Death20 block, the only explicit deadline statement is "Do not keep this letter. It must leave your hands within 96 hours." As noted above, this seems like you only need to pass on the original. And there is no mention of someone suffering misfortune on the fourth day after receipt. Examining the "Copy First" Lottery24 block, there is no explicit deadline statement. Nine days seems to be the implied deadline, judging from Lost Job - Better Job and the promise of a "surprise" in nine days. Thus again, it appears ambiguity is the optimal policy. The letter needs to encourage promptness and does so with a deadline and accounts of bad luck for tardiness: at the same time it needs to encourage late compliance and does this with a Lose-Win testimonial.
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Typical Send-a-Dime money chain letter, this mailed May 8,
1935 in Beaumont, Texas. Archive item 1935.
4-1 THE ORIGIN OF MONEY CHAIN LETTERS (1922
- 1935)
[Photo purchased on eBay. Attached text reads: "Springfield, MO. - It was a Pot of Gold for some while it lasted. Scene is in a garage in Springfield, during the height of a "get rich quick" spree where speculators bought letters for $5.00 each and sold two copies for $5.00 each, keeping one five. This craze soon failed for lack of buyers but the gains to some of the participants attracted nation-wide attention while it lasted. Those who made sure money were the notary publics, who charged from ten cents to fifty cents per letter to notarize them. Note at right center of table man with money in hand and notary public with stamp." Further text is torn away. Scheme may be described wrong on this note - probably it was the Springfield type as described above.]
Money chain letters have greatly diversified since 1935 and many billions have been mailed worldwide. I have collected examples from England that are derived from the American Send-a-Dime letter. These ask for a sixpence, bear a list of five names and addresses instead of six, and reassure the reader that there is "no further assessment or catch" to the procedure [1935e1, 1935e2]. A 1988 study describes contemporary letters and attitudes of the "players" (Boles & Myers). Money chain letters have also invaded the Internet in great numbers [2001].
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4-2 DIVERGENCE OF LUCK AND MONEY CHAINS
(1935 - 1939)
Send-a-Dime crash
Identity crisis Identification by
command A Demon
appears
Send-a-Dime crash.
The Send-a-Dime chain letter craze of 1935 peaked in the weeks
after it received its first newspaper coverage (April 19 in
Denver, April 21 in New York). Denver restaurant owner A.
McVittie received 2,363 copies in two days (April 27).
However, by May 28 the New York Times was reporting
"Chain-letter fad on wane." Hopes to make money using
Send-a-Dime quickly collapsed and the letters became a public
nuisance. Parodies circulated that mocked the process and
expressed intimidating hostility to senders [1935]. Despite the
subsequent long term survival of money chain letters, surely
there came a time in the mid 1930's when chain letters were
quickly discarded with little examination.
Identity
crisis.
While money chain letters were being contemptuously discarded by
the millions, what was happening to the prevailing Prosperity
luck chain letters? Many must have suffered the same fate since
they looked so much like Send-a-Dime. After all, Send-a-Dime was
modeled on one of them, with the leading list of six names. Here
is a challenge for you: for a luck chain letter to survive then,
how could it convincingly distinguish itself from the reviled
and illegal Send-a-Dime money chain letters?
Identification by command.
You may suggest a prominent disclaimer. But money chain letters
often claim that they are not a chain letter [1978].
Probably from thousands of variations there appeared "Do not
send money" on a 1939
Flanders-Prosperity type letter. In 1952 an observant reporter,
writing about Send-a-Dime, noted that almost all luck chain
letters had this sentence (Nelson), as all do
now. It mattered little, for replication, whether a recipient
sent money or not. The replicative power of "Do not send
money" resided in its distinguishing the letter it was on
from a money chain. What other sentence could so decisively
inform a reader that the letter in hand did not ask for money?
This use of a command for identification is a striking
example of the creativity of the folk process. The contents of a
traditional chain letter are not understood by their literal
meaning, but by their affect on circulation.
Once "Do not send money" predominated on luck chain letters, they could not nourish hope of bringing in money by some rational means. And the author of Send-a-Dime, the fabulous Jane Doe, had removed all mention of good luck or bad luck, and removed all testimonials. Thus luck chain letters and money chain letters parted ways, and since this splitting of the motivational stream they have radically diverged. Testimonials would re-appear on money chain letters, but instead of third person tales of good and bad luck we now see first person fictions of riches gained. No luck is involved in these stories - getting rich allegedly follows by cause and effect if you obey the instructions.
A
Demon Appears.
A discovery in 2003 reveals that there was an early experiment
(1936?) in asking for money and threatening bad luck for
noncompliance. The following "actual letter found among some
mementos" appeared in the March 1977 issue of the nostalgia
magazine Good Old Days (Esther Norman, 1977).
The initial list of five names and addresses was not published.
THE GOOD LUCK CHAINThis is a fairly typical Send-a-Dime letter except that a good luck paragraph and a bad luck paragraph have been added (in italics above). The good luck paragraph may be an edited version of testimonials circulating at the time on a Prosperity type letter [compare to 1933]. The bad luck paragraph appears to be a composed list designed to frighten a representative variety of downline recipients into sending a dime. None of these testimonials mention a name, nor do they bear the win-lose or lose-win structure of the more memorable testimonials that first appeared during the 1940's and 50's. An undated money chain letter also received by Esther Norman [1935u] contains some similar rewrites as above. All the Send-a-Dime physical copies I have collected, over 34, were mailed between May 5, 1935 and the close of that year. None of these have any threats or negative testimonials, nor have I found any other published example, so far. This demonstrates that the Send-a-Dime letter, at least in its beginning, abandoned the appeal to good and bad luck. But it should not be too surprising that eventually money chain letters appeared, by design or by naive hybridization, that threatened bad luck for breaking the chain. There is a newspaper account from 1937 that claimed "dime chain letters ... often gave nasty warnings of disaster to anyone who might contemplate breaking the chain" (Pittsburgh).Dear Friend:
This chain was started in the hope of bringing good luck to you. WITHIN THREE DAYS, make five (5) copies of this letter, leaving off the top name and address and add your name and address at the bottom of the list. Remember, faith, hope and charity!
Mail or give these five copies to five of your friends or relatives to whom you wish good luck and prosperity to come. Be careful to choose friends who are reliable and dependable and who will be certain to keep the chain unbroken.
An Army officer received $5,000 from sending out the letters. A housewife received $3,000 and a high school student received $1,000, so you can see that it pays off.
Send 10c to the top name on the list, the one that you omitted. Wrap it carefully in paper, put it in an envelope, enclosing nothing else, as a charity donation. In turn, as your name reaches the top, you will begin receiving hundreds of dimes.
Beware! If you break the chain you will have bad luck. One woman was in a car accident when she broke the chain. Another woman was sued for divorce. A man lost his job. A high school student failed to pass in three subjects. Bad luck will follow you if you break the chain!
Send your five letters today! Pick good friends you can trust! The dimes will begin arriving if you do. [1936uu]
But could such a chain letter long survive, and if so, what might it evolve toward? Surely the most malignant combination of the many motivations for complying with a chain letter is the joining of money with fear. A grim evolutionary potential of a such a letter is extortion, real or simulated. An internet informant told me (1996) that a hundred quota money chain letter existed in India that, as they recalled, contained bad luck warnings against breaking the chain. And there is the curious suicide of Cecil Headlee, 39, who "shot and killed himself because he thought 'a mob was going to get him for breaking the chain' " (DP, 1935). This brief account does not tell us what type of chain letter was involved, but considering the early date, May 15, 1935, probably the fear came from Mr. Headlee's head, rather than through the mails. But there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the Norman letter given above, and thus likely threatening versions did circulate. However I suspect these would have been brought to the attention of the postal inspectors. A "send money or die" letter would surely have concerned them, and thus any such demon may have been squashed as it emerged from its egg.
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4-3 LUCK FOLLOWS MONEY (1949)
Money Influences Follow-up letters Design or
Self-organization?
Though luck and money chain letters diverged in
content after the 1935 Send-a-Dime craze, some features have
appeared in luck chain letters that may have had special appeal
to people involved with money chain letters.
Money
Influences.
Consider the following three lines of text from our standard
example of the Luck By Mail type - the 1952
chain letter published by Herbert Halpert.
(1) "Send this copy and four to someone you wish good luck."
(2) "Gen Patton received $1,600 after receiving it. Gen Allen received $1,600 ..."
(3) "... you will receive by mail."
