Speaker 1: Welcomed Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minkey.
Speaker 1: We begin the interview series for Unobscured season two with
Speaker 1: the phenomenal historian Dr Anne Browdie. She is Senior lecturer
Speaker 1: on American religious history at Harvard Divinity School, where she
Speaker 1: directs the Women's Studies in Religion program. Dr Browdy has
Speaker 1: published widely on women in American religious life, exploring everything
Speaker 1: from spiritualism to Judaism, Christian science, and Native American religions.
Speaker 1: She's an amazing scholar and we're so glad she joined
Speaker 1: us to talk about spiritualism. The research team found her
Speaker 1: book Radical Spirits while they were working on episodes for
Speaker 1: my other podcast Lore. Needless to say, it was one
Speaker 1: of the inspirations for this season of Unobscured. Researcher Carl
Speaker 1: Nellis started each historian interview by asking our guests what
Speaker 1: it meant to be a spiritualist in the nineteenth century America.
Speaker 1: So Dr Browdie's answer to that question is where we'll begin.
Speaker 1: This is the Unobscured Interview series for season two. I'm
Speaker 1: Aaron Maggey. What I would say it meant to be
Speaker 1: a spiritualist in the nineteenth century was to be part
Speaker 1: of a movement that was seeking empirical evidence for the
Speaker 1: immortality of the soul by communicating with the spirits of
Speaker 1: the dead, and in general that meant communicating with the
Speaker 1: spirits of the dead through the intervention of a human medium. Really,
Speaker 1: what spiritualists believed they accessed through the medium of a
Speaker 1: human being who was being used for communication and were
Speaker 1: the spirits of the dead and uh Those spirits might
Speaker 1: be the spirits of deceased relatives or loved ones or
Speaker 1: friends who had passed to the world beyond. They might
Speaker 1: be public figures or historical figures. They could be figures
Speaker 1: from religious history or political history. They could be um
Speaker 1: other cultures, other civilizations. They could be what we're understood
Speaker 1: to be the spirits of dead Indians, the indigenous inhabitants
Speaker 1: of the America's um, but they were understood to be
Speaker 1: the spirits of individuals in general that they were seeking
Speaker 1: to communicate with. When people came to these seances, what
Speaker 1: were they looking for? Many people were looking for consolation.
Speaker 1: They were looking to be reunited with a loved one
Speaker 1: who had been ripped away from them by death and
Speaker 1: one often thinks that the appeal of spiritualism would be
Speaker 1: limited to times when death is very present, to times
Speaker 1: of epidemic or of war, And indeed, wars in particular
Speaker 1: give rise to a lot of interest in spiritualism because
Speaker 1: young people are ripped away suddenly. The fabric of reality
Speaker 1: is really rent by the loss of those we expected
Speaker 1: to be with us, particularly children, UM, young men in war,
Speaker 1: loved ones, people very near and dear who's lost made
Speaker 1: reality um unbearable, understandable, incomprehensible um. And the attempt to
Speaker 1: reconnect with those lost loved ones is also an attempt
Speaker 1: to heal the fabric of reality. And you notice I
Speaker 1: used the present tense there. Communication with the dead is ubiquitous.
Speaker 1: Everyone does it. It occurs in all times and places,
Speaker 1: at certain periods. It takes a kind of form that
Speaker 1: more than one person experiences, and that gives rise to
Speaker 1: a community of communication with the dead, a community of
Speaker 1: people who understand this as a goal that they can
Speaker 1: seek together. And that's what spiritualism is in nineteenth century America.
Speaker 1: It's a new religious movement of people who believe that
Speaker 1: they can find scientific evidence for the immortality of the soul.
Speaker 1: By communicating with the spirits of the debt. And you
Speaker 1: mentioned that some of those spirits they are both kind
Speaker 1: of the lost loved ones, but some of those spirits
Speaker 1: are figures like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, William Penn, Daniel Webster,
Speaker 1: even more recent at that time, you know Henry clay
Speaker 1: Um or after his death, Theodore Parker. Sometimes they were
Speaker 1: addressing just one or two people in a in a
Speaker 1: small science, but sometimes they're addressing large crowds through a
Speaker 1: trans lecturer like Corre scott Um. Just tell us about
Speaker 1: spiritualist relationship to history, kind of written large. Mm hmmm. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up trans lecturers because I had
Speaker 1: really only spoken about family seances, where people are seeking
Speaker 1: communication with an individual from their own life and their
Speaker 1: own circle. And trans mediums were public lecturers who gave
Speaker 1: lectures guided by usually though not always a particular spirit.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they went into trance and were guided by a
Speaker 1: more generalized sense of spirit presence, but usually it was
Speaker 1: an identifiable external intelligence with a specific identity who spoke
Speaker 1: through the medium in a public setting. And the trans
Speaker 1: lecturers are a very important development in American history because
Speaker 1: they are the first large group of American women to
Speaker 1: mount the podium and speak in public. There certainly had
Speaker 1: been other instances of women who had did had done this,
Speaker 1: most of them under some kind of spirit guidance, whether
Speaker 1: it be the Holy Spirit um uh or spiritual inspiration
Speaker 1: connected to the Bible. But trance speaker is who saw
Speaker 1: themselves as communicating messages from spirits, were the first significant
Speaker 1: group of American women to go on tour as public lecturers,
Speaker 1: and you asked about the spirits who spoke through them. Um.
Speaker 1: In general, trance speakers had particular relationships with particular spirits,
Speaker 1: so that um while a public a public figure might
Speaker 1: deliver a message through a spirit, they usually were figures
Speaker 1: who came back repeatedly to speak through a specific spirit.
Speaker 1: When public spirits inspired trans lectures, they often delivered communications
Speaker 1: on subjects that they were concerned about during their own lifetime.
Speaker 1: So in the case of Benjamin Franklin, he was a
Speaker 1: favorite medium for the communication of scientific information, and the
Speaker 1: notion that spirit mediums could communicate scientific information was understood
Speaker 1: as another kind of evidence of spirit presence. Because um
Speaker 1: most of the mediums were people who did not have education.
Speaker 1: The ideal medium was the fourteen year old girl, someone
Speaker 1: who was understood as being innocent, naive, um, and therefore
Speaker 1: incapable of duplicity, incapable of making up a trans lecture
Speaker 1: that came through her during in a in a public setting.
Speaker 1: Of course, that issue that you just pointed at played
Speaker 1: a large role in our first season of Unobscured, because
Speaker 1: we were looking at the same on which trials and
Speaker 1: question of whether the young girls who were claiming afflictions
Speaker 1: could be witnesses against established church members and leaders in
Speaker 1: the community as well as kind of outsiders or each other.
Speaker 1: Um And I'm thinking about uh. In addition to Radical Spirits,
Speaker 1: you've written Sisters and Saints and edited a number of
Speaker 1: other projects on the religious history of American women. How
Speaker 1: significant is spiritualism as a chapter in American women's history.
Speaker 1: You just kind of pointed at the public stage. But
Speaker 1: do you have some more reflections on kind of what's
Speaker 1: the significance of spiritualism in this kind of long history
Speaker 1: of American women and religion. Well, that's a great question.
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody has ever asked me that question, really,
Speaker 1: um and I could talk about it for a long time.
Speaker 1: So you cut me off if I've said enough. But
Speaker 1: in some ways the spirit medium is like a mirror
Speaker 1: image of the ideal Christian woman at the same time
Speaker 1: that she pushes the characteristics of the ideal nineteenth century
Speaker 1: Christian woman to its extreme. So you know, what's sometimes
Speaker 1: referred to as the cult of true womanhood in the
Speaker 1: nine century posits the notion that women by nature are pure, passive,
Speaker 1: and pious. And the understanding there is that women um
Speaker 1: in some ways reflect the qualities of a perfect Christian
Speaker 1: better than men do. That they are untainted by the
Speaker 1: the competitive values of the marketplace and of the economic sphere,
Speaker 1: and therefore they reflect the values of the home, the
Speaker 1: domestic values of Christianity, a place of charity, of nurture,
Speaker 1: of retreat from the marketplace, the world of politics where
Speaker 1: men get dirty through competition, um, And that women rather
Speaker 1: reflect a place of purity where Christianity can blossom. So
Speaker 1: spirit mediums push this idea to its radical extreme, that
Speaker 1: if women have these spiritual qualities more than men do,
Speaker 1: then they can send spirits that they are are perfectly
Speaker 1: suited to be vehicles for divine knowledge. Now that's, of course,
Speaker 1: the opposite of what the Christian churches are teaching, particularly
Speaker 1: the established churches that recognize the authority of education, the
Speaker 1: authority of scripture, the authority of apples, stalic succession, the
Speaker 1: notion that priesthood in the Catholic or Episcopal Church, for example,
Speaker 1: is passed from man to man through the laying on
Speaker 1: of hands back to Christ. And it's this uninterrupted lineage
Speaker 1: of male religious authority into which no women have ever intervened.
Speaker 1: The idea of the spirit medium presents us with a
Speaker 1: very different possibility of religious authority if women could convey
Speaker 1: spirituality because of their innocence. You know, I've met mediums
Speaker 1: who are alive today who give this same feeling of
Speaker 1: personalities where there's space for other things to pass through.
Speaker 1: And we have many other psychological terms that we might
Speaker 1: use to describe that in this day and age. But
Speaker 1: it's very close to the idea of a young girl
Speaker 1: who doesn't present impediments to an external intelligence that wants
Speaker 1: to use her as a vehicle for communication. Spiritualism uses
Speaker 1: concepts and experiences that derive from the history of Christianity
Speaker 1: and from Christian experience that are related to gender, and
Speaker 1: it kind of just pushes them a little too far.
Speaker 1: In this direction or that direction until they no longer
Speaker 1: qualify as orthodox Christianity. And so spiritualism in some sense
Speaker 1: tells us where the limits are of orthodoxy, the limits
Speaker 1: of what's acceptable for Christians, because, after all, Christians are
Speaker 1: taught in many contexts that they should try to communicate
Speaker 1: with benevolent spirits who are looking after them, who are
Speaker 1: looking down from heaven to lead them in positive directions.
