The 100^th anniversary of the A. C. McClurg publication of the THE MOON MAID was in February 2026. The focus in this article will be the things happening in the world that influenced Burroughs when he wrote the novel. It was a busy time. World War One had ended and prohibition was becoming a reality. The Russian Revolution filled the news and the fear of the rise of communism was growing into a fierce flame. American patriotism was at an all-time high. The short-lived League of Nations was formed, the Ottoman Empire was ending, women gained the right to vote, and Charles Ponzi was in the news. The Jazz Age was coming, but no one knew that at the time.

I’ll leave the character and place names in the novel for another article and only briefly touch on lineal reincarnation as presented in the story.

The chronology of when the three parts of The Moon Maid were written seems a little disjointed because Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote “Under the Red Flag” aka “The Moon Men," which became part two of the novel before he wrote “The Moon Maid,” which became part one. After finishing The Moon Maid, he rewrote “Under the Red Flag,” as “The Moon Men.” Part three, “The Red Hawk,” part three, was written third. The publication order was Maid, Men, and Red Hawk.

  

 

‘Under the Red Flag,” the first story written for the trilogy  was a strong condemnation of communism presented by Burroughs as fiction and it featured an America invaded and occupied by communists. No publisher would buy it and as was noted previously, it was rewritten as “The Moon Men.” The reasons that it didn’t sell, are outlined later in this article. Burroughs wrote “The Moon Maid,” the first third of the novel of the same name, as a lead in for his rewritten Moon Men version of “Under The Red Flag.” “The Red Hawk” continued the story of America’s occupation by Kalkars, the fictionalized communists and their human collaborators and the American’s revolt against them. The combined three stories clearly demonstrate Burroughs mistrust of communism – especially Russian communists. The final story is a perfect example of a quote attributed to Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” There is no evidence that Burke ever said or wrote that comment, but that doesn’t make it untrue. The closest thing to be found in his writings, is "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

 

When I first saw the film, “Red Dawn,” I was astonished at the similarity in theme to “The Red Hawk.” American patriots, live off the land like Native Americans, never surrender, and lead the resistance against the invaders. "C'mon! We're all going to die, die standing up!"

 

 

The world was a different place when Ed sat down to write “Under the Red Flag” in 1919. The Russian Revolution was big news. Without turning this into a history class, here’s some key dates. In March of 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and a provisional government was formed. The October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks seized Petrograd, arrested members of the provisional government at the winter palace, and the Council of People’s Commissars was established as the new government. That wasn’t the end of things. In February 1918, the Bolsheviks formed the Red Army and a brutal conflict between the Bolshevik Red Army and the ‘White Army’ began. The civil war lasted for four years, ending with the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922. Why does what was going in Russia have to do with anything? When ERB originally wrote “Under the Red Flag,” the invaders of America were Bolsheviks. The story remained unsold and after he wrote “The Moon Maid,” he rewrote “Under The Red Flag,” and changed the communists to into Kalkars. Same bad guys, same politics, same philosophy, different name.
 

Clear evidence of this was provided on December 4, 1918, when Edgar Rice Burroughs submitted a proposal to the Department of Justice. He planned to alert the American people to the dangers of being governed by Bolsheviks (Communists) by writing a fictionalized account about life under Bolsheviks rule.
 

Burroughs requested background information so his novel would be as accurate as possible, but the Department of Justice refused to help, instead the chief of the Chicago bureau of the Department of Justice (Federal Bureau of Investigation), a man named Hinton G. Clabaugh wrote back to Burroughs and told him, thanks, but no thanks. He declined to provide any information and suggested that Burroughs abandon the entire project - basically to leave the government’s strategy to the people in charge.

 

Burroughs ignored Calbaugh’s instructions and wrote a book anyway. The result was  ‘UNDER THE RED FLAG.’ After he couldn’t sell the story, ERB then wrote  ‘The Moon Maid’ to set up  a repurposed ‘The Moon Men,” aka  UTRF rewritten and finally the ‘The Red Hawk,’  about evicting Bolshevikian Moon Men from America. Pretty sure I made up that word.  Burroughs anticipated the same type of ‘political censorship,” and when he wrote CARSON OF VENUS, a novel in which the Nazi’s were lampooned, he cleverly changed NAZI to ZANI. It worked.

 

This article won’t explore in detail the lineal incarnations of Julian, who is a protagonist in each of three stories, but as a different incarnation of himself. Lineal reincarnation is one version of ‘immortality,’ a regular theme in ERB’s works. Lineal reincarnation describes the common perception of rebirth as a sequential, one-life-after-another process, moving forward in time, but spiritual traditions often view reincarnation as non-linear, driven by karma and consciousness rather than strict dates, suggesting souls might skip forward or backward in time, or experience multiple lives simultaneously across different realities, challenging the straight-line view of past and future lives. Strict linear reincarnation, as presented by Edgar Rice Burroughs in “The Moon Maid,” is not a tenet of Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism, the primary religions who believe in reincarnation. I suppose that one could say that the simplest description  of lineal reincarnation would be “I am my own grandpa,” not to be confused with the song of the same name written by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe, performed by Lonzo and Oscar in 1947, a song inspired by the Mark Twain article, “Very Closely Related “ published in “The Wit and Humor of the Age” in 1883. Did ERB read the Twain article? He could have, but we’ll never know. The song has been covered by hundreds of times, including one version by the Muppets.

 

Burroughs’s view of lineal reincarnation relies of the belief that Julian, unlike the rest of us, can remember, or see if you will, his future lives as well. This concept was also explored by H. Rider Haggard in some of his later novels.

Burroughs concluded the trilogy with the patriotic story, “The Red Hawk,” a tale that focuses on the American resistance to Kalkar rule. In a way it could be characterized as the second American revolution. The resistance people live like the Apache that Burroughs came to admire when he was in the U. S. Cavalry stationed at Fort Grant near Willcox, Arizona. As mentioned before, the world was a busy place during the years between when ERB wrote The Moon Maid, rewrote The Moon Men, and when he sat down to write “The Red Hawk.”

The fascism movement was founded, the Nazi Beer Hall Putsch took place, Lenin died and Stalin gained control of the communist party, the Ottoman Empire came to an end, the fascist, Mussolini took power in Italy, Prohibition was in full force in America, and the rise of unions was happening in the United States. Ed wasn’t a fan of any of those happenings.

 

“ON THE ROAD TO OCTOBER”  was published in 1924 with a preface by Stalin,  The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists. The book and the preface were widely read and reviled in the West, but we can only wonder if ERB read it.

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MOON MAID REFERENCES IN ERBzine