Note the copy quota is five, which should not surprise us since this had been the quota on the vast majority of luck chain letters since before 1930. However I mention it here to point out that the Send-a-Dime money chain letter also had quota five - which is understandable since it copied key features of a luck chain letter. [1933] Next, note that the two generals each received $1,600. This is very close to the maximum amount that appears on Send-a-Dime, namely $1,562.50. But this amount appears only on this one Luck by Mail example in the archive. Almost all the other amounts are much higher, more like what the maximum would be for a "Send-a-Dollar" letter. Finally, the defining characteristic of the Luck by Mail type, including this 1952 example, is the prediction that the luck (money) will come in the mail, just as it was claimed to have come to the Generals.
Money letters setting higher antes probably
followed transmission paths of Send-a-Dime in 1935. In 1978, the
$1000 ante pyramid scheme
"Circle of Abundance" followed the earlier $100 ante "Circle of
Gold" (Marks 1978). It
is easy to see why this happened. Pyramid schemes are illegal
and flow along social contacts in the early going. Thus the
lower ante Circle of Gold established a tree of trusted prior
participants that was available to the same initial "circle" for
the higher ante next round. Of course this second tree was
pruned of all those who lost money in the first round. There may
also have been a documented attempt to boost the Circle of Gold
scheme by utilizing a circulating luck chain letter. On a
prevalent Death-Lottery example, this is a final postscript: "May
you continue to be encircled in gold." This is added to a
published letter which has no date, but by its content I
estimate to be around 1980, during which
Circle of Gold was still active in some states.
By 1952, the paths of prior money letters had left loosely connected transmission networks totaling perhaps 10 million people, some links going back to 1935. The Halpert letter, and variants, may have surged through these networks, also spinning off letters into the general public in sufficient quantity to kill off all its luck chain letter cousins by immunization.
Symbiotic distribution occurs if for two replicators within a network of transmission, the receipt of one favors the replication of the other. Quota five (Luck by Mail) and quota twenty letters (Death20) circulated simultaneously from 1959 to 1967 (< Table 2). Perhaps this was possible because of niche differentiation. Luck by Mail (quota five) may have been a symbiotic resident within the old money chain network, while Death20 was establishing itself among office workers and professionals.Design or Self-organization?
Apart from suggestive bits of text, there is no other direct
evidence that luck chain letters ever followed money chain
letters. If we had all the chain letters received by fifty
people over the years, then by examining postmarks the
phenomenon might be confirmed. Even if this symbiotic
distribution could be proved, that does not prove someone
deliberately modified a luck chain letter to serve as a
follow-up to a money letter. For if among the thousands of
variations present in the chain letter population, some happen
to appeal more to money chain letter players, then these will
proliferate in the money chain transmission networks. Thus it is
difficult to decide if some features are the product of
calculating human design, or the product of selection from a
vast pool of accidental or uncalculated variations.
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4-4 THE MEDIA CHAIN LETTER (1948 - 1998)
(1) Luck Chain Letter
(2) Food for
Thought (3) Food for Thought
& Gene Sarazen
(4) Food
for Thought & Gene Sarazen & Luck Chain Letter
(5) Cover
Letters and Luck Chain Letter (The Media Chain
Letter)
(6) Lucky Frog
& Luck Chain Letter
In this section the origin of the "Media Chain
Letter" is described in detail. Many famous people participated
in this chain letter around 1990. Its complex history involved
hyper-competitive innovations, major deletions, and migrations
to new genres. At one phase of its development, two traditions
of text copying were joined together: a mainline luck chain
letter was placed at the bottom of an office humor item. Since some
of the text on the chain letter goes back to the beginning of
the twentieth century, I will start with that.
Luck
Chain Letter (LCL)
The "Luck by Mail" type of chain letter developed a few
years after the end of World War II and dominated
circulation on up through most of the 1960's. Toward the end
of that decade someone received such a letter and kept it
for a few years. It may have read somewhat like the
following example which was received by William F. Hansen in
1967.
The original copy of this letter came from the Netherlands. The luck of it has been around the world four times (sent by U.S. Officers). The one who breaks this chain will have bad luck.
Please copy this and see what happens to you in four days after you receive it.Do not send money and do not keep this copy. Send it and four others to people whom you wish good luck.
It must leave your home twenty-four hours after you receive it. General Ashton received $6,000.00 only to lose it after breaking the chain.You are to have good luck after receiving this. This is not a joke. You will receive it by mail.
Insert your name at the bottom of this list, leaving off the top name.
[list of 24 names omitted] [1967]
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
In 1923, a group of the world's most successful financiers met at the Edgewater Beach hotel in Chicago. Present were:
The president of the largest independent steel company.
The president of the largest independent steel company.
The president of the largest utility company.
The greatest wheat speculator.
The president of the New York Stock Exchange.
A member of three President's cabinet.
The greatest "bear" in Wall Street.
The president of the International Settlements
The head of the world's greatest monopoly.
Collectively, these tycoons controlled more wealth than there was in the United Sates Treasury, and for years newspapers and magazines had been printing their success stories and urging the youth of the nation to follow their examples. Twenty-five years later, lets see what happened to these men.
The president of the largest independent steel company - Charles Schwab - lived on borrowed money the last five years of his life.
The greatest wheat speculator - Arthur Cutten - died abroad, insolvent.
The president of the New York Stock Exchange - Richard Whitney - was recently released from Sing Sing.
The member of the President's cabinet - Albert Fall - was pardoned from prison so he could die at home.
The greatest "bear" in Wall Street - Jesse Livermore - committed suicide.
The president of the Bank of International Settlement - Leon Fraser - committed suicide.
The head of the world's greatest monopoly - Ivar Kreuger - committed suicide.
All of these men had learned how to make money, but not one of them had learned how to live. [1948]
Scores of published examples of "Food for
Thought" appear when one searches newspapers.com using "greatest
wheat speculator". Many are identical to that given above
from the Billy Rose column. Other syndicated columnists, such as
Norman Vincent Peale, later gave other versions. Some appear
only locally. For example, a minister might use "Food for
Thought" in a newspaper sermon. Variations include alternative
titles, such as "Something to Think About" or "The
Deceitfulness of Riches". The number of tycoons may be reduced, and the conclusion may be
rewritten. If an alleged source is given for FFT, it is
inaccurate and usually not dated. The publisher may have
obtained FFT from other published versions, or received it as an undocumented clipping, or saw it
on a bulletin board.
When an anonymous piece is based on other published versions,
and when it is often changed by a publisher (e.g. condensed,
rewritten, retitled, etc.), I will call
it a "chain publication". Most Himmelsbrief had such a
publication history well into the 20th century, though they may
not have been changed as often as FFT.
1. President of the largest steel company?
2. President of the largest gas company?
3. President of the New York Stock Exchange?
4. The greatest wheat speculator?
5. President of the Bank of International Settlement?
6. The great Bear of Wall Street?
These men should be considered some of the world's most successful men, at least they found the secret of making money. Now more than 65 years later, do you know what became of these men?
1. The president of the largest steel
company, Schwab, died a pauper.
2. The president of the largest gas company, Howard Hopson,
is insane.
3. The president of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard
Whitney, was released from prison to die at home.
4. The greatest wheat speculator, Arthur Cooper, died
abroad, insolvent.
5. The president of the Bank of International Settlement
shot himself.
6. The great Bear of Wall Street, Mr. C. Riverhore,
committed suicide.
That same year, 1923, the winner of the most important golf championship, Gene Sarazen, won the U.S. open and PGA Tournament. Today he is still playing and he's solvent.
Conclusion: Stop worrying about business and play golf!!!!
This letter originated in the Netherlands, and has been passed around the world at least 20 times, bringing good luck to everyone who passed it on. The one who breaks the chain will have bad luck. Do not keep this letter. Do not send money. Just have a wonderful, efficient secretary make four additional copies and send it to five of your friends to whom you wish good luck. You will see that something good happens to you four days from now if this chain is not broken. This is not a joke. You will receive good luck in four days.Golfer Gene Sarazen died in 1999 at age 97. On this 1988 example there are now only six ill-fated tycoons, instead of eight as in the 1948 FFT. The symbiont chain letter does not have the negative testimonial and list of names that appeared in the 1972 chain letter given above. It had become a living fossil, surviving only in the mutually beneficial relationship with the FFT+GS office humor item. In 1972 the only luck chain letter independently circulating demanded 20 copies and had a death threat - clearly it was not appropriate to take the place of the symbiont LCL. Notice that the wording of the instructions to make five copies in LCL has become more flattering to the secretary: "Just have a wonderful, efficient secretary make four additional copies and send it to five of your friends to whom you wish good luck." In 1988 no one could have predicted that in just two years this obsolete chain letter would circulate by itself with a stack of cover letters from the rich and famous.