Speaker 1: And whether they're formal theological doctrines of their religions teach
Speaker 1: that or not, popular culture teaches that, and it abus
Speaker 1: Christianity very broadly in practical settings, in in the personal
Speaker 1: experience of popular Christianity. So the ideas of spiritualism should
Speaker 1: not be so foreign to Christians, and in many cases
Speaker 1: they're not. In many cases, people who are church members,
Speaker 1: um even members of other religions are also participating in
Speaker 1: communication with spirits, even though it formerly formally contradicts the
Speaker 1: doctrines of their faith. The are a number of traditions
Speaker 1: within Christianity that address the communion of saints in some way,
Speaker 1: right or um, that's right, yeah, yeah. You mentioned the
Speaker 1: way that spiritualism kind of explores or pushes the boundaries
Speaker 1: of orthodoxy sometimes leaps over them. Um. In the decades
Speaker 1: before UM, there was the kind of formalization of what
Speaker 1: is modern spiritualism in the late eighteen forties. UM. There
Speaker 1: are some other pressures on American Christianity and American religion. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some historians talk about the significance of Jacksonian democracy for
Speaker 1: American life in the decades before spiritualism arrived. UM. Can
Speaker 1: you address maybe what we mean by Jacksonian democracy and
Speaker 1: what influence it had on American religion and kind of
Speaker 1: the twenties and thirties. UM. Well, I won't address Jacksonian
Speaker 1: democracy because I will not tread into political history for
Speaker 1: here of going outside my expertise. However, the period of
Speaker 1: the eighteen twenties and thirties is known as the Second
Speaker 1: Greade Awakening, and it's sometimes referred to as the period
Speaker 1: of the democratization of American religion. When we see religious
Speaker 1: authority and experience sweeping the country through revivals, and we
Speaker 1: see a declining emphasis on an educated clergy, on religious hierarchies,
Speaker 1: on religious education, and an increasing emphasis on religious experience
Speaker 1: that is accessible to any individual. Anyone who accepts Christ,
Speaker 1: accepts their sinfulness and their need of Christ's salvation. UM.
Speaker 1: So the Second Greade Awakening is a period of mass
Speaker 1: revivals and UM that's also a kind of preparation for
Speaker 1: spiritualism because of it, it's a religiously democratizing impulse that's fantastic. UM.
Speaker 1: There were also movements in science and in thinking about
Speaker 1: the human person and the human mind through mesmerism and
Speaker 1: animal magnetism, some of those things that laid the groundwork
Speaker 1: for magnetic trances and clairvoyance UM. But there were also
Speaker 1: influences in communications technology that we're changing the way people
Speaker 1: were thinking about communicating across distances. And you talk about uh,
Speaker 1: women being attuned to the spirits in a way that
Speaker 1: men weren't. Can you talk a little bit about maybe
Speaker 1: the way that changes in thinking about the human mind
Speaker 1: and what was possible with technology also laid the groundwork
Speaker 1: for spiritualist thinking and practice. Well, you have to remember
Speaker 1: the shock of technological advance, Electricity, the telegram of these
Speaker 1: things were like magic for a society in which they
Speaker 1: had not previously been existed or known, and they were
Speaker 1: poorly understood and um as they came to be introduced
Speaker 1: as ideas before people witnessed them personally, it was as
Speaker 1: plausible that there could be a spiritual telegraph that would
Speaker 1: connect communication through human mediums with the spirits of the
Speaker 1: dead as that there could be a telegraph that would
Speaker 1: send communications across the country without anybody being able to
Speaker 1: hear them or see them. And I don't think it's
Speaker 1: any coincidence that the first spirit messages that were communicated
Speaker 1: through the Fox Sisters were communicated by raps wraps on
Speaker 1: the table, on the furniture, on the wall, on the floor,
Speaker 1: which if you think about that, it sounds like UH
Speaker 1: tell leograph tapping out Morse code. And the the first
Speaker 1: UH seances were conducted by writing the alphabet out on
Speaker 1: a piece of paper and the person UH who was
Speaker 1: running the seance would pass their hands over the alphabet
Speaker 1: until raps were heard, and then stop on that letter
Speaker 1: and write that letter down. And during some of the
Speaker 1: first communications, they had a hard time separating these letters
Speaker 1: that they received in this way into words. It wasn't
Speaker 1: always clear what the messages were. So if you think
Speaker 1: about this, it's a it's a technology that is kind
Speaker 1: of mimicking and inspired by the new technologies of electricity
Speaker 1: and the telegraph. They're trying to do something very similar
Speaker 1: but with spirit power. And if you think about it,
Speaker 1: it's kind of boring. Um two. And what what that
Speaker 1: informs me of is the great hunger for spirit communication.
Speaker 1: If you think about people and these they have other
Speaker 1: things to do, but they are sitting around a table.
Speaker 1: Think how long it took to get a spirit message
Speaker 1: by passing your hands over the alphabet until you heard
Speaker 1: raps at a single letter, and then you had to
Speaker 1: repeat that process maybe fifty or a hundred times to
Speaker 1: get a brief spirit message. And meanwhile, you're kind of
Speaker 1: hoping that you have a human medium who will be
Speaker 1: an effective vehicle for communication. You're hoping that you have
Speaker 1: created the right atmosphere in the seance room that will
Speaker 1: make a spirit comfortable to communicate and confident that this
Speaker 1: is a medium through which they can communicate, and an
Speaker 1: audience that will be receptive to their message. So you
Speaker 1: have a lot going on, and just think about I
Speaker 1: mean this is we tend to think of seances as
Speaker 1: a parlor game, and certainly they could become that, and
Speaker 1: they did become that a popular entertainment. But the first seances,
Speaker 1: I don't think we're games at all. I think they
Speaker 1: show us the deep, deep hunger to communicate with the
Speaker 1: spirits of the dead, the deep hunger to be reconnected
Speaker 1: with loved ones that we have lost, and the deep
Speaker 1: hunger for knowledge of the divine, for knowledge of what
Speaker 1: will happen after we die. Mm hm And you mentioned
Speaker 1: the Fox sisters, uh, before we get there, um, very
Speaker 1: very soon before uh, Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie seer
Speaker 1: um publishes on harmonial philosophy, and you mentioned the trying
Speaker 1: to get the atmosphere right conducive to spirit communication, and
Speaker 1: the idea of harmony becomes very important to spiritualist practice
Speaker 1: and belief. UM. Can you talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: Andrew Jackson Davis and how his ideas were significant and
Speaker 1: his trances were significant in a way that distinguished them
Speaker 1: a little bit from say, the Shaker visionaries or other
Speaker 1: trance or clairvoyance experiences that preceded him. So Andrew Jackson Davis,
Speaker 1: the Poughkeepsie see or the prophet of the Harmonial philosophy
Speaker 1: was quite different from the Shaker visionaries who preceded him.
Speaker 1: They were um seeking messages or receiving messages, whether they
Speaker 1: sought them or not in the context of a community
Speaker 1: gathered around a single figure, mother Ann Lee Um. Andrew
Speaker 1: Jackson Davis didn't have that kind of community around him.
Speaker 1: He tried to create it, but he never had that
Speaker 1: sense of authority that Mother Anne did, or the sense
Speaker 1: of creating a community that would live by a set
Speaker 1: of agreed upon rules. So he was really just preaching
Speaker 1: this harmonial philosophy to like minded individuals wherever he might
Speaker 1: find them. And I wonder whether his philosophy would have
Speaker 1: caught on in the way that it did, And it
Speaker 1: certainly did catch on in a very powerful way. But
Speaker 1: I wonder if it would have done that without the
Speaker 1: Fox Sisters, because the Fox Sisters brought a kind of
Speaker 1: popular accessibility to spirit communication, whereas Andrew Jackson Davis preached
Speaker 1: a harmony philosophy that made room for spirit communication but
Speaker 1: placed it in a much broader context. He the spirit
Speaker 1: who spoke through him was the spirit of Emmanuel Swedenborg,
Speaker 1: and Swedenborg's vision, which Andrew Jackson Davis was inspired by,
Speaker 1: Um described a world of spheres. Swedenborg had been involved
Speaker 1: in the mining industry, and he understood the world in
Speaker 1: terms of levels, both levels under the ground and levels
Speaker 1: spheres above the ground that are through which the soul
Speaker 1: advances in its journey towards heaven. So there's a notion
Speaker 1: of progression, and this is something that Andrew Jackson Davis
Speaker 1: wrote about that people found very meaningful, the idea that
Speaker 1: the soul continues to progress after death. Where Orthodox Calvinism
Speaker 1: and Protestant faith taught that whatever virtue you had accomplished
Speaker 1: in your life at the moment of death or lack
Speaker 1: of virtue determined your faith for eternity, that you would
Speaker 1: either be damned or you would be blessed to sit
Speaker 1: at the right hand of God for eternity and saved
Speaker 1: thereby from the flames of hell and eternal suffering. You
Speaker 1: would go to one of those two places according to
Speaker 1: the state of your soul at the time of death.
Speaker 1: This was a source of huge anxiety to family members
Speaker 1: who might not have known the state of their loved
Speaker 1: one's soul at the moment of death. They might not
Speaker 1: have felt confident that their loved one was among the
Speaker 1: elect who had been selected by God to enjoy His
Speaker 1: blessings forever and be reunited with their family in heaven.
Speaker 1: So if this is a source of huge anxiety, and
Speaker 1: Andrew Jackson Davis address that anxiety with the idea building
Speaker 1: on Swedenborg, that the soul can continue to progress in
Speaker 1: grace following death, and many spirit messages described the so,
Speaker 1: for example, people who communicated with children who had been lost,
Speaker 1: some of them even before the age of being able
Speaker 1: to speak, not to mention, before the age of reason
Speaker 1: of knowing the difference between right and wrong. How could
Speaker 1: you know what the fate of such a child would
Speaker 1: be if they couldn't choose whether to do good or ill.
Speaker 1: So families had a lot of anxiety about this, and
Speaker 1: the notion that a child could continue to progress after
Speaker 1: death allowed people to hear spirit messages from their deceased
Speaker 1: beloved babies and children who could describe to them how
Speaker 1: they continued to develop, continued to learn, were educated, learned
Speaker 1: to read and write, and develop in all kinds of
Speaker 1: ways after death, and usually these messages of consolation also
Speaker 1: assured the parent or the survivor that the deceased spirit
Speaker 1: continued to care about them after death. A particularly consoling
Speaker 1: idea for the parents of children who had been lost
Speaker 1: before they could express gratitude or or fealty or loyalty
Speaker 1: or love to the parents who loved them so much.
Speaker 1: M hm. And you you mentioned that in this second
Speaker 1: grade awakening period it um, there there are multiple ways
Speaker 1: in which Christianity is fragmenting. I think there's the I
Speaker 1: think it's Emerson, or maybe it's the Row who says
Speaker 1: that the stern old face have all been pulverized. Right.
Speaker 1: And so you're looking at an American religious landscape that
Speaker 1: includes now Methodists and Universalists and Shakers and Quakers and Baptists.