Many of the names on the cover letters were so
well known that the packet of these with the chain letter was called: "The Media Chain Letter" (Joseph Nocera, New Republic,
Nov. 12, 1990); "The Chain Letter of the Rich and Famous"
(Diedre Fanning, New
York Times, Oct. 7, 1990); and "The VIP Chain
Letter" (Charlie Clark, Washington Post,
Nov. 16, 1991). The oldest example
of the Media Chain Letter in the archive contains many names of
celebrities and executives in the entertainment industry [1990]. But
the oldest cover letter in the stack was sent by Pierre
Salinger, former Press Secretary for President Kennedy. For
narrative convenience, I assume that the celebrity attributions
are reliable. However it should be kept in mind that the
signatures present are all corrupted photocopies and hence
unverifiable. Another Media Chain Letter bundle [1990]
circulated in American real estate and investment firms, crossed
over the Atlantic, and returned. Many comments are musings on
the utility of good luck. "Some of us in the securities and
real estate businesses forgot that it's better to be lucky
than smart." Another theme, common in published reports on
the Media Chain, is admission of fear of bad luck. "A man
will do anything out of fear" (Newspaper editor). Most
reporters accepted these comments at face value: "Media Barons
Knuckle Under Superstition" (AP headline, Aug. 29, 1990). But
some observers noted social reasons for the letter's success.
1. Identification with celebrity. "The real reason behind the letter's success, of course, is not fear, but the thrill of having written certification that, yes, indeed, you do belong to the inner circle" (Esquire, Dec. 1990). "It's more a kind of media status game, filled with unseemly overtones of see-how-famous-my-friends-are" (Joseph Nocera, New Republic, Nov. 12, 1990). If one receives the letter from a high status person, one can boast of this association by sending out the chain with the prior cover letter. The chain letter states "send it to five of your friends," and the forwarding letters prominently display the five recipients. Little status is gained by having sent the letter to someone of much higher status than oneself.
2. Exercise of wit. "These accompanying documents, most recipients admit, are what prompts them to play the game and write their own 'I can't believe I'm doing this' notes, as they pass the letter on" (Kathleen Hendrix, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1991). Almost all of the comments on forwarding letters attempt humor, and the early self-deprecation theme is often carried forward. "Tell me why I am doing this" (Feb. 1991). "The name for this is idiocy. But hopefully not many will know" (May 1991). Growing lists of thematic humor also appear as graffiti, photocopied office humor, and E-mail chains [e1996].
From its initial circulation in the entertainment and publishing industries, the Media Chain Letter soon migrated to other industries and other countries. But within a packet of letterheads you see a preference to distribute locally and along lines of professional contact, for example among Canadian legislators, or London architects and surveyors. Often prestigious titles appear on the letterheads. In response are comments like: "With sponsors like this - pass it on" (Canadian Govt. official, Feb. 1991), or "Think of it this way, there could be a good new business contact amongst this lot" (UK Architect, March 1991). The display of association with high status individuals was the primary motive for replicating the Media Chain Letter. Confessions of superstitious motivation were mostly dissembled covers of this status display, disapproval of superstition being deflected by self deprecating humor. The chain letter became a mere instructional appendage to its packet of forwarding letters.
Status motives were present with other chain letters. Many copies of the Good Luck chain contained long lists of "X to Y," so that if you are Y, any downline recipient can conclude that X knows you [1922]. A striking later example has 113 different names. These start out with Japanese naval officers, phase into a European venue, and half way through shift to silent film celebrities such as Sid Graumann, Harold Lloyd and Mac Sennet [1926]. The half serious 1979 Brill chain [1979] had no real threat but many entertainment industry stars in its list of prior senders. Perhaps many of the listed celebrities never actually sent out the Good Luck or Brill letters. But forwarding letters with the Media chain were on corporate stationery and usually signed, thus providing a more convincing display for identification with celebrity.
The Media Chain Letter continued to progress through hierarchies for several years. A note in the British Medical Journal (March 25, 1995) complained of its "wad of memos." Infected organizations included the Ministry of Defence, the Metropolitan Police and the National Health Service. Like chickenpox, the Media chain letter is usually a one-time infection, leaving a trail of immunity. As the paper form of this chain letter worked out its extinction, the text crossed over into the vast new territory of the Internet.
Lucky
Frog & Luck Chain Letter
Though I have not located an example, probably sometime in the early 1990's FFT+GS+LCL was digitized and transmitted via E-mail. Many photocopied office humor items have also crossed over to the Internet. A July 1993 chain E-mail consists of a series of ironic questions, later versions of which are titled "Why ask why?" By mid 1995 this item had been pasted on the beginning of FFT+GS+LCL [e1995]. Since then the symbiont chain letter has been attached to other email jokes, including "The Gift" [e1995-12], and "The Lucky Frog":
READ THIS MESSAGE AND PASS IT ON....
A man takes the day off work and decides to go out golfing. He
is on the second hole when he notices a frog sitting next to
the green. He thinks nothing of it and is about to shoot when
he hears, "Ribbit. Nine Iron" The man looks around and doesn't
see anyone. "Ribbit. Nine Iron." He looks at the frog and
decides to prove the frog wrong, puts his other club away, and
grabs a nine iron. Boom! he hits it ten inches from the
cup. He is shocked. He says to the frog, "Wow that's amazing.
You must be a lucky frog, eh?" The frog reply's "Ribbit.
Lucky frog." The man decides to take the frog with him to the
next hole. "What do you think frog?" the man asks. "Ribbit.
Three wood." The guy takes out a three wood and Boom! Hole in
one. The man is befuddled and doesn't know what to say. By the
end of the day, the man golfed the best game of golf in his
life and asks the frog, "OK where to next?" The frog
reply, "Ribbit. Las Vegas." They go to Las Vegas and the guy
says, "OK frog, now what?" The frog says, "Ribbit Roulette."
Upon approaching the roulette table, the man asks," What do
you think I should bet?" The frog replies, "Ribbit. $3000,
black 6." Now, this is a million-to-one shot to win, but after
the golf game, the Man figures what the heck. Boom! Tons of
cash comes sliding back across the table. The man takes his
winnings and buys the best room in the hotel. He sits the frog
down and says, "Frog, I don't know how to repay you. You've
won me all this money and I am forever grateful." The frog
replies, "Ribbit, Kiss Me." He figures why not, since after
all the frog did for him he deserves it. With a kiss, the frog
turns into a gorgeous 15-year-old girl.
"And that, your honor, is how the girl ended up in my room."
The origination of this letter is unknown, but
it brings good luck to everyone who passes it on. The one who
breaks the chain will have bad luck. Do not keep this
letter. Do not send money. Just forward it to five of your
friends to whom you wish good luck. You will see that
something good happens to you four days from now if the chain
is not broken. You will receive good luck in four days. [e1997]
< Start
of above section <
Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
4-5 THE "IT WORKS" CONQUEST
(1979 - 1982)
The rise of
the It Works postscript Table 4 - Occurrences of D, L, LD, DL and
DL variations Inferred Relatedness Using
Text Alternatives
Table 5 - Text Alternatives for Major
DL Subtypes Why did "It Works" work?
In 1979 a certain offhand postscript first
appears on copies of the prevailing luck chain letter. In a few
years it is on all circulating luck chain letters,
millions of them. All the letters without it are gone. I examine
this event in detail.
The rise of the "It Works" postscript.
In the 1970's four structurally related types of luck chain
letters circulated in the US:
The earliest IWP letter in the archive was mailed
anonymously in May 1979 to my California address. It was a
photocopy of a typed letter. Here are the exact keystrokes - the
format has been shortened.
"Trust in the Lord with all your Heart and He will acknowledge
and He will light the way."This prayer has been sent to you for good luck. The original copy is from the NETHERLANDS.It has been around the world nine times.The luck has now been brought to you.You will receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter provided you in turn send it back out. THIS IS NO JOKE... You will receive it in the mail. Send copies of this letter to people you think need good luck. DO NOT SEND MONEY, FOR THE FATE HAS NO PRICE ON IT. Do not keep this letter.... It must leave your hands within 96 hours after you receive it.
An RAF officer received $70,000. Joe Elliott received $4,000,000 and lost it because he broke the chain. While in the Phillipines, General Welch lost his life six days after he received this letter. HE failed to circulate the prayer. However,before his death he received $775,000.Please send out20 copies to see what happens to you on the fourth day. This chain comes from Venezuela and was written by Saul Anthony De Cadif,a missionary from South America. I,myself,now forward it to you.Since this chain must make a tour of the world,you must make 20 copies identical to this one and send it to your friends, parents,or associates. After a few days,you will get a surprise. THIS is true even if you are not superstitious. Take note of the following.
Constattino Dias received the chain in 1953.He asked his secretary to make 20 copies and send them.A few days later he won a lottery for $2,000,000 in his country. Carlo Raditt, an office employee, received the chain.He forgot it and a few days later lost his job.He found the chain letter and sent it to 20 people. Five days later he got an even better job. Dalin Nairchild received the chain and not believing in it threw itaway.Nine days later he died.For no reason what so ever should this chain be broken.
REMEMBER NO MONEY. PLEASE DON'T IGNORE THIS. IT DOES WORK.
MAHALO (THANK-YOU) [1979]
There is much reason to believe that the DL type compound letter was initially formed in the English language. The same is true for the initial appearance of IWP, perhaps months or even a year prior to the above letter. It is unlikely that successive translations into English could have produced the series of letters in the archive. But close translations from the English letters exist in French [1995], Spanish [1996], Polish [1992], Italian and likely many other languages. This itself is evidence that there were no indigenous predecessors in these languages. Descendants also invaded the Internet in nearly word-for-word form, at first still asking for 20 copies. But in this medium the entire postscript was soon deleted and replaced by "You may not sign on this message". [e1994]
The following archive
tabulations document changes in the population of chain letters
around this time using mostly two year intervals. The first four
abbreviations are for the chain letter types listed above. The
next five are for key textual innovations within the DL type.
Table 4. Occurrences of D, L, LD, DL and DL Variations.
D: All Death20 type
letters
L: All Lottery24 type letters (none
collected so far).
LD: All Lottery-Death type letters
DL: All Death-Lottery type letters.
DL-N: Death-Lottery (DL)
letters with a list of names and none of the key
postscripts.
DL-0: DL letters with no list of
names and none of the key postscripts.
DL-1: DL letters concluding with "Do
not send money" or variants.
DL-12: DL letters concluding with "Do not
send money. Please do not ignore this" or variants.
DL-123: DL letters concluding with "Do not send money.
Please do not ignore this. It works" or variants.
Years | D | L | LD | DL |
DL-N | DL-0 | DL-1 | DL-12 | DL-123 | |
1959 - 1971 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|
0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
1972 - 1973 | 2 |
0 | 0 | 1 |
|
1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
1974 - 1975 | 1 | 0 | 13 | 4 |
4 |
0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
1976 - 1977 | 2 |
0 | 0 | 3 |
0 |
3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
1978 - 1979 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7 |
1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 3 | |
1980 - 1981 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8 |
0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8 |
|
1982 - 1983 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 14 |
0 | 0 | 0(a) | 0 | 14 | |
1984 - 2005 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 138 |
0 | 0 | 0 | 0 (b) | 138 |
(a) One letter likely had "Please do not ignore
this - It works" deleted in its ancestry [1982-01]. It is
tabulated as DL-123.
(b) Several letters likely had the two words "It works" deleted
[1984-08]. They are
also tabulated as DL-123.
Inferred Relatedness
Using Text Alternatives
The above counts of
occurrences in the archive establish without doubt that chain
letters bearing IWP captured the gigantic American luck chain
letter niche within a few years of their appearance. But a more
thorough understanding of what happened requires looking at
details on early IWP letters and their predecessors. For
example, note (a) of Table 4 claiming that the letter 1982-01 was likely
an IWP descendent despite its shortened postscript can be
supported. It is sufficient to show its near identity with a
letter bearing IWP in full, and its significant variation from
all DL letters that never bore IWP. Thus we seek identifying
features of the IWP clade - their presence on a chain
letter being very unlikely to have come about by any means other
than copying from another member of the clade.
The following "text alternatives"
table facilitates assessing the relatedness of chain letters
under consideration. Six text alternatives (T1
to T6), listed in the column heads, can be either version A/a or
version B/b for each of 16 selected DL letters listed in the
rows. An "x" in the table means that deletions or other changes
to a letter have nullified the possibility of determining a text
alternative. An apostrophe (single quotation mark) after a text
indicator, say b', designates a variation of b that is not of
significance for the purposes of the table. The chain letters
are grouped by variation, and chronologically ordered within
each variation. First the definitions of the six text
alternatives are set.
The rows of a text alternatives table are condensed descriptions
of parts of chain letters, the alternatives and their names
being selected here to facilitate human judgments on
relatedness. But concatenated strings of these alternative names
could themselves be input to a computer program, such
as the one employed in Bennett,
that calculates a symmetric matrix giving the relatedness of all
pairs of letters in a sample. For this purpose: (1) the text
alternatives should encompass all text in the letter that has
variations in the sample, (2) names of the text alternatives
should be all different, and (3) the number of letters in
these names should correlate with the unliklihood that the
alternative could be independently invented. Then an
evolutionary tree could be constructed, by various methods,
which would not exaggerate the effect on relatedness of long
innovations in a letter.
T1 = a: You will receive good luck within 4
days of receiving this letter.
T1 = B: You will receive good luck within four days of
receiving this letter provided in turn you send it back
out.
Note: When a text alternative, such as T1 = B above, is
deemed to be a feature (very
unlikely to have appeared more than once
without having been copied from an existing letter), it is designated by an upper case
letter.
T2 = a: Send twenty copies
of this letter to people you think need good luck.
T2 = b: Send copies of this letter to
people you think need good luck.
Note: These alternatives are not "features" since they can
easily change a to b, or b to a. But they add some weight to a
conclusion about relatedness.
T3 = a: Please do not send money.
T3 = B: Do not send money, for fate (faith) has no
price on it.
Note: Either "fate" or "faith" may
appear in the added clause.
T4 = a: It must leave you within 96
hours.
T4 = B: It must leave your hands within 96
hours.
Note: In T4 = a, the word "you" may be omitted.
T5 = a: This chain . . . was written by St.
Aptine de Cade . . .
T5 = B: This chain . . . was written by Saul
Anthony De Cadif . . .
T5 = b' This chain . . . was written by Sol (Soul)
Anthony De Cacief . . .
Note: Only the first name (or title) is useful here. The
last names are highly variable.
T6 = a: . . . a missionary from South
America. Since the chain must make a tour . . .
T6 = B: . . . a missionary from South America. I,
myself, now forward it to you. Since the chain must
make a tour...
Note: "I, myself, now forward it to you" was
deleted around 1984 and is absent thereafter on all DL letters.
No. | Chain Letter File Name | Type - Variation
|
T1 | T2 | T3 |
T4 |
T5 |
T6 |
1. |
le1973-11p_dl!_prvrbs_q20n21 |
DL-N |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
2. |
le1974-10_dl_n27 |
DL-N |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
3. |
le1975_dl_n23_a1 |
DL-N |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
4. |
le1977-06-08_dl_fgge_q20 |
DL-0 |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
5. |
le1978-04_dl_q20n0 |
DL-0 |
a |
b |
a |
a |
a |
a |
6. |
le1979-06-21_dl_t_q20n0 |
DL-0 |
a |
b |
a |
a |
a |
a |
7. |
lle1979-01_dl_xmoney(2)_q20 |
DL-1 |
a |
b |
a |
B |
b' |
a |
8. |
le1979-05_dl_tw! |
DL-123 It Does Work |
B |
b |
B |
B |
B |
B |
9. |
le1979-07-30p_dl_w't |
DL-123 It Does Work |
B |
b |
B |
B |
B |
B |
10. |
le1980-12-23_dl_wt_dates |
DL-123 It Works |
B |
b |
B |
B |
B |
B |
11. |
le1981-04_dl_wt |
DL-123 It Does Work |
a |
b |
B |
B |
B |
B |
12. |
le1982-01-28_dl_m_t |
DL-1 (2 & 3
deleted) |
B |
b |
B |
x |
B |
B |
13. |
le1984-08_dl_w't |
DL-12 (3 deleted) |
B |
b |
B |
B |
B |
x |
14. |
le1986-05-08_dl_w-k' |
DL-12
" |
B |
b |
B |
B |
B |
x |
15. |
le1991u_dl_w-(kc)! |
DL-12
" |
B |
b |
B |
B |
B |
x |
16. |
le2004-10_dl_wklc |
DL-123 It Works |
B |
b |
B |
B |
B |
x |
First I use information in Table 5 to justify the
claims in Table 4 that deletions of postscripts have occurred on
letters #12, #13, #14, and #15 (Table 5 designations) . Note
that the earliest DL-123 type letter, #8, introduced the
diagnostic variations T1 = B, T3 = B, and T6 = B. Thus it seems
very unlikely that letter #12 could bear these same B versions
without having copied them from some DL-123 letter. So we
conclude that letter #12 had "Please do not ignore this. It
works" deleted at some time in its ancestry. Similar
reasoning suggests that #13, #14, #15 (and other post 1980 DL-12
letters in the archive) have had the entire IWP deleted, perhaps
because of image expansion or misaligned photocopying. To claim
otherwise would require much independent invention, such as the
diagnostic changes T1 = B and T3 = B, and the name "Saul" (T5 =
B). Later DL-12 letters do not bear the Linkage statement (T6 =
B) that the early DL-123 letters did, but as noted above, T6 = B
disappeared completely around 1984 from all DL letters.