Speaker 1: And there are these practices in the in the in
Speaker 1: the period like camp meetings and circuit preaching and a
Speaker 1: new privileging of religious enthusiasm. And how did this kind
Speaker 1: of uh, i'll say, riotous religious atmosphere um. You mentioned
Speaker 1: this a little bit, maybe a couple more of your
Speaker 1: reflections on how it opened a space for spiritualism and
Speaker 1: maybe which traditions, which theological traditions, do you see as
Speaker 1: the strongest influences on Spiritualism's origin. Well, you would think
Speaker 1: that those who were involved in what you called riot
Speaker 1: us expressions of spirituality might be the most likely to
Speaker 1: give birth to spiritualist communication. Not so, it was more
Speaker 1: the quiet faiths. It was Quakerism, Unitarians, and universalists who
Speaker 1: were apt to explore spiritualism. Quakers in particular, had already
Speaker 1: a notion that the individual contains within themselves a perfect
Speaker 1: transcript of ultimate truth, that each individual is a transcript
Speaker 1: of the mind of God, and so we should look
Speaker 1: within ourselves to know the mind of God. And that
Speaker 1: notion of what Quakers called the inner Light was very
Speaker 1: close to what spiritualists would do when they looked to
Speaker 1: individual mediums to hear the voices of spirits, to hear
Speaker 1: spiritual knowledge UM coming from an individual, and the idea
Speaker 1: that an individual medium could look within themselves could so
Speaker 1: the the seance had some commonalities with a Quaker meeting,
Speaker 1: where Quakers sit in silence to await the voice of God.
Speaker 1: That's what spiritualists are doing. Also, they're waiting for a
Speaker 1: spirit voice they Now, Quakers would never be so rude
Speaker 1: as to do what is often done in a spiritualist
Speaker 1: church service or um seance, which is to boldly ask
Speaker 1: are there any present? Are there any spirits present who
Speaker 1: wish to communicate um? Spiritualists do not wait in silence
Speaker 1: as uh Quakers might. They create the conditions to promote
Speaker 1: spirit communication UM. But it's interesting that they do view
Speaker 1: silence quiet, perhaps proceeding by preceded by him singing or
Speaker 1: prayers that would create the ambiance, the atmosphere in which
Speaker 1: a spirit would feel comfortable communicating. Let's go to talking
Speaker 1: about one of those particular Quakers, who is a remarkable
Speaker 1: historical figure that I had never heard mentioned or addressed
Speaker 1: in any of the histories that I've read, but who
Speaker 1: just stands out as so key to a number of movements.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about Amy post Um. Nancy Hewitt's just published
Speaker 1: a fantastic biography of her called Radical friend Um. But
Speaker 1: I would love to hear your reflections on Amy Post
Speaker 1: as a Quaker in Rochester, New York, because she's at
Speaker 1: the she's at the center of women's rights conventions, she's
Speaker 1: helping to run the underground railroad through Rochester, and she's
Speaker 1: there to be the midwife for spiritualism. Can you tell
Speaker 1: us a little bit about Amy Post? Absolutely. Amy post
Speaker 1: is one of my favorite historical characters. She was in
Speaker 1: the room where it happened, not just for spiritualism, but
Speaker 1: for so many new developments in radical, radical religion in
Speaker 1: the area of Rochester, New York. And she was a
Speaker 1: critical figure in spiritualism because of the degree of respect
Speaker 1: that she commanded. So she became kind of a mentor
Speaker 1: to the Fox Sisters. She lent credibility to this development
Speaker 1: of spiritualism by her friendship with the Fox Sisters and
Speaker 1: also by her um by the fact that spiritualism spread
Speaker 1: through her net work of radical Quakers. And these were
Speaker 1: Quakers who were champing at the limits of Quakerism, who
Speaker 1: were not content to observe the restrictions that the Society
Speaker 1: of Friends placed on them. They were not content to
Speaker 1: restrict their friendships to members of the Society of Friends.
Speaker 1: They were not content to restrict their religious practices to
Speaker 1: members of their own faith. And Spiritualism helped them push it,
Speaker 1: the push it the limits of what the Quaker faith permitted,
Speaker 1: both socially through their organization and who they could communicate
Speaker 1: with with, but also religiously what the sources could be
Speaker 1: of spirit knowledge. So she's in Rochester, New York. Um,
Speaker 1: could you briefly describe what made Rochester, New York the
Speaker 1: right place to serve as this kind of nerve center,
Speaker 1: not just for spiritualism, but the women's movement and some
Speaker 1: of these other things that were going on at the
Speaker 1: same time, what made Rochester the place where things arrived
Speaker 1: and sprang out from Rochester with that area was called
Speaker 1: the burned Over District. Upstate New York was known as
Speaker 1: the burned Over District in the early nineteenth century, and
Speaker 1: what that meant is that it had been burned over
Speaker 1: by the spirit that waves of the flames of revival
Speaker 1: had passed through Upstate New York, leaving in their wake
Speaker 1: newly organized evangelical churches and religious communions um, Mormonism, Seventh
Speaker 1: Day advent Is Um, new religious developments UM that seemed
Speaker 1: to find root and receptivity in that arena. It's no
Speaker 1: coincidence that Upstate New York and Seneca Falls in particular,
Speaker 1: which is a small village not far from Rochester. It's
Speaker 1: no coincidence that these areas gave birth both to spiritualism
Speaker 1: and to the women's rights movement. And there were a
Speaker 1: lot of individuals who participated in the very formative moments
Speaker 1: and events of both these two movements. Many of these
Speaker 1: people were involved in the abolition movement. Many of them
Speaker 1: were involved in Quaker networks. They were people who were
Speaker 1: pressing the idea of individual agency so that they really
Speaker 1: um press the idea of the autonomy of the visual
Speaker 1: in both a spiritual and a political sense. So this
Speaker 1: is what we see in the radical wing of the
Speaker 1: abolition movement, people like um William Lloyd Garrison, who really
Speaker 1: saw abolition as an extension of the idea that it
Speaker 1: is heretical for one individual to assert ownership over another individual,
Speaker 1: because they are asserting the authority of God over one
Speaker 1: of God's creatures. And only God has the authority or
Speaker 1: the ability to hold that control. And human beings, be
Speaker 1: they white or black, be they men or women, must
Speaker 1: ultimately place their allegiance in God alone, and not to
Speaker 1: any human master, whether it be a slave master, whether
Speaker 1: it be a priest or minister, whether it be a
Speaker 1: husband who had authority, legal authority over his wife in
Speaker 1: almost every way at this time. He owned his wife's property,
Speaker 1: had authority over her physical person, over her children, over
Speaker 1: where she lived. And all of these questionings of personal
Speaker 1: and religious authority were intertwined so that the appeal of
Speaker 1: a form of religiosity that could cut through all forms
Speaker 1: of religious authority by saying you the individual, or if
Speaker 1: not you, then the fourteen year old girl in your household,
Speaker 1: can cut through the structures of religious authority. You don't
Speaker 1: have to ask a minister, you don't have to ask
Speaker 1: your Sunday school teacher, you don't have to even consult
Speaker 1: the authority of the Bible. You can learned directly what
Speaker 1: the divine order is, what happens when we die. You
Speaker 1: can find out directly. You can have direct knowledge of
Speaker 1: ultimate truth. And in uh, Well, eighteen forty eight is
Speaker 1: a is a is a key year. Key year. Frederick
Speaker 1: Douglas and William c Now arrive in Rochester to launch
Speaker 1: the North Star, and they share an office with Amy
Speaker 1: Post and the New York Anti Slavery Society. Right, but
Speaker 1: more happens in eighty eight in the history of the
Speaker 1: women's rights movement and in the history of spiritualism. Can
Speaker 1: you maybe give us a capsule of those events? What
Speaker 1: happens in eighteen forty eight? Well, eighteen forty eight is
Speaker 1: a pivotal year in many many arenas, um specifically in
Speaker 1: relation to spiritualism and women's rights. Eighty eight is when
Speaker 1: the Fox sisters first to hear the wrappings that they
Speaker 1: attribute to the spirit of a dead peddler, that they
Speaker 1: hear wrappings on the walls and furniture of their small
Speaker 1: cottage in Hydesville, New York, and that when it is
Speaker 1: taken seriously by adults, ultimately gives rise to the spiritualist movement.
Speaker 1: Is also when the first women's rights convention is called
Speaker 1: in Seneca Falls, New York by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Katie Stanton, and the very table where they right the
Speaker 1: famous Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence
Speaker 1: that gives the first real statement of women's rights in
Speaker 1: North America. That table, which is now in the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: had been rocked by spirits. It had been uh, the
Speaker 1: wraps had rapped on that small mahogany table, and many
Speaker 1: of the same people were present at both of these events.
Speaker 1: You have to remember that the Seneca Falls Convention, when
Speaker 1: Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Katie Stanton put out the call
Speaker 1: for the Seneca Falls Convention, an unprecedented call. It was
Speaker 1: to discuss the civil, political, and religious rights of women. Now,
Speaker 1: what are religious rights and who cares about religious rights? Well,
Speaker 1: they did. They were just as concerned with their rights
Speaker 1: in their religious spheres as in the civic and political spheres.
Speaker 1: They cared about whether they could vote in their churches
Speaker 1: as much as whether they could vote for the school
Speaker 1: board or the Senate, And they were excluded from lay
Speaker 1: rights in the churches in the same way that they
Speaker 1: were excluded from voting rights in civil society. They were
Speaker 1: eluded from ordination in the churches the same way they
Speaker 1: were excluded from elective office in civil society. So religious
Speaker 1: rights offered direct parallels. They were excluded from religious education,
Speaker 1: from seminaries and um Bible scholarship the same way that
Speaker 1: they were excluded from law schools and secular colleges. So
Speaker 1: there was an exact parallel that was discussed at Seneca Falls,
Speaker 1: and the Seneca Falls Convention declared that when men usurp
Speaker 1: the rights of authority in the church by excluding women
Speaker 1: from the clergy and from religious office, that they step
Speaker 1: into the place of God by excluding women from religious rights.
Speaker 1: So we often think of Seneca Fall as the birth
Speaker 1: of the woman's suffrage movement. In fact, women's suffrage was
Speaker 1: a very controversial proposition at Seneca Falls, and not everyone
Speaker 1: supported it. It was ultimately included, but it was hotly debated.
Speaker 1: And religious rights, I'm sure we're also controversial, but no
Speaker 1: more so than women's suffrage. And we don't think of
Speaker 1: Seneca Falls so much as the birthplace of religious rights,
Speaker 1: but when they came to write the history of women's suffrage,
Speaker 1: they included those developments, and in many religious documents. For example,
Speaker 1: the fiftieth anniversary History of the Women's Missionary Movement traces
Speaker 1: its origins to the Seneca False Convention and to the
Speaker 1: women's rights movement that they saw that as the point
Speaker 1: of origin for women demanding equality in the churches and
Speaker 1: in the religious sphere. What is it that takes what
Speaker 1: starts out as just kind of a neighborhood kerfuffle where
Speaker 1: the Fox parents are talking with their daughters and get
Speaker 1: some neighbors to come and hear this sound and try
Speaker 1: to figure out what it is. What takes that neighborhood
Speaker 1: event into the public sphere and and and forms it
Speaker 1: into a new religious movement. How does it grow so fast? Well,
Speaker 1: there's several answers to that question. The most immediate one
Speaker 1: is the Post family. Amy and Isaac Post, who took
Speaker 1: the Fox sisters into their home and gave them credibility.