Next I will use Tables 4 & 5 to address some
questions about the IWP capture of the luck chain letter niche.
Question 1: Did the three
parts of IWP appear all at once, or in two or three phases?
It is likely that IWP originated in two phases. First the
postscript "Do not send money" was added to a DL letter. One
descendant of this letter is present in the archive: le1979-01, chain letter #7 in Table 5. This is not a result of
deletions from a DL-123 letter for it contains the variations T1
= a, T3 = a and T6 = a. There is not a single undeleted example
of a DL-12 letter in the archive. Thus it is very likely that
IWP originated in two phases: "Do not send money" and
then "Please do not ignore this. It works." I may
continue to use the symbol "DL-12" to represent letters with
this text, in spite of its ancestry.
Question 2: Was IWP initially placed on just one
circulating letter, or more than one?
Probably just one, because all the many examples collected
except one have the exact same "B" options for T1, T2, T3, T4,
T5 and T6 (or T6 = X). If IWP had been placed on another
circulating letter, very likely some of the features of this
letter would differ from the "B" option. The one exception is 1981-04, a DL-123
letter with T1 = a. But this likely resulted from a deletion of
the added phrase "provided in turn you send it out" (T1 =
B), changing it to T1 = a. This
deletion could have been accidental when retyping, or perhaps
was a deliberate reversion to the more familiar "copy later"
chain letter orthodoxy. In any case, it is hard to imagine why
someone would go to the trouble of adding IWP to multiple
letters. Unlike, say, a Bible verse or "With love all
things are possible", the IWP postscripts have the
look of offhand comments to a friend rather than a cause that
merits promotional effort.
Question 3: Were there
one or more other significant innovations that were
launched in the same letter that first bore IWP?
The first DL-123 letter in Table 5, le1979-05,
introduces not only IWP but also the diagnostic innovations I
have labeled T1 = B, T3 = B and T6 = B. The other tabulated
alternatives, T2 = b, T4 = B and T5 = b', appear on prior DL-0
and DL-1 letters. It can never be shown with certainty that any
two features appeared concurrently. Likely there was some
uncollected letter which contained, say, T1 = B, but not IWP, or
visa versa. Concurrence would say something about the motives of
an innovator. But it makes little difference to the resulting
population of chain letters if two innovations were co-linked,
or if one was post-linked shortly after the debut of the other.
In any case, it appears the "It Works" innovator may have made
two or three other significant changes to the text.
Question 4: Was IWP itself the main reason the
letters bearing it proliferated so greatly, or was there another
feature on these letters that was the main reason?
Estimating the effect of a feature on the circulation of its
chain letter host is largely a matter of informed guesswork.
Unknown motives of readers may be involved. We will attempt to
answer Question 4 by considering a broader question in the next
subsection.
Why did "It Works" Work?
The tabulated data of Table 4 suggest that each of three
successive innovations (DL-0, DL-1, and DL-123) increased
circulation. Here are likely reasons for each.
DL-0: The senders list on DL-N letters was an awkward presence, especially since photocopying was rapidly becoming the dominant method of replication. When a letter must be typed or hand copied, it is not that much additional bother to update a list of names. But if one is photocopying, instructions to revise the letter in any way may prompt discard. Further, asking for one's name is not consistent with anonymous distribution, which prevailed in subsequent years. Most of the lists on DL-N were internal, between the D and L blocks. Deleting this gives the resulting text the appearance of a single chain letter, making the contradictions between the D and L blocks less likely to be observed.
DL-1: When first taking a letter in hand, a reader often may glance at the end of the letter, looking to see who signed it. This gives postscripts special potency. The DL-1 postscript, "Do not send money", was a highly visible flag signaling that the letter was not a solicitation for money.
DL-23: "Please do not ignore this. It
works" together constitute a polite affirmation of the
power of the letter, in contrast to the previous bossy
conclusion: "For no reason whatsoever should this chain be
broken." This was retained, but now was much less
prominent. A money chain letter, attributed to "Nelson
Robards", was circulating at the time that concluded with
"Do it . . . it really does work" [1978].
Perhaps "It Works" luck chain letters "followed" this money
chain (< Section 4-3),
each increasing the other's circulation. "It does work"
is a common variant of the third sentence of IWP, and is
the version on the two oldest examples in the archive. DL-23 constituted a revival of the "Affirmation" type
statements that were common on luck chain letters from
1927-1940. These functioned as an independent voice affirming
the claims of the letter. Many radio and
television advertisements use the phrase "It works."
I now consider whether the identifying features T1 = B, T3 = B
or T6 = B had a significant affect on the circulation of
DL-123.
T1 = B: Could the added
proviso to the promise of good luck ("You will receive good luck
within four days of receiving this letter provided in
turn you send it back out) have been the the major
cause of the success of DL-123? This
appears early in the letter, and fundamentally changes its
operating superstition from a lucky talisman (Copy later) to a fateful obligation (Copy first). There is one,
and only one, letter on which it appears without the complete It
Works postscript. [1982-01].
Whatever the genealogy of this letter, it did not replicate
sufficiently to show up again in the archive, something we
should expect if the "provided" clause were highly
effective by itself. However, the potency of the full postscript
is itself challenged by the rapid increase of a variation that
deleted the last two words ("It works"). This deletion,
co-linked to a transfer of the Kiss title, appears in the "KCL"
variation of the 1990's (> S4-6_kcl).
But the KCL letters begin with the Kiss title and conclude with
the Love title, thus combining the appeal of both. This may more
than make up for the loss of "It works." Another reason
for assessing T1 = B to be more effective than IWP is that, as
noted above, it stayed on a widespread Internet version of the
letter whereas all the postscripts were soon deleted without
consequence. [e1994]
T3 = B: This added phrase ("Do not send money, for fate
has no price on it) may function like
an Affirmation, but readers would not need to be further
convinced that money should not be sent. Perhaps some would be
impressed by this kitsch flourish, but in any case I do not see
how it could affect circulation significantly.
T6 = B. The Linkage ("I, myself, now forward it to you") is awkwardly placed in the L block of DL-123. It is not surprising that by 1984 it had been deleted, perhaps deliberately by the author of a highly replicative new title. It is always present on early DL-123 letters, but likely had no role in the replicative success of its host.
So the answer to Question 4 above is that there
was one other innovation on letters with IWP that could have
been the main reason for their success - the added proviso that
good luck requires compliance first (T1 = B). But it is near
impossible to judge if this, or the postscripts, motivated the
most compliance.
< Start
of above section <
Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
4-6 The Death-Lottery Chain Since 1981
Introduction
Trust expires
Belief fizzles
Kiss and Love
divide the territory
Kiss gets Wife's Money
Love gets a Car
Kiss jumps on top
All fall down
Table 6 - Occurrences of
Trust, Belief, Kiss, Wife's Money, Love and Car
Table
7. Text alternatives on DL title variations
Table 8. Text alternatives for the Car Testimonial
Table 9. Numbers of English language paper
luck chain letters collected per year since 1995
Introduction.
After 1981 almost all of the millions of luck chain letters
circulating in the United States were the descendants of a
single founder that had appeared a couple years before bearing
the It Works postscript (IWP) and a "copy first" proviso (< Section 4-5).
In this final section seven ensuing changes in this population
are described, concluding with its near extinction at the end of
the millennium. I give the following
allegorical names to these events: (1) Trust expires, (2) Belief
fizzles, (3) Kiss and Love divide the territory, (4) Kiss gets
wife's money, (5) Love gets a car, (6) Kiss jumps on top, and
(7) All fall down. Except for the last,
each of these events involve one or more of the following named
innovations.
Trust: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and He will acknowledge and He will light the way." This is the corrupted form of Proverbs 3:5-6 that appeared as a leading "prayer" on the hyper-competitive It Works letter in 1979.The following table gives a count of these innovations, and combinations of them, in the archive over three year intervals from 1972 to 2001.Belief: "And all things whatever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive." This title is the King James version of Matthew 21:22.
Kiss: The title "Kiss someone you love when you get this letter and make magic."
Love: "With love all things are possible." This title is probably a substitution in Mark 10:27: "With God all things are possible."
Wife's Money: The following modification (in italics) of the Death and Money testimonial: "While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife six days after receiving this letter. He failed to circulate the letter. However, before her death,
he received $7,755she had won $50,000. in a lottery. The money was transferred to him four days after he decided to mail out this letter."Car: The testimonial: "In 1987 the letter received by a young woman in California was faded and barely readable. She promised herself to retype the letter and send it on, but put it aside to do later. She was plagued with various problems, including expensive car repairs. The letter did not leave her hands in 96 hours. She finally retyped the letter as promised and got a new car."
Table 6. Occurrences of Trust, Belief, Kiss, Wife's Money, Love, and Car.
Years | Trust | Belief | Kiss
& His Money H$ |
Kiss & Wife's Money S$ |
Love & No Car |
Love &
Car |
Kiss
transfers to Love & Car |
1972-1974 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
0 | 0 |
1975-1977 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
0 | 0 |
1978-1980 | 9 | 1 |
0 | 0 | 0 |
0 | 0 |
1981-1983 | 6 | 4 | 1 |
0 | 1 |
0 | 0 |
1984-1986 | 0 | 0 | 5 |
4 |
15 |
0 | 0 |
1987-1989 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
10 | 2 |
3 |
0 |
1990-1992 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
1 |
24 | 2 |
1993-1995 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
5 | 0 |
10 | 7 |
1996-1998 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
11 | 15 |
1999-2001 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1* |
0 |
* In English, but collected by J. B. Renard in Montpellier, France in 1999.
The obvious changes in frequency in Table 6, including remarkable extinctions, are the basis for characterizing the post-1981 history of the English language DL letters with the seven events named above. I now consider them one-by-one in the next seven subsections. This analysis is detailed; the reader may wish to skip this part and go directly to the final subsection of this treatise (>4-6all_fall_down).
1.
Trust expires.
Proverbs 3:5-6 had appeared near the top of most mainline
letters since 1952 in countless corrupted forms until the It
Works capture in 1979 fixed its form as "Trust" given above.
This header probably had positive replicative effect at first,
but by the early 1980's it seems to have become a liability.
Perhaps quick recognition of a letter as the nuisance of the
prior decade was a factor.
2.
Belief
fizzles.
Someone replaced Trust with "Belief" in 1980, placing this New
Testament verse above the body of the letter. On our earliest
version [1980] the
verse is identified correctly as Matthew 21:22. "Belief" was
immediately successful at the expense of Trust, but within two
years its circulation seems to have ended. This was probably due
to the appeal of two new secular titles I discuss below. The
omission of the Unbeliever's Death was an early post-linked
feature [1981]
that apparently captured the Belief clade. This may have also
contributed to the demise of Belief.
3. Kiss and Love divide the territory.
The earliest Kiss title
in the archive is from October 1983, and the
earliest Love title was
sent from Sweden to England in June, 1983. Both
these letters, as well as three letters from earlier in 1983
that had no title [1983-02],
have nearly identical text details (other than the titles), yet
they differ markedly from the prior DL letters with either the Trust or Belief titles. The table
below facilitates comparisons. Ten text alternatives are
tabulated for a selection of seventeen chain letters from the
IWP clade. Again, text alternatives considered diagnostic are
designated by upper case letters.
Table
7. Text Alternatives on DL Title Variations
T1 = a: This prayer has
been sent to you for good luck.
T1 = b: This quote
has been sent to you for good luck.
T1 = c: This paper
has been sent to you for good luck.
T1 = d: This letter has
been sent to you for good luck.
T2 = a: The original
copy is from the Netherlands.
T2 = C: The original copy is in New
England.
T3 = a: The luck has now been brought
to you.
T3 = c: The luck has now been sent to you.
T4 = a: . . . provided you
in turn send it back out.
T4 = c: .
. . providing you, in turn, send it on.
T5 = a: . . .
Welch lost his life six days after he received
this letter.
T5 = b: . . . Welch lost
his wife six days after receiving this letter.
T6 = a: Please send 20 copies to see what
happens ...
T6 = c: Please send 20 copies of the letter and
see what happens ...
T7 = a: . . . send it to your
friends, parents, or associates.
T7 = c: . . . send them to
friends and associates.
T8 = a: Take
note of the following:
T8 = C: Do note
the following:
T9 = a: He asked his secretary to make 20 copies
and send them.
T9 = c: He asked his secretary to make 20 copies and send them out.
T10 = a: Carlo Raditt . .
. forgot it and a few days later, lost his job.
T10 = C: Carla Dadditt . . . forgot it
had to leave his hands within 96 hours. He lost
his job.
Variation: XU = The Unbeliever's Death
testimonial has been deleted in full.
No |
Chain Letter File |
Type, Variation |
T1 |
T2 |
T3 |
T4 |
T5 |
T6 |
T7 |
T8 |
T9 |
T10 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
le1979-05_dl_tw! |
DL-123 Trust title |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
2 |
le1982-01-28_01_m_t |
DL-123 Trust title |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
3 |
le1982-09-20_dl_wt_dates |
DL-123 Trust title |
a |
a |
c |
a |
b |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
4 |
le1983-06-30_dl_wt' |
DL-123 Trust title |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
c |
a |
5 |
le1980_dl_wb! |
DL-123 Belief title | b |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
6 |
le1980u_dl_B-L29_wb |
DL-123 Belief title |
b |
a |
a |
a |
b |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
7 |
le1981u_dl-_wb |
DL-123 Belief title XU
|
b |
a |
a |
a |
a |
c |
a' |
a |
c' |
a |
8 |
le1982_dl_wb |
DL-123 Belief title XU
|
b |
a |
a |
a |
a |
c |
a' |
a |
c |
a |
9 |
le1983-02_dl_w(k) |
DL-123 Untitled | c |
C |
c |
a |
b |
c |
c |
x |
c |
C |
10 |
le1983-04_dl_w(k) |
DL-123 Untitled |
d |
C |
c |
a |
b |
c |
c |
C |
c |
C |
11 |
le1983-05_dl_w(k) |
DL-123 Untitled |
d |
C |
c |
a |
b |
c |
c |
C |
c |
C |
12 |
le1983-10-04_d_wk! |
DL-12 Kiss title |
d |
C |
c |
a |
b |
c |
c |
C |
c |
C |
13 |
le1984-05_dl_wk |
DL-123 Kiss title |
c |
C |
c |
a |
b |
c |
x |
C |
c |
C |
14 |
le1985-06_dl_wk |
DL-123 Kiss title |
d |
C |
c |
a |
b |
c |
c |
C |
c |
C |
15 |
le1983-06-13_dl_wl!_e |
DL-123 Love title |
d |
C |
c |
c |
b |
c |
c |
C |
C |
C |
16 |
le1983_dl_wl |
DL-123 Love title |
c |
C |
c |
c |
b |
c |
c |
C |
C |
C |
17 |
le1984-05_dl_wl |
D-L123 Love title |
c |
C |
c |
c |
b |
c |
c |
C |
C |
C |
Note that the four Trust letters (#1 to #4) have
almost all the text alternatives the same, except for three
cases (for example, T3 = c for letter #3). None of these three
exceptions are diagnostic, and could easily be "pop ups".
The second two Belief letters (#7 & #8) have the Unbelievers
Death testimonial deleted (variation XU). This is two sentences
long, so this was very likely deliberate - probably for ethical
reasons. The absence of this threat was likely negative for
circulation and could explain the early disappearance of this
sub-type from the archive. These two Belief letters have another
variation in common - the innovation T6 = c ( "Please send 20 copies of the letter and
see what happens ..."). Since all the remaining letters in the table
(#9 to #17), including the three Untitled letters (#9 to
#11), also have T6 = c, we can suspect that all these remaining
letters have a Belief ancestor. The cladogram of Bennett, Li and
Ma (2003) displays
the same relationship. Based on the information in
the table, the following is a parsimonious hypothesis for the
origin of the five title options, and the text alternatives.