Speaker 1: And they were so much at the network, They were
Speaker 1: so much at the node point of this large network
Speaker 1: of abolitionists, radical reformers, and radical Quakers at information spread
Speaker 1: quickly through them, but it spread faster than that once
Speaker 1: the news of the spirit rappings was out and once
Speaker 1: adults had taken it seriously, And that is a key
Speaker 1: point I personally, Actually, this is not a personal conviction.
Speaker 1: It's my conviction as a historian. Um My own view
Speaker 1: is that there is too much emphasis on the Fox
Speaker 1: Sisters in the history of spiritualism. They are an important moment,
Speaker 1: and they are uh. Their initial wrappings did give birth
Speaker 1: to a new religious movement. But if the adults around
Speaker 1: them had not taken this seriously as spirit communication, it
Speaker 1: would have made no difference. That these adolescent girls heard
Speaker 1: these rappings and attributed them to a dead peddler. It
Speaker 1: would have made no difference if adults hadn't taken them seriously.
Speaker 1: If adults who were well respected and and we're known
Speaker 1: for their religious piety hadn't taken them seriously, it would
Speaker 1: have made no difference. But once that happened, once this
Speaker 1: had been taken seriously by adults, spirit communication addressed a hunger.
Speaker 1: And it's possible that the democratization of spirituality in the
Speaker 1: second grade awakening loosened up the receptivity of the American
Speaker 1: public so that they were willing to hear spirit communication
Speaker 1: from sources that had not been previously considered credible. Yet,
Speaker 1: there were other kinds of hungers that spiritualism was addressing
Speaker 1: as well, the hunger for consolation. This is a time
Speaker 1: when families are becoming more connected to younger children. Infant
Speaker 1: mortality is on the decline, and therefore one can afford
Speaker 1: to become more invested in one's love for an infant
Speaker 1: child or a young child, even though the mortality rate
Speaker 1: before five years old continued to be higher than after that.
Speaker 1: So losing a young child was often in the purview
Speaker 1: of women. Women were the attendance of both birth and death,
Speaker 1: and children died in their arms at home, and so women,
Speaker 1: as they came to place more hope that their children
Speaker 1: might survive, were more and more devastated by their loss
Speaker 1: and looked for a form of consolation after their death.
Speaker 1: There's another cultural asports or social movement, uh that's important
Speaker 1: in this era that we're going to explore, or that
Speaker 1: we that we are exploring in the show. Um that
Speaker 1: is part of that network that spread spiritualism and that's
Speaker 1: the utopian the radical utopian movement. Um. Those radical Utopians
Speaker 1: were on the ground floor with spiritualism, so to speak. UM,
Speaker 1: could you briefly describe the religious impulse behind many of
Speaker 1: the utopian communities like Northampton and Hopedale and Fruitlands of
Speaker 1: Nida Brook Farm. There was a religious impulse behind this
Speaker 1: this movement in these communities that were being founded. How
Speaker 1: important were the Utopian collectives for spreading spiritualism in your view? Well,
Speaker 1: the utopian communities all had a religious impulse and they
Speaker 1: were all different. Many have had a charismatic leader who
Speaker 1: had a religious or utopian vision that was guiding. UM.
Speaker 1: The particular community formation Hopedale, which was one of the
Speaker 1: most important for the spread of spiritualism, was considered a
Speaker 1: community based on what they called practical Christian socialism. And
Speaker 1: of course, a communitarian ideal and a socialist ideal go
Speaker 1: hand in hand because of the idea of shared property.
Speaker 1: Holding property in common is a common element of utopian settlements.
Speaker 1: And believe me, socialism is a lot easier if you
Speaker 1: have a religious motivation. Without a religious motive, not that
Speaker 1: many people are willing to share property UM or to
Speaker 1: live in harmony to to place their desires as individuals.
Speaker 1: And remember the American Constitution in shrines property as an
Speaker 1: individual right that is uh equivalent to the pursuit of happiness.
Speaker 1: So to give up the notion that individual property equals
Speaker 1: happy us you have to be very deeply committed and
Speaker 1: piety religious fervor go a long way towards making that possible.
Speaker 1: Of course, the Quakers are the most successful communitarian religious
Speaker 1: experiment in American history. That is beyond the communities of
Speaker 1: Roman Catholic religious orders. Utopian communities are looking for truth.
Speaker 1: They are composed of zealous people deeply committed to the
Speaker 1: pursuit of truth, and spiritualism offers as a vehicle for
Speaker 1: truth that is on the present. Truth is always available.
Speaker 1: If you have access to a spirit medium, a spirit
Speaker 1: might speak through them at any time. And it's who
Speaker 1: is ready to sacrifice and dedicate their life to a
Speaker 1: zealous pursuit of truth. It's a very appealing to have
Speaker 1: access to spirit communication. So spiritualism grows and gathers followers
Speaker 1: through the networks of radicals and utopians. You know that
Speaker 1: network that Amy post was at this important point in um.
Speaker 1: But it also inspires serious opposition UM pretty early on,
Speaker 1: and then through its growth it was gathering members, but
Speaker 1: it was also making enemies. UM. Can you talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about the opposition to spiritualism and maybe if
Speaker 1: any come to mind, who were the antagonists of spiritualism
Speaker 1: in the early days. All of the things that made
Speaker 1: spiritualism attractive to radicals made it abhorrent to conservatives, social, political,
Speaker 1: and theological. And I shouldn't even say they needn't even
Speaker 1: be theological conservatives. They need only be people committed two
Speaker 1: religious institutions, because spiritualism is really a form of religious anarchy.
Speaker 1: If anyone can make contact with the spirits of the dead,
Speaker 1: you don't need religious authority, You don't need a religious hierarchy,
Speaker 1: you don't need the authority of the Bible. You can
Speaker 1: if you can go directly yourself or through a medium,
Speaker 1: to religious authority that has the potential to undercut all
Speaker 1: kinds of institutional authority, religious and otherwise. Spirits tend to
Speaker 1: be antarchic, not all of them, but they have that
Speaker 1: potential because they could say anything, and they can disagree
Speaker 1: with each other. If you don't have a scripture, a
Speaker 1: written scripture in which doctrine is recorded. What is to
Speaker 1: keep spirits from spa outing different doctrines at different times
Speaker 1: and places. Nothing? And they did, and uh they often.
Speaker 1: Spirits often affirmed political or social views of the mediums
Speaker 1: or their communities. And they had the potential for very
Speaker 1: radical communities, particularly communities that were questioning the legitimacy of
Speaker 1: traditional marriage. That we're questioning traditional gender hierarchies. UM. Spirits
Speaker 1: had the potential to affirm the religious validity of departures
Speaker 1: that were extremely threatening to established faiths, and they did so.
Speaker 1: Free love is one of the movements that is often
Speaker 1: associated with spiritualism, and that was anathema to establish Christian Church,
Speaker 1: which saw the sanctity of marriage as the bulwark of
Speaker 1: society and um something that the Church gives birth to, sanctifies,
Speaker 1: and depends on. So questioning of the a traditional view
Speaker 1: of marriage was extremely threatening. Spiritualists espoused the idea of
Speaker 1: spiritual affinity. And I don't want to attribute this to
Speaker 1: all spiritualists because they were not all equally social radicals. Um,
Speaker 1: some could be quite conservative socially, but social radicals tended
Speaker 1: to be spiritualists, and they found in spiritualism and in
Speaker 1: the idea of spiritual affinity UH support for the aggregation
Speaker 1: of traditional marriage. The idea of spiritual affinity was the
Speaker 1: idea that we have one ordained match in spirit life,
Speaker 1: and that if we are if we marry someone who
Speaker 1: is not our true spirit match, our true spirit affinity,
Speaker 1: that marriage is immoral. And so if a woman should
Speaker 1: be forced into marriage or should voluntarily marry for reasons
Speaker 1: other than true love, then her marriage was illegitimate, and
Speaker 1: the same for a man. So spiritualists saw the way
Speaker 1: that women were forced into marriage by economic necessity as
Speaker 1: a religious impropriety because it was coming between the natural
Speaker 1: attraction of a man and a woman that is ordained
Speaker 1: by God. To who say that they could be joined
Speaker 1: by the state, and that a husband could be given
Speaker 1: legal access to his wife's body by a ceremony of
Speaker 1: the church and the state, whether or not she felt
Speaker 1: in her soul, in her being a spiritual affinity for
Speaker 1: that man that made her want to unite with him
Speaker 1: and with his body in sexual congress. So you can
Speaker 1: start to hear much of American society getting upset. It's
Speaker 1: not hard to see how these very controversial um and
Speaker 1: non conforming ideas were upsetting to the majority of religious
Speaker 1: groups and to societies that saw church and state and
Speaker 1: family as mutually supporting institutions. Mm hmm. Let's let's follow
Speaker 1: this line for a few minutes. Because in the lives
Speaker 1: of some of the prominent spiritualist mediums like Cora Scott
Speaker 1: hatch Um and Victoria Woodhull, Uh, they were not just
Speaker 1: hearing these doctrines but living through often brutal marriages. Um.
Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about uh, kind of
Speaker 1: the maybe a little more about the state of marriage
Speaker 1: kind of at mid century, and um, maybe what they
Speaker 1: meant by free love, because maybe our ideas are a
Speaker 1: little more inflected by maybe the seventies than what a
Speaker 1: spiritualist would mean by free love in the in the
Speaker 1: eighteen forties, fifties, sixties, seventies. That's absolutely right. The idea
Speaker 1: of free love in the nineteenth century was very limited
Speaker 1: because it was not an idea that said you should
Speaker 1: be able to have sex with whomever you please. Was
Speaker 1: not that by a long shot. The idea of free
Speaker 1: love is that you should be spiritually free to love
Speaker 1: your true affinity, whether you are legally married to that
Speaker 1: person or not. So the freedom to love that was
Speaker 1: espoused by nineteenth century, free love advocates was a freedom
Speaker 1: of the individual, and it gave particularly women freedoms that
Speaker 1: they did not have under the law. What free love
Speaker 1: meant in the nineteenth century and to most spiritualist advocates,
Speaker 1: was that if a woman did not feel spiritual affinity
Speaker 1: to her husband at that time, she had no obligation
Speaker 1: to have sexual relations with him. She had full autonomy
Speaker 1: over her whole being and she needed to determine for
Speaker 1: herself whether the person her husband or not, who join
Speaker 1: with her sexually was her true affinity or not, and
Speaker 1: spiritualists advocates were very harsh, particularly women. Reformers were very
Speaker 1: very harsh on men who complained that they should be
Speaker 1: able to have sex out of wedlock because they were
Speaker 1: bound in marriage to someone who was not their true
Speaker 1: affinity and they had met an unmarried woman who was
Speaker 1: their true affinity. Well. Women spiritualist reformers had no time
Speaker 1: for this sort of thing at all. They were very,
Speaker 1: very firm with the idea that if you are married
Speaker 1: to someone who is not your spiritual affinity, you are
Speaker 1: committing a crime of the spirit and you need to
Speaker 1: come forward in the light of day and declare that
Speaker 1: and declare who your spiritual affinity is. So they were
Speaker 1: advocates of divorce and some of the early which was
Speaker 1: not readily available um Andrew Jackson Davis's wife, Mary Loved Davis,
Speaker 1: was married at the time that they met, and she
Speaker 1: moved to Indiana to receive a divorce, a legal divorce,
Speaker 1: and that was the only place where she could do
Speaker 1: that at that time. But to get a divorce in
Speaker 1: order to be able to unite with her spiritual affinity,
Speaker 1: she risked the custody of her children, and she risked
Speaker 1: never seeing her children again. And women had no guarantee
Speaker 1: of custody, which was usually understood to go with the
Speaker 1: father at that time. So this was not a an
Speaker 1: opportunity casual liaison, at least that is not how the
Speaker 1: women reformers understood it. Andrew Jackson Dave self later discovered
Speaker 1: that the woman who had been his partner on the
Speaker 1: spirit on the Spiritualist lecture circuit for so long and
Speaker 1: his partner in reform, the beloved reformer, Mary Loved Davis.