(1) In 1980 or before, someone replaced the Trust
title with Belief, and changed the self-reference from "prayer"
to "quote". (T1 = b, see letter #5)
(2) Not long after, someone casually inserted the innovation
T6 = c ( "Please
send 20 copies of the letter and see what
happens ..."). (# 7
& #8)
(3) In 1982 or early 1983, the title from one of these T6 = c
letters was deleted from the top of a photocopy. The
self-reference "quote" was retained.
(4) Soon after, a copyist decided to correct the self-reference
since there was no longer a "quote". They made the odd
choice of "paper". (#9)
(5) Around the same time the Kiss title was added to an Untitled
letter. (#12)
(6) Around the same time the Love title was added to an
Untitled letter. (#16)
(7) At various times, copyists were not satisfied with the
self-reference "paper", and changed this to "letter"
on Untitled, Kiss, and Love letters. But "paper" remained
the most common self-reference. (#11, #12,
#16)
Some other scenarios seem about as likely. The
occurrences of the self-references "paper" versus "letter"
are the greatest challenge to parsimony. A tempting alternative
phylogeny has "paper" a miscopy of "prayer" on an
uncollected Trust letter, and this lineage losing its title,
accumulating the "B" alternatives and receiving the two new Kiss
and Love titles.
Most of the ten text alternatives in the above table, though often corrupted, are identifiable on every mainline letter after 1984. For example, on 1998-07 "Gene Welch" has been corrupted to "George Welch," but we never again see "General" or "Gen." as was present in the 1970's. Even minor changes such as "copy" for "chain" have persisted. This is a remarkable demonstration of 15 years of faithful copying, and proof that the progeny of the Kiss-Love founder completely captured the mainline. This constituted a descent group of over a billion letters.
Why were the Kiss and Love titles so successful?
Did some of the above linked features also contribute
significantly to the circulation of these letters? Examining the
ten text alternatives used in the table, few if any seem as if
they could have impacted propagation as much as the five titles
(Trust, Belief, Untitled, Kiss or Love). But we will consider
three candidates.
(1) T5 = b: " ... Welch lost his wife
six days after receiving ...".
The alternative "wife" was present on the Kiss-Love
founder and thus became universal in the mainline, never
reverting back to "life". The brief success of the
pre-war Blind13 type chain postcard, which threatened a family
member with blindness, suggests that threatening the reader's
family gains more compliance than threatening the reader. But "wife"
had appeared in 1975
and probably many other times uncollected, without getting
established.
(2) T7 = c: "...send
it to your friends or associates."
"Parents" was dropped from the distribution in the
Kiss-Love clade. This likely could not have had a major impact
on circulation, but it could have had some indirect positive
effect.
Consider the participant age of a social activity - for chain letters the average age of those who are replicating it. Participant age may regress (marijuana smoking), remain fixed (school traditions), or advance with time (canasta), perhaps even keep pace with calendar time (class reunions). There is a postcard exchange letter (an ancestor of the kids' World Record chain letter) whose participant age regressed. You be the judge: here is some text from an example received by an eleven year old in Clarkston, WA:
It was started in 1986 if it goes through 1995 it will be in the Guiness Book of World Records (your name will be included). It has never been broken, so please don't spoil it for everyone . . . If you were to break the chain we would have to wait another nine years to be in record book. [1996]Text alternative "parents" was present as a distribution target on the Trust titled chain letters. Perhaps this statistically advanced the chain letter's participant age, especially since many senders distribute just one or a few copies. For this and reasons that follow, apparently the new titles, Kiss and Love, gained the loyalty of youth, while the core network of Trust letters aged.
While in the Philippines, Cora Welch lost his wife six days after receiving this letter. He failed to circulate the letter, however, before her death, she had won $50,000. in a lottery. The money was transferred to him four days after he decided to mail out this letter. [1986]I designate this innovation by "S$" (she ... won) and the prior version by "H$" (he received). In S$ it is the wife who first got the money, not her husband, and it is she who loses her life. The final sentence (The money was transferred ... ) reflects a reviser's puzzlement over the original Copy Later frame, in which Mr. Welch gets the money after merely receiving the talismanic letter. To force a Copy First frame, now it seems the money is at first inaccessible to Mr. Welch, until finally he complies and only after that the money is transferred to him. So in S$, Mr. Welch got nothing but misery until he mailed out the letter.
The origin of S$ may depend on a simple mistake. It would be very easy to shift the gender of the last pronoun from "he" to "she" in Death and Money:
While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife six days after receiving this letter. He failed to circulate the letter. However, before her death, she had won $750,000. in a lottery. [hypothetical]This change confuses the meaning of the testimonial since it is not clear if Mr. Welch ever got the money himself, and both good and bad luck are now going to his wife, yet he broke the chain. So this hypothetical version would have invited revision, such as adding "The money was transferred to him four days after he decided to mail out this letter." The fact that our earliest example of S$ uses "Cora Welch" instead of "Gene Welch" could only add to the gender confusion. In any case, this illustrates how a simple change, even a copying error, could provoke a lengthy addition.
Remarkably, this new version of the Kiss
letter, S$, captured the clade within a few years, as seen in
Table 6 above (< Occurrences).
From 1984 to 1998 there are 24 examples of S$ in the archive,
but only 8 examples of H$. And H$ completely disappears from the
archive by 1990. Careful comparison of letters bearing H$ and S$
reveals no new variation on S$ letters, other than this
modification to the Death and Money testimonial, that could
explain this. There is the usual alternation between the
self-reference "paper' and "letter", and a few non-diagnostic
additions like "The luck has now been sent to you." So
why did the S$ testimonial get more people to copy a letter than
the H$ testimonial?
We have already noted that a threat to a family
member may be more fearful than a threat to oneself. But both H$
and S$ have that. Perhaps the conversion
to Copy First superstition in S$ made the testimonial more
effective, especially to the younger readers that may have
disproportionally circulated the Kiss title. But consider
someone who has never read the Death and Money testimonial
before, or has but does not remember it. There is a key
difference between H$ and S$ other than a gender shift. S$
mentions the winning of a lottery - a first for the
leading D block in the ubiquitous DL chain letter dynasty. Yes,
Mrs. Welch wins and dies, but the second fate is easily averted
by distributing copies. And since this lottery mention is much
closer to the beginning of the letter than the second in the L
block (Boss Wins
Lottery), many will read it who otherwise would have
stopped reading before even getting to the L block. Further,
this winner is an Anglo woman, instead of a Latino male, as
"Constantine Diaz" is in the "L" block. Thus with S$ there are
more possibilities of a reader identifying with the promise that
the letter may help them win a lottery. If a man is reading it,
his wife may already be holding a lottery ticket. Recall the "One in a Hundred Rule",
all that is needed for a quota 20 chain letter variation to
become hyper-competitive is for one additional person in a
hundred to become fully compliant.
The Car
testimonial is usually self-dated 1987, and first appears
in our sample in July 1988, appended near the end of a Love
titled letter [1988].
Not a single Love titled letter in the archive thereafter fails
to possess it! Despite this quick conquest of the Love subtype,
the Kiss titled letters persisted without Car. This supports the
above speculations that these two titles had a different
audience, perhaps differing by motive, age, or gender. If Kiss
and Love had the same motivational niche, Love & Car would
have swamped Kiss just like it did Love without Car ("No Car").
I discussed the replicative advantages of Car in Section 3.6
(< Mainline
Testimonials).
For the table below I have identified seven text
alternatives which may distinguish Love-Car examples from No
Car. Thirteen chain letters which date from near the advent of
Car are checked for which alternatives are present on them.
Table 8. Text
Alternatives for the Car Testimonial.
T1 = a: The luck has now been sent to
you.
T1 = b: The luck has been sent to you.
T2 = a: You will receive good luck within four
days of receiving this letter, providing you, in turn,
send it on.
T2 = b: You will receive good luck within
four days of receiving this letter, providing you send it on.
T3 = a: This is no joke. You will receive it
in the mail.
T3 = b: This is no joke. You will receive good luck
in the mail.
T4 = a: . . . in the mail. Send copies to people
you think need good luck.
T4 = B: . . . in the mail. Send no money. Send copies to
people you think need good luck.
T5 = a: While in the Philippines Gene Welch lost
his wife six days after receiving the letter.
T5 = b: While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife
51 days after receiving the letter.
T6 = a: Since a copy must make a
tour of the world you must make twenty copies and . . .
T6 = b: Since the copy must tour the world, you must make 20
copies, and . . .
T7 = a: Please don't ignore this. It works.
T7 = b: Do not ignore this. St. Jude. It works.