Speaker 1: He later concluded that she was not his true affinity
Speaker 1: and that he wanted to sever his relation with her
Speaker 1: and Mary, a younger woman. Spiritualists were shocked by this,
Speaker 1: and it really, Um, it was very detrimental to Andrew
Speaker 1: Jackson Davis is standing in the community. And it gives
Speaker 1: you some of the irony of these radical ideas that
Speaker 1: sexual will liberation in the nineteenth century was a much
Speaker 1: more complicated idea, given the legal climate regarding divorce, regarding
Speaker 1: child custody, and the lack of birth control. It was
Speaker 1: not what we think of as the sexual freedoms of
Speaker 1: the sixties and seventies. Let's keep talking gender and power
Speaker 1: a little bit. Uh. There are mediums as spiritualism grows, Uh,
Speaker 1: like the Fox Sisters, Cora Victoria, Emma Brittain who comes
Speaker 1: to the United States as Emma Harding before she's married. Um.
Speaker 1: There are also mediums like Andrew Jackson Davis or Daniel
Speaker 1: Douglas Whome. Um. How was the were the experiences of
Speaker 1: male and female mediums different in the eighteen fifties. Certainly
Speaker 1: there is a stereotype that the passivity of the female
Speaker 1: medium could make her a victim of a um, a
Speaker 1: male merchandiser, and there were examples of this. Cora Daniels.
Speaker 1: It's hard to know what to call her. Her Cora Scott,
Speaker 1: Hatch Tappan, Daniels Richmond to use all of her four
Speaker 1: married names, as well as her h unmarried names Scott,
Speaker 1: under which she became first entered the public record as
Speaker 1: a public medium. Her marital history encompasses just about every
Speaker 1: possibility of the relationship between a female medium and a
Speaker 1: husband or um a male figure. Her first husband was
Speaker 1: a promoter who really um was much older than her
Speaker 1: and wanted to be her manager. She was very appealing
Speaker 1: and successful public medium and trance speaker. She had beautiful
Speaker 1: golden curls, and she was very popular on the lecture circuit.
Speaker 1: She had a golden voice of silver tongue, and people
Speaker 1: flocked to her public performances. She was written about in
Speaker 1: the newspaper, and she was an enormously desirable and appealing figure.
Speaker 1: And her first husband did, to some extent take financial
Speaker 1: advantage of that UM and that became a stereotype of
Speaker 1: the innocent young woman who is subject to spirit control
Speaker 1: and to the control of a domineering male manager who
Speaker 1: will exploit her talents. UM. Her subsequent husbands were quite different.
Speaker 1: Her next two husbands, her second and third husband's, were reformers.
Speaker 1: They were people who traveled with her on reform circuits.
Speaker 1: They were both involved with both abolition and Indian rights
Speaker 1: and UH, they really saw their marriages to her as
Speaker 1: um part of their reform activism, and they traveled with
Speaker 1: her as partners on the reform circuit um, so they
Speaker 1: were kind of peers. Then her fourth husband, Richmond, really
Speaker 1: was in the service of her mediumship, and he published
Speaker 1: volumes and volumes of her spirit lectures. He employed typographers
Speaker 1: to take down what she said in trance and uh
Speaker 1: to trance to write it out, and he prepared these
Speaker 1: volumes and volumes of her spirit extures for publication. So
Speaker 1: he really devoted himself to promoting her mediumship, not to
Speaker 1: exploit it, but out of respect for what she had accomplished.
Speaker 1: By this time, she was a mature woman, well respected
Speaker 1: nationally as a leader in spiritualism, and he married her
Speaker 1: with knowing that that's who he was marrying, a very
Speaker 1: very powerful woman, leader, well known on the public platform.
Speaker 1: Another another woman whose story we're following through Unobscured is
Speaker 1: I'm a Hearting of Britain. She begins her life performing
Speaker 1: music as a young woman, makes contacts in occult circles,
Speaker 1: playing music for their for their meetings and music halls
Speaker 1: in France and in England, then comes to the United
Speaker 1: States and performs on the stage before UM. There there's
Speaker 1: some testimony that she was converted to spiritualism Matta John
Speaker 1: Conklin seance and Conklin is someone we followed to the
Speaker 1: White House, uh later on in our story. UM, but
Speaker 1: she gives us a look at someone who came from
Speaker 1: performing on stage to spiritualist mediumship. Can you talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about the way that her life gives us
Speaker 1: a glimpse into that side of spiritualism and public performance.
Speaker 1: Spirit mediums could be subjected to really dreadful test conditions,
Speaker 1: and because they depended on passivity to allow spirits to
Speaker 1: communicate through them, they often found themselves in positions where
Speaker 1: they could be exploited. They were tied up, placed in
Speaker 1: bags um nail that were nailed to the ground in
Speaker 1: order to create what we're called test conditions where they
Speaker 1: could not fraudulently communicate with spirits. Um. The idea of
Speaker 1: a test takes us back to the idea of spiritualism
Speaker 1: as scientific investigation. So they're trying to they're trying to
Speaker 1: construct conditions for a laboratory experiment where they're controlling the variables,
Speaker 1: and controlling the variables could mean subjecting a lone woman
Speaker 1: too very dire physical constraints. The other point of similarity
Speaker 1: between a spirit medium, particularly a trance speaker, and a
Speaker 1: performer is that it was okay to look at them.
Speaker 1: Spirit mediums trans lectures were often the first woman that
Speaker 1: people in the towns where they spoke had seen as
Speaker 1: send the public platform. Remember that the theater was not
Speaker 1: a morally neutral environment. Women of the theater were considered
Speaker 1: to be public women. They were considered to be women
Speaker 1: of the night, and not uh not necessarily women of
Speaker 1: the moral caliber that one would meet at one's church
Speaker 1: or want one's son to marry. The idea of a
Speaker 1: woman appearing in public was a breach of protocol. So
Speaker 1: the very some of the early women who made public
Speaker 1: statements and became known for them in the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: would give them to their brothers to read because they
Speaker 1: did not want to appear in public. They did not
Speaker 1: want to be the object of the male gaze. They
Speaker 1: did not to be in what was at that time
Speaker 1: called a promiscuous assembly, that is, an assembly of men
Speaker 1: and women where men could look at women freely. Women
Speaker 1: were considered to be appropriate to the private sphere, to
Speaker 1: the sphere of the home, of the protections of domesticity,
Speaker 1: and being public. A public woman was often another word
Speaker 1: for a prostitute. That is, there was a moral equivalence
Speaker 1: between a woman being in public rather than private and
Speaker 1: selling her body. So women mediums walked a delicate line
Speaker 1: between maintaining their moral stature, which they felt very strongly about,
Speaker 1: because to be a vehicle for spirit communication, one had
Speaker 1: to maintain one's purity m so that one could be
Speaker 1: an an appropriate vehicle for spirit. A spirit, a pure
Speaker 1: spirit would not want to communicate through a person who
Speaker 1: is not pure in mind, in heart, and soul. So
Speaker 1: the purity of the medium was very, very important, and
Speaker 1: it was a little bit suspect if a woman ascended
Speaker 1: the public platform to speak in public. But trance speakers
Speaker 1: had a kind of out that other women didn't have
Speaker 1: if they spoke in public, because trance speakers, we're not
Speaker 1: claiming to speak for themselves. They were claiming that this
Speaker 1: was an external intelligence speaking through them, and intelligence that
Speaker 1: they did not control. So they were not speaking through
Speaker 1: their own authority already, they were not speaking on their
Speaker 1: own authority. It was one else's authority that was so
Speaker 1: they were not breaking the taboos of propriety that a
Speaker 1: woman should not speak in public in the same way
Speaker 1: that an actress was who appeared on stage in the theater,
Speaker 1: or an abolitionist lecturer. Remember the first women who spoke
Speaker 1: as abolitionists, the grim Key Sisters, had rotten fruit thrown
Speaker 1: at them because of the scandal of a woman preaching
Speaker 1: in public. It was considered to be immoral. So when
Speaker 1: spirit medium spoke in public, they were in this kind
Speaker 1: of intermediate space where they were not speaking for themselves,
Speaker 1: they were speaking for someone else. Another one of the
Speaker 1: amazing people that were following with this story is Sojourner Truth. Um,
Speaker 1: and she's a pub speaker. Can you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about the dynamics of speaking in public for her? Well?
Speaker 1: So Journer Truth really draws our attention to the extent
Speaker 1: to which race contributes to the construction of femininity. So
Speaker 1: journal Truth wasn't subject to the norms of femininity because
Speaker 1: she was not granted the privileges of femininity as someone
Speaker 1: who had been enslaved, as someone who had been in
Speaker 1: domestic service. Um. As someone who lacked legal rights. As
Speaker 1: an African American UM, she did not have the privileges
Speaker 1: that Christian morality ostensibly accorded to women. So her blackness
Speaker 1: conflicted with the norms of femininity that were accepted at
Speaker 1: this period in the minds of those who refused to
Speaker 1: accord her those privileges. Sojourner Truth had other sources of
Speaker 1: strength to appeal to, and in Sojourner Truth, who is
Speaker 1: such a fascinating figure, we see the intersection of a
Speaker 1: number of streams that are intermingling in American religion at
Speaker 1: this time. For one thing, we see the impetus uh
Speaker 1: the the way that African traditions come in through the
Speaker 1: African American population UM and how African traditions come spirit
Speaker 1: presence is a point of intersection between American spiritualism and
Speaker 1: many of the traditions that came with enslaved Africans to
Speaker 1: the New Worlds, where the idea of spirit presence, the
Speaker 1: idea of communication with with ancestors, is very much part
Speaker 1: of many many African traditional practices. In so Turner Truth,
Speaker 1: we see someone who um has African traditions as part
Speaker 1: of her heritage, who is exposed early in her life
Speaker 1: to the proliferation of Christianities that is happening in the
Speaker 1: Burned Over period. Who becomes um ensconced in a community
Speaker 1: of with a charismatic figure, who um is attracting people
Speaker 1: to all kinds of novel ideas. But ultimately she becomes
Speaker 1: a spiritualist, and she does that when she is a
Speaker 1: public figure. So, for so Turner Truth, she's been through
Speaker 1: a number of parts of her religious evolution already by
Speaker 1: the time she encounters spiritualism, but it intersects with her
Speaker 1: role as a reformer and with the reform communities that
Speaker 1: she is part of. So for her, she interestingly is
Speaker 1: someone who shows a different kind of vulnerability that spiritualism
Speaker 1: can address. Whereas white women could be empowered by spirits
Speaker 1: to do things that they were considered incapable of because
Speaker 1: of their innocence, so journal Truth was empowered to do
Speaker 1: things that she was considered incapable of because of stereotypes
Speaker 1: about black femininity and about blackness, and about her ignorance,
Speaker 1: her presumed ignorance as a presumed illiterate black person. So
Speaker 1: spirits could empower her to do things she was assumed
Speaker 1: to be incapable of because of her lack of access
Speaker 1: to education and the authority of education, just as a
Speaker 1: young girl might draw on spirit authority because she was
Speaker 1: uneducated like a she didn't have the education that someone
Speaker 1: with biblical learning or ministerial training would have. Someone who
Speaker 1: was African American was also barred from those same kind
Speaker 1: of opportunities that an adolescent girl was. And like an
Speaker 1: analystent girl, African Americans were considered to be less governed
Speaker 1: by rationality, which was considered to be incompatible with mediumship.
Speaker 1: Masculinity education was considered to make the personality too organized
Speaker 1: for a spirit to use you as a vehicle. But blackness, femininity, youth, ignorance,
Speaker 1: innocent these were all qualifications for spirit mediumship. Could you
Speaker 1: say a bit more about what black spiritualists like sojourn
Speaker 1: or Truth or Harriet Jacobs or Harriet Wilson would have
Speaker 1: faced in even in abolitionist circles and utopian and reformist movements. Um,
Speaker 1: there were forces at work in these movements that maintained
Speaker 1: racist attitudes and relationships. Uh, they faced racism and bigotry
Speaker 1: even among other abolitionists. There's been some good writing about
Speaker 1: the way that their mediumship was in conflict with even
Speaker 1: these new ideas of authority and hierarchy. Do you have
Speaker 1: any comments on that that you could offer. Spiritualism provided
Speaker 1: the opportunity to cut through any kind of structure of authority,
Speaker 1: be it political authority, the authority of gender hierarchy, the
Speaker 1: authority of racial hierarchy, the authority of the slave system
Speaker 1: of human bondage, the authority of the state, the authority
Speaker 1: of the church, the authority of the Bible of the clergy.
Speaker 1: All of these structures of authority presented opportunities for spiritualism
Speaker 1: to cut through them. So somebody who is suffering under
Speaker 1: any of these forms of authority could be empowered by
Speaker 1: spirit to oppose them and to be liberated from them. Now,
Speaker 1: there is no reason to think that someone who was
Speaker 1: liberated by the spirit from one source of authority wouldn't
Speaker 1: necessarily see the harm or the hierarchy, or the immorality
Speaker 1: of all sources of authority. In fact, those who said
Speaker 1: that all sources of authority are equally challenged by spiritualism
Speaker 1: were the most controversial. Those were the figures who challenged
Speaker 1: the authority of marital bonds, of private property, of all
Speaker 1: kinds of controversial things, so you can see how there
Speaker 1: is gradation that spirit you might spiritualism might empower you
Speaker 1: just to cut through one source of authority or fifteen,
Speaker 1: and there's going to be people everywhere on that continuum.
Speaker 1: I don't find it a bit surprising that spiritualists and
Speaker 1: abolitionists were not completely liberated from all sources of hierarchy.
Speaker 1: In fact, I don't believe that any human being is.
Speaker 1: I believe that a hundred years from now, whatever sources
Speaker 1: of authority or oppression we are blind to today, the
Speaker 1: historians of those next generations will be critiquing the people
Speaker 1: who think they're so woke today for whatever it is
Speaker 1: that we are blind to by our own circumstances. That
Speaker 1: was certainly the case for the abolitionists and the reformers
Speaker 1: of the nine century. For someone like Harriet Jacobs, spiritualist
Speaker 1: networks would provide communities where she would find some sympathetic people,
Speaker 1: some people who accept her mediumship, who were willing to
Speaker 1: follow her leadership, who were willing to support her in
Speaker 1: her spiritual quest, but not all, whereas in another environment
Speaker 1: everyone would have opposed her. Spiritualism is often positioned at
Speaker 1: as an interesting midpoint between, to put it crudely, faith
Speaker 1: and science. I mean, we've talked a little bit about
Speaker 1: that already. Um, empiricism and belief in the spirits, kind
Speaker 1: of touching on technology, that kind of thing. Um For believers,
Speaker 1: it kind of offered empirical proofs for belief in the
Speaker 1: spirit world. For materialists or religious dissenters, it was a
Speaker 1: you know, a phenomenon of the natural world, or may
Speaker 1: be seen a little bit differently. Could you describe whether
Speaker 1: this kind of liminal zone or this this space that
Speaker 1: spiritualism occupies, was it more of an asset or a
Speaker 1: liability for spiritualists in the eighteen fifties. Wow, that's a
Speaker 1: fascinated question. There are many scientists who were deeply committed
Speaker 1: to investigating spiritual communication, and many scientists who were deeply
Speaker 1: invested in a Societies for psychical Research were founded both
Speaker 1: in the United States and in Great Britain and in Europe,
Speaker 1: and these were composed of scientifically mind people, including many
Speaker 1: scientists who were committed to exploring the possibility of spirit
Speaker 1: communication under very strict test conditions. I was it an
Speaker 1: asset or a liability? I don't really know how to
Speaker 1: answer that. Because many scientists are people of faith. Many scientists,
Speaker 1: both then and today see a sympathy between scientific inquiry
Speaker 1: and religious faith. They see the miraculousness of God's creation
Speaker 1: as the subject of scientific inquiry and something that is
Speaker 1: imbued with natural laws that can be discovered through scientific investigation.
Speaker 1: So there's always been a mix of science and faith.
Speaker 1: I don't think that middle space will ever disappear, and
Speaker 1: certainly many religion just figures have viewed scientific inquiry and
Speaker 1: continue to do so as a path to the discovery
Speaker 1: of God's law and the intricacy and miraculousness of creation
Speaker 1: that embodies the natural law of of of God's mind.
Speaker 1: M We talked earlier about some of the opposition to
Speaker 1: spiritualism that would be mustered through the church theologically um
Speaker 1: or we talked about it in terms of a conservatism
Speaker 1: of wanting to, you know, defend the borders or the
Speaker 1: margins of what was a traditional hierarchy UM but there
Speaker 1: were other kinds of antagonisms to spiritualism, maybe out of
Speaker 1: those motives, but that took the form of sometimes antagonistic investigations.
Speaker 1: How did spiritualists react when in Uh say that the
Speaker 1: fox sisters relative Mrs Culver published an account of Maggie
Speaker 1: admitting in the eighteen fifties that her raps were staged
Speaker 1: or um to something like the one investigation by the
Speaker 1: Buffalo University faculty, after which professors published a report that
Speaker 1: said the girls were making the sounds with popping joints. Um.
Speaker 1: What kind of affected these approaches to spiritualism that were
Speaker 1: kind of exposures or something like that? Um? What did
Speaker 1: this early negative press, Uh? What influence did it have
Speaker 1: on spiritualism as a movement. Because spiritualism is a religion
Speaker 1: that never had an orthodoxy or a religious hierarchy that
Speaker 1: could say who's in and who's out, Spiritualists were really
Speaker 1: free to respond in any way that they want to. Certainly,
Speaker 1: these exposures created a crisis of faith for some people.
Speaker 1: For some people, it simply meant that while those mediums
Speaker 1: were not genuine, it was worth continuing their investigations until
Speaker 1: they were satisfied that they found a medium who was genuine.
Speaker 1: And fraud is a very fraud subject in spiritualism, because
Speaker 1: there are no questions that there have been fraudulent mediums
Speaker 1: who perpetrated deception on the public and profited by it.
Speaker 1: And that there have been gullible people who were embarrassed
Speaker 1: and disserviced by fraudulent mediums. Now, that is also true
Speaker 1: of many professions, law and medicine, for example. UM not
Speaker 1: to mention politics provides opportunities for deception and double speak
Speaker 1: and misrepresentation. Does that mean that all participants in it
Speaker 1: have those motives and are dishonest? These are the questions
Speaker 1: that spiritualists asked about their mediums, and to my mind,
Speaker 1: as a historian, I feel completely confident in saying that
Speaker 1: the majority of mediums were absolutely sincere in their belief
Speaker 1: that they were channeling communications from the spirits of the dead.
Speaker 1: I do not believe that the American public is gullible enough,
Speaker 1: or that there are enough good liars to create a
Speaker 1: movement of this size and impact and durability solely through fraud.
Speaker 1: You also had um some antagonism from the press. The
Speaker 1: New York Times often published mocking articles about spiritualism. The
Speaker 1: Boston Career mustered the forces of the Academy against Spiritualism
Speaker 1: and hosted their own investigation with Harvard faculty UM. But
Speaker 1: in many other cases, spiritualists had allies in the mainstream press.
Speaker 1: Horace Greeley was famously a spiritualist, and and spiritualists themselves
Speaker 1: often lefted the chance to spread their message through journalism. Um.
Speaker 1: How important was the spiritualist use of periodicals for the movement? Well,
Speaker 1: you've just come on one of my favorite topics, the
Speaker 1: spiritualist press of the ninete century. Um, the the revolution
Speaker 1: in communication, the print revolution of the mid ninete century
Speaker 1: was absolutely crucial to the spread of spiritualism because spiritualists
Speaker 1: were radicals. They were radical about something. They were religious radical,
Speaker 1: if not radicals, concerning slavery or or other reforms of
Speaker 1: the day, and so they were likely to be in
Speaker 1: the minority opinion of the small towns in which they
Speaker 1: lived across America. What periodicals provided for them was the
Speaker 1: ability to form non geographic communities, communities of like minded
Speaker 1: people who did not see each other face to face.
Speaker 1: So you really begin the Um, you see the seeds
Speaker 1: of the virtual communities that have become so important in
Speaker 1: the digital age. In the periodical press of the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: you could subscribe to a periodical published in Chicago or
Speaker 1: Milwaukee or Boston, no matter where you lived, and you
Speaker 1: would receive it through the mail, and you would see
Speaker 1: on it the names of other subscribers in your small
Speaker 1: town or in your state, and it would give you
Speaker 1: the potential to communicate with them, to create a network
Speaker 1: in your community, to learn when speakers might be coming
Speaker 1: to your state, when a speaker might come to your
Speaker 1: to the capital of your state, that you could go
Speaker 1: and here and meet other like minded people and receive
Speaker 1: further intelligence about the religious movement that you adhere to.