Note: "St. Jude" is also added to top or at the
extreme bottom of some letters.
No. |
File name |
Variation |
T1 |
T2 |
T3 |
T4 |
T5 |
T6 |
T7 |
1 |
le1983-06-13_dl_wl!_e |
Love - No Car |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
2 |
le1985_dl_wl |
Love - No Car |
a |
b |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
3 |
le1985-12_dl_wl_h2pp |
Love - No Car |
a |
a' |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
4 |
le1986-05-08_dl_w-k' |
Love - No Car |
b |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a' |
5 |
le1987-06_wlj! |
Love - No Car |
a |
a |
b |
B |
a |
b |
b |
6 |
le1988_dl_wl |
Love - No Car |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
a |
7 |
le1988-07_dl_wlc!j |
Love - Car |
b |
b |
b |
B |
a |
b |
b |
8 |
le1988_dl_w(l)cj |
(Love) - Car |
a |
a |
b |
B |
b |
x |
b |
9 |
le1989-03_dl_wlcj |
Love - Car |
b |
b |
b |
b |
a |
b |
b |
10 |
le1989-07_dl_wlcj_rec-fate |
Love - Car |
b |
a |
b |
B |
b |
b |
b |
11 |
le1989_dl_wlcj |
Love - Car |
a |
a |
b |
B |
b |
b |
b |
12 |
le1990-01_dl_w'lcj |
Love - Car |
a |
a |
b |
B |
b |
b |
b |
13 |
le1990-08_dl_wlcj |
Love - Car |
a |
a' |
b |
B |
a |
b |
b |
First, note that the Car testimonial must have been added to a letter similar to #5 (le1987-06_wlj!) since this earlier letter introduces the alternatives T3=T6=T7=b and the diagnostic T4 = B seen later on the first Car in the archive, #7. T1=b and T2=b are also pre-linked to Car (on letters #2 and #4), and the earliest Car letters apparently had T5=a. So the first Car must have looked much like the No Car letter #5. This is fairly strong evidence that whoever placed the composed testimonial Car on a chain letter did not take the opportunity to make other changes in the letter. It also suggests that Car was placed on only one letter, for if it had been placed on two different circulating letters likely at least one of the text alternatives T3, T4, T6 or T7 would have had an "a" value. But there is no descendant of such a letter in the archive.
Did any of the seven text alternatives on early
Car contribute significantly to its impressive
replication? Alternatives T1, T2, T3
and T6 are very likely neutral for propagation. Text alternative T4 = B above, the early "send no
money," is probably slightly positive for propagation
since it doubles and advances this universal prohibition. It may
have originated accidentally in re-typing, first as an exact
duplication of "Do not send money . . .", then edited to
"Send no money" for stylistic variety.
The text alternative T5=b, ("Gene Welch lost his
wife 51 days after receiving the letter") was discussed
previously (< 51 days). It
was not on the earliest Car letter in the archive, but appeared
shortly after (on #8) and likely became common as a post-linked
rider on the new testimonial.
The text T7=b ("St. Jude") first appears
in the archive on the No Car #5 [le1987-06_dl_wlj!].
The Car testimonial was first added on a letter close to this
letter and bearing "St. Jude". All Car letters thereafter
bore "St. Jude" except for a few deletions [1994, 1997] and a
Protestant substitution [1993]. There have also been a few independent appearances of
"St. Jude" [1991,
1992] but
none of these show up more than once in the archive. Thus by
itself Jude is unreliable to use for inferring phylogeny. It may
have been positive for propagation of the Car clade, or perhaps
it was just a pre-linked rider. On Mexican chain letters "St.
Jude Thadeus" appears to be an essential component. [1984, 1995] But
the appeal of St. Jude to Latin Americans may not be so old. One
informant called him the "Patron Saint of Anglos" in the 1950's.
(Orsi)
6. Kiss jumps on top.
This examination of 1990's DL letters has
revealed at least five different transfers that both replicated
and were collected for the archive. For the last two years of
large circulation, 1996 & 1997, the archive contains 28 DL
luck chain letters. Over half of these, 15, are descendants of
one of the above transfers. So letters with both titles present
were favored. Likely the transfer of
text from one chain letter to another was common behavior
throughout the twentieth century, and was an important factor in
chain letter evolution. If paper luck chain letters had sustained their
circulation for another few years, possibly the KLC transfers
would have captured the entire North American luck chain letter
niche.
Despite the success of the DL type letters in the early 1990's, the circulation of all paper luck chain letters dramatically declined beginning in the late 1990's. The following table documents this with numbers from the Paper Chain Letter Archive.
Table 9.
Numbers of English language paper luck chain letters collected
per year since 1995.
Year of circulation |
Mainline | Outliers |
1995 | 15 | 3 |
1996 | 20 | 0 |
1997 | 9 | 0 |
1998 | 1 | 2 |
1999 | 1 | 0 |
2000 | 0 | 1 |
2001 | 0 | 0 |
2002 | 0 | 0 |
2003 | 1 | 0 |
2004 |
3 |
1 |
2005 |
1 |
0 |
2006 |
0 |
0 |
2007 |
0 |
0 |
2008 |
1 |
0 |
2009 |
0 |
0 |
2010 |
0 |
0 |
2011 |
0 |
0 |
The last DL luck chain letter collected was titled "The
Financial Blessings Letter" [2008]. It retains all DL testimonials except the Unbeliever's
Death, deletes much other DL text (especially at the
beginning), and has rewrites to promise a divine monetary reward
for replication.
Though I reduced efforts to collect paper chain
letters after 1997, still, if their circulation had been even at
10% of previous levels, many more would have been collected than
were. The term "chain letter" is now universally applied to
examples on the web, and authors often deem it necessary to
explain to their readers that this term once meant actual paper
letters. The primary cause for the disappearance of paper luck
chain letters was the rise of new communications technologies.
Here are three suggestions on how this operated.
(1) The flood of email and internet luck chain
letters immunized people, especially the young, against the
promises and threats of paper chain letters.
This was the basis of a 1995 prediction that "the familiar
'prayer' or 'good luck' type chain letters will totally
disappear from the US mail by the year 2000" [e1995-06].
The public is now far more skeptical about chain letters than it
was in, say, 1985.
(2) Compliant recipients of a paper chain
letter chose to fulfill its demand for copies by sending it
out in email form, or posting it on social media.
The effort and cost of complying electronically is minuscule
compared to the what is required to mail out twenty paper
letters. Many chain messages on the internet began as word for
word transcriptions of paper chain letters. A very early example
is a standard DL letter with the "Trust" title and the "It
Works" postscript that appeared on the ARPA net. [1982]
Email forwards used to list all the parties who relayed the
message, and comments by individual forwarders were preserved.
On this example we find a note stating: "This is the infamous
ARPA-net chain letter which caused much havoc a few years ago
on the ARPA-net." But it was not until the 1990's that
personal computers proliferated and numerous paper chain letters
were shunted into the digital realm.
(3) Computerized search technologies, such as
Google, exposed recipients to critiques of chain letters.
Prior to the internet, very few people were able to access any
comment at all on a chain letter they received. Not so now. My ISP reports give the search strings used that led
to someone accessing any of my web pages, including the
digitized texts of hundreds of chain letters. These reports confirm that receipt of a chain letter, paper
or not, often prompts people to search the Web with some
characteristic text from the letter. This was more frequent in
years past, especially for luck chain letters. Then the searcher
was likely to encounter unkind words about chain letters from a
web vigilante. Wasting "bandwidth" was the usual complaint. Both
paper and cyber money chain letters still circulate; an
abundant example has the title "As seen on Oprah and 20/20". My
archive
entry for this chain letter shows up second in a Google
search using the title. After giving the text, this page
presents an analysis of the letter that discourages replication.
A century of denunciation failed to eliminate
paper luck chain letters (New York Times: 1916, 1917e, 1931, 1959b). The Internet,
email, and smart phones all but ended them in just a few years.
< Start of above section < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents
Daniel W. VanArsdale
email: barnowl@silcom.com
Chain Letter Evolution (THIS FILE):
http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/evolution.html
The Paper Chain Letter Archive - contents:
http://www.silcom/~barnowl/!contents.html
Index page of Daniel W. VanArsdale: http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/index.htm
Eat No Dynamite (A collection of college graffiti): http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/graffiti.htm
End: Chain Letter Evolution, Version 10/27/1998f
11/04/2002p
1/7/2007 12/9/2012
5/2013 6/2015
revised 3-1 10/2016. Hit counter uploaded 12/1998.