Speaker 1: So the periodical press was enormously important. It also spread
Speaker 1: news about traveling mediums and trance speakers did travel on
Speaker 1: a circuit, and they didn't have the religious organizations, you know,
Speaker 1: their Methodist circuit rider had the church to set the
Speaker 1: circuit that they would ride and announce where they would
Speaker 1: be on such and such a date and on such
Speaker 1: and such a schedule. Spirit mediums didn't have that. They
Speaker 1: often traveled on faith. That is, they would um be
Speaker 1: hosted by spiritualist families in the communities that would invite them.
Speaker 1: And the the compensation that they received was what was
Speaker 1: taken at the door, what what contributions were taken up
Speaker 1: when they passed the hat, and they really didn't know
Speaker 1: how they would be received, how they would get money
Speaker 1: to travel to their next destination. It was not an
Speaker 1: easy life being a spirit medium, particularly being a woman
Speaker 1: traveling alone, UM by public transportation on trains and stage
Speaker 1: coaches to smaller places. UM. It was was an arduous movement,
Speaker 1: and the newspapers were critical to spreading word and making
Speaker 1: this possible. M UM. In your view, what were some
Speaker 1: of the most significant periodicals spiritualist periodicals. I don't think
Speaker 1: many historians would UM contradict me if I said that
Speaker 1: the two most important periodicals were The Banner of Light,
Speaker 1: published in Boston, the longest lived and most widely read
Speaker 1: of the spiritualist periodicals, followed by the Religio Philosophical Journal
Speaker 1: in Chicago, which was really the voice of the Midwest. UM.
Speaker 1: And then there were many periodicals published and smaller communities periodicals.
Speaker 1: Publishing a periodical was a form of ministry. UM. Editors
Speaker 1: and publishers often did not make a profit on the
Speaker 1: periodicals that they published, but they understood this as a
Speaker 1: way of spreading the word of the spiritual manifestations and
Speaker 1: of joining like minded people into a community of faithful
Speaker 1: m That's great. I'm glad you said that, because we're
Speaker 1: focusing on the Banner of Light as Our as our.
Speaker 1: I mean, it does seem pretty clear that it's the biggest.
Speaker 1: But you know, we're following the editors of the Banner
Speaker 1: of Light to their to New Orleans on the trip
Speaker 1: that they take down there in the eight fifties and
Speaker 1: looking at the star Carmon Nique and you know some
Speaker 1: of the things that we're going with spiritual north anyway,
Speaker 1: So that's fantastic. Let's talk more about another issue that
Speaker 1: brings spiritualism or race right to the to the surface
Speaker 1: of spiritualism, UM, which you mentioned earlier, and that is
Speaker 1: Native American UH Indian spirit controls spirit guides. UM. How
Speaker 1: do you think about this practice which was so common
Speaker 1: in spiritualism. What is the myth of the vanishing race?
Speaker 1: And how did Indian spirit guides reflect or deflect that
Speaker 1: myth in the years after the Civil War. So spirit
Speaker 1: mediums very much participate in the myth of the vanishing race,
Speaker 1: which is the idea that the indigenous inhabitants of North
Speaker 1: America are part of the past and that there cultures
Speaker 1: and populations will give way, um to the new inhabitants
Speaker 1: of North America coming from Europe. The UH, the myth
Speaker 1: of the vanishing race. I don't actually like that term,
Speaker 1: the myth of the vanishing race um, because it's not
Speaker 1: Europeans did slaughter millions of Indian people. So it's not
Speaker 1: just a myth. That's also a military and economic enterprise UM.
Speaker 1: But there's also a mythological underpinning that is critical to
Speaker 1: the American enterprise, to the notion of the United States
Speaker 1: as a nation with a manifest destiny ordained by God
Speaker 1: two bring American civilization and Christianity across the continent from
Speaker 1: sea to shining Sea. And that idea requires a spiritual
Speaker 1: justification for replacing indigenous inhabitants with inhabitants from Europe as
Speaker 1: well as people brought here in slavery from it m HM.
Speaker 1: So it requires a a spiritual understanding that can justify
Speaker 1: that displacement and the displacement of people's from their lands
Speaker 1: and the gifting of that land to new inhabitants. Do
Speaker 1: you have a general way of that that when you're
Speaker 1: talking about Native spirit guides Indigenous spirit guides, um, how
Speaker 1: do you describe it in general terms? The practice Indian
Speaker 1: spirit guides are part of a longer American tradition that
Speaker 1: dates back long before the spiritualist religion emerges in the
Speaker 1: eighteen forties. Remember that the Patriots who dumped the tea
Speaker 1: into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party dressed up
Speaker 1: as Indians and used hat wielded hatchets while they were
Speaker 1: dressed as Indians, with the idea that the Indian embodied
Speaker 1: both independence and a lack of British sovereignty, but also
Speaker 1: savagery and a wild response to uh tea being the
Speaker 1: epitome of civilization as well as a staple necessity of
Speaker 1: British life in the colonies. Um So, this notion of
Speaker 1: the Indian as a symbolic representation was well imbued in
Speaker 1: American culture before spiritualism comes on the scene, and spiritualists
Speaker 1: participate in ideas about romantic ideas about Indians that are
Speaker 1: have already begun to develop um and are developing in
Speaker 1: American literature. Lydia Mariah Child writes a romance about uh
Speaker 1: a woman who falls in love with an Indian and
Speaker 1: then the Indian mysteriously fades away into the sunset while
Speaker 1: she develops a more appropriate romantic relationship with a white man.
Speaker 1: And so there is this ability in America can culture
Speaker 1: to espouse positive views about Native Americans at the same
Speaker 1: time that one assumes that they are people of the
Speaker 1: past who are dying away and who are appropriately part
Speaker 1: of the past that is part of the land of
Speaker 1: the spirits. So spiritualists Indian guides of mediums often describe
Speaker 1: a place they describe as the summer Land, a land
Speaker 1: of natural beauty and an undisturbed natural land where Indians
Speaker 1: live in peace and harmony as do white people, and
Speaker 1: where there is no conflict between the indigenous inhabitants and
Speaker 1: those who have displaced them. So it spiritualists participate in
Speaker 1: the fantasy that Indigenous America and a European dominated a
Speaker 1: Erica can live in harmony and can be part of
Speaker 1: the same spiritual vision. UM. But that's a fantasy, and
Speaker 1: spiritualists also participate in the process of displacement. Now, spiritualists
Speaker 1: are always reformers and they are very active in Indian
Speaker 1: rights reform movements. They are an extremely critical of massacres
Speaker 1: of Indians. They protest against them. There is one spiritualist
Speaker 1: named Samuel Tappan in particular, who is an Indian rights
Speaker 1: reformer and um who is on the Commission that is
Speaker 1: charged to invest investigate the Sand Creek Massacre, when Cheyenne
Speaker 1: and Arapaho people who were under government protection were massacred
Speaker 1: by the U. S. Army during the Civil War, and
Speaker 1: he's extremely critical of American Army officials who perpetrated that massacre.
Speaker 1: He spends his life trying to find justice for the
Speaker 1: people who were killed there and for the Cheyenne, Indians
Speaker 1: and Rabbajos who were harmed by that. But he at
Speaker 1: the same time views the United States as a westward movement,
Speaker 1: that is, the spiritual progress, and he at the same
Speaker 1: time participates in the progress of the railroad westward, the
Speaker 1: progress of the oil industry, the industries that require Native land,
Speaker 1: that require Native people to be displaced in order for
Speaker 1: them to succeed. So spiritualists are in a um an
Speaker 1: odd position in my view, where they are espousing Indian rights,
Speaker 1: but they are also perpetrating stereotypes that place Indians in
Speaker 1: the past, in a romantic past, where Indians are appropriately
Speaker 1: living in the spirit world and providing support for spirit
Speaker 1: mediums um rather than exercising sovereignty in the present. When
Speaker 1: the Civil War began, how did spiritualists respond so Spiritualists
Speaker 1: had many of the same responses that other reformers did
Speaker 1: during the Civil War. That is, they supported the war effort,
Speaker 1: they supported abolition, but they were so committed to a
Speaker 1: new age of spiritual communication, when human beings would be
Speaker 1: able to evolve farther within phut from spiritual wisdom, that
Speaker 1: they wanted to keep their radical reforms and the Sisterhood
Speaker 1: of Radical Reforms alive during the Civil War. So when
Speaker 1: most of the reformers like Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Lucretia
Speaker 1: Mott and lots of the other figures dropped everything to
Speaker 1: support the Women's Loyal League and support the Union and
Speaker 1: create a highway of vegetables that women reformers in Chicago
Speaker 1: sent from the North to the the scurvy laden soldiers
Speaker 1: in the Union Army, spiritualists kept having spiritualist conventions when
Speaker 1: most reformers had just dropped everything but the war effort.
Speaker 1: And that meant that at spiritualist conventions, the reforms of
Speaker 1: free love and vegetary and ism and women's rights we're
Speaker 1: still being discussed, even though women's rights conventions had been
Speaker 1: dropped for the duration of the war. So you see
Speaker 1: this cadre of extremely radical reformers still advocating for women
Speaker 1: at a time when everyone else thinks there's something more
Speaker 1: important to talk about. You mentioned already the way that
Speaker 1: the massive scale of death during the Civil War influenced
Speaker 1: the growth of spiritualism. Can you talk a little more
Speaker 1: about how the war and is aftermass shaped attitudes towards
Speaker 1: spiritualism kind of generally, and did that differ north to south.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that it differed north to south. A
Speaker 1: huge amount of carnage during the Civil War nor South, black, white,
Speaker 1: free enslaved. A huge number of people lost their lives,
Speaker 1: and you can see how that would generate interest in
Speaker 1: communication with the dead. But there's something else going on
Speaker 1: during the Civil War, which is the enormous carnage in bodies.
Speaker 1: And Drew Faust has written about the changing attitudes towards
Speaker 1: the dead body. The people try to retrieve the bodies,
Speaker 1: and that's how we get the whole embalming industry that
Speaker 1: has its origins in the Civil War. And so attitudes
Speaker 1: towards death are shifting a little bit at this period,
Speaker 1: and spiritualism is going to kind of move with that
Speaker 1: and around it and in it and through it and
Speaker 1: out of it. So some people now are going to
Speaker 1: be more focused on the body and the wanting to
Speaker 1: retrieve the body and bury the body and have a
Speaker 1: place in a cemetery where they can go to be
Speaker 1: reunited with their loved one. But you know that some
Speaker 1: people who are taking advantage of the rural cemetery movement
Speaker 1: and burying that loved one in a family plot, are
Speaker 1: going to want to communicate with them and are going
Speaker 1: to go to a seance or to a spirit medium
Speaker 1: to try to do that. A lot of people died.
Speaker 1: We really have never seen anything like that on American
Speaker 1: soil since then, when death was close at hand, and
Speaker 1: uh so, of course some people are going to be
Speaker 1: inspired to seek communication during that period, including in the South.
Speaker 1: And we do see spiritualism in the South in this period,
Speaker 1: never to the same extent as in the North, but
Speaker 1: we do see it there as well. Mm hmm. Victoria
Speaker 1: Woodhall was someone who had her family had been involved
Speaker 1: in various often criminal practices, and in the years after
Speaker 1: the Civil War. Um Mary Gabriel's bio of hers one
Speaker 1: that we're using, and she talks about her family pick
Speaker 1: and clean the bones of the communities in the border
Speaker 1: states that we're grieving. Um. But then Victoria goes to
Speaker 1: New York and she and her sister Tenny become personal
Speaker 1: clairvoyance for Cornelia's Vanderbilt. And then Victoria becomes a more
Speaker 1: prominent figure in the women's movement by virtue of that
Speaker 1: new position, that new influence, that backing, that money, and
Speaker 1: she starts her her stock brokerage. Can you talk about
Speaker 1: the way that Victoria wood Hall enters the women's movement
Speaker 1: at the end of the eighteen sixties and seventies. Well,
Speaker 1: Victoria Woodhall is a very dynamic and appealing and attractive figure,
Speaker 1: and practically everyone who comes in contact with her has
Speaker 1: strong feelings about her of one type or another, and
Speaker 1: a lot of suffrages see her as a fantastically appealing
Speaker 1: and articulate spokeswoman for their cause. She attracts a lot
Speaker 1: of attention, and uh, they see that as an asset
Speaker 1: that the movement can benefit from and needs. Now, I
Speaker 1: have to admit I have not read the Mary Gabriel
Speaker 1: biography of Victoria wood Hall, and I really need to
Speaker 1: because I'm a huge fan of her new book on
Speaker 1: the Ninth Street. Women of Abstract Expressionism. UM so I
Speaker 1: really want to know what she had to say about
Speaker 1: Victoria Woodall. But I personally am not a Victoria Woodhall fan.
Speaker 1: I view Victoria Woodhull primarily as an opportunist who would
Speaker 1: find sisterhood with any movement that provided her an opportunity
Speaker 1: for self advancement and an cause that she felt she
Speaker 1: could advocate where she would have a group of people
Speaker 1: who would stand behind her and follow her and adulate
Speaker 1: her and place her in leadership. She certainly found that
Speaker 1: both in the women's rights movement and in the spiritualist movement.
Speaker 1: She didn't really make a lasting mark on either one
Speaker 1: of them. She made a lot of trouble for a
Speaker 1: lot of people. She got a lot of people in
Speaker 1: trouble through their affiliations with her UM and her association
Speaker 1: and advocacy of free love, which tainted other people with
Speaker 1: the the taint of immorality, whether they had earned it
Speaker 1: or not. UM. So, I might not be depending on
Speaker 1: what it is you want to say about Victoria Woodall,
Speaker 1: I might or might not be the best interview. Well, no,
Speaker 1: that's okay. I'm interested on a couple of events that
Speaker 1: she was involved in. Your point of view on the
Speaker 1: when Victoria Woodhall travels from New York to Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty nine. She goes to the Women's Rights
Speaker 1: Convention that's in Washington, and she comes away frustrated by
Speaker 1: the internal divisions in the women's movement. Can you describe
Speaker 1: the conflicts in the women's movement at the time that
Speaker 1: Victoria was observing that made her feel like the women's
Speaker 1: movement wasn't going to make the kind of difference that
Speaker 1: she thought she could. So at the end of the
Speaker 1: Civil War, the women's movements divide over whether the needs
Speaker 1: of African Americans for legal rights are so urgent that
Speaker 1: they should take precedence over the rights of women, or
Speaker 1: whether women and African Americans should be enfranchised together. The
Speaker 1: men's rights advocates who advocated for abolition and for the
Speaker 1: Union cause always believed that they were part of a
Speaker 1: movement that always advocated for the rights of women, and
Speaker 1: that they were fighting simultaneously for the human rights and
Speaker 1: equal rights of blacks and of women black and white.
Speaker 1: That turned out not to be the case, and that
Speaker 1: was a very very divisive issue at the end of
Speaker 1: the Civil War and the women's movement um experienced tragic
Speaker 1: divisions over that conflict. So what I can also say,
Speaker 1: um about Victoria Woodhulls election as president of the National
Speaker 1: Spiritualist Association. Spiritualism was never a movement that prospered through organization.
Speaker 1: In the twentieth century, the Spiritualist Association of Churches would
Speaker 1: become a denomination. But at the time that Victoria wood
Speaker 1: Hall was elected to presidency of a national organization of spiritualists,
Speaker 1: it was really not a meaningful or representative body. So
Speaker 1: although she relished being elected president of anything, it didn't
Speaker 1: really make her a leader in spiritualism, and her affiliation
Speaker 1: with spiritualism was brief. How would you describe the relationship
Speaker 1: between the women's rights movement and spiritualism in the eighteen
Speaker 1: seventies as we're kind of marching forward out of the
Speaker 1: eighteen sixties into that next decade, and you mentioned the
Speaker 1: trouble that Victoria brought to the movement by her by
Speaker 1: association with her. Um, what rolled the spiritualists teaching on
Speaker 1: sex and marriage and uh Mrs Satan as she was
Speaker 1: sometimes called. Um, What role did those teachings about sex
Speaker 1: and marriage and spiritualism play in attracting and repelling advocates
Speaker 1: of women's rights to the spiritualist movement. Well as the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century moved on, all sorts of religious nonconformity showed
Speaker 1: appeal to advocates of women's rights. So women's rights advocates
Speaker 1: are investigating and becoming involved with Theosophy, with Christian Science,
Speaker 1: with a diversity of New Thought and New Age movements
Speaker 1: that a spouse equal rights for women and that permit
Speaker 1: women's leadership. So we have we have movements espousing a
Speaker 1: diversity of religious opinions that are in some way critic
Speaker 1: call of traditional gender roles that women's rights advocates are
Speaker 1: exploring in different times and places and to different extents.
Speaker 1: So when Elizabeth Katie Stanton comes to right or I
Speaker 1: should say, to edit her own critique of the Bible
Speaker 1: as sexist in the eight nineties, the Women's Bible an
Speaker 1: incredibly controversial document. Most all of the women who are
Speaker 1: willing to cooperate with her on that are members of
Speaker 1: unconventional religious movements, and that would include Spiritualists, Theosophice, New Thought,
Speaker 1: Christian Science, and other movements. Now, Elizabeth Katie Stanton really
Speaker 1: wasn't very happy about that, because there were lots of
Speaker 1: Christian women's rights advocates who were not exploring new religious movements,
Speaker 1: and it was Stanton's hope that they would support a
Speaker 1: critique of the sexism of the Bible. People like Francis
Speaker 1: Willard and other women who advocated women's suffrage but were
Speaker 1: also leaders of popular Christianity and so they had a
Speaker 1: much larger following than the Women's Suffrage Association. Stanton hoped
Speaker 1: that they would support a critique of the Bible that
Speaker 1: would show the parts of the Bible that spoke about
Speaker 1: women's rights and what they said those women. The Christian
Speaker 1: advocates of women's rights and of women's suffrage, would not
Speaker 1: collaborate with Stanton on this project because for them, the
Speaker 1: Bible was above reproach. They saw the Bible as a
Speaker 1: source of women's rights and they didn't want to talk
Speaker 1: to anybody who was going to critique it, and they
Speaker 1: knew that they would lose credibility if they did so.
Speaker 1: When Stanton gathers all these unconventional people, including spiritualists, to
Speaker 1: critique the Bible, she becomes incredibly unpopular, and the Women's
Speaker 1: Suffrage Association itself condemned Stanton for doing that. In the seventies.
Speaker 1: There are also battle lines drawn within spiritualism. Um we
Speaker 1: have the rise of materialization mediums. Can you talk about
Speaker 1: what we what we mean by that when we look
Speaker 1: back and we say materialization mediums. And in your book
Speaker 1: he wrote about um the way that there was a
Speaker 1: kind of division. I think you wrote about it in
Speaker 1: terms of trance mediums and materialization mediums. And if you
Speaker 1: if you could address what was going on with their conflict.
Speaker 1: Sure so. Try mediums communicate the presence of spirits through
Speaker 1: their words, through their intelligence, through the wisdom that they
Speaker 1: want to impart to human beings. Materialization manifestations claim to
Speaker 1: prove spirit presence through the physical presence of the spirit
Speaker 1: in the room. Now, what is the physical spirit? The
Speaker 1: physical presence of the spirit. Spirit is usually seen as
Speaker 1: opposed to matter, So how could spirit manifest physically? And
Speaker 1: different mediums demonstrated the physical presence of mediums in different ways.
Speaker 1: Some they would have of musical instruments in the room
Speaker 1: and they would invite the spirit drum the guitar in
Speaker 1: a darkened room and demonstrate their physical presence that way.
Speaker 1: Some materialization seances allowed people to experience being touched by
Speaker 1: a spirit having a departed loved one brush your cheek
Speaker 1: with her fingers in a darkened spirit closet, and then disappear.
Speaker 1: Some materialization mediums exuded a spirit substance from their bodies
Speaker 1: called ectoplasm. So all of these attempts to demonstrate the
Speaker 1: physical presence of a here it suggest an opportunity for fraud,
Speaker 1: and many of the materialization seances gave rise to serious
Speaker 1: accusations of fraud and discrediting of both mediums and spiritualists
Speaker 1: who accepted communications through materialization manifestations. Whereas trans mediums were
Speaker 1: looking to communicate wisdom, not to communicate the embodied presence.
Speaker 1: Now they also attempted to give tests to prove that
Speaker 1: a particular spirit was who they said they were. So
Speaker 1: they would ask questions, or they would ask an investigator
Speaker 1: to ask questions that only someone who knew that person
Speaker 1: during life would be able to underto answer, or that
Speaker 1: only that person themselves would be able to answer. Um.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't that they weren't trying to prove spirit
Speaker 1: presence in the same way that the materialization seances were,
Speaker 1: but they were not um. They did not make recourse
Speaker 1: to elaborate closets and spirit cabinets and um guitars and
Speaker 1: violins that uh, the materialization mediums said were necessary for
Speaker 1: spirit communication to occur. You you said a few minutes
Speaker 1: ago that spiritualism never prospered through organization and in the
Speaker 1: in this period, uh, can you describe how gendered power
Speaker 1: namics led trans mediums to oppose the formation of the
Speaker 1: American Association of Spiritualists. Well, once you start having electing
Speaker 1: national delegates, which is what the National Association of Spiritualists
Speaker 1: attempted to do, then the qualities of a spirit medium
Speaker 1: are no longer going to be the most valuable qualities
Speaker 1: in a religious leader, because the person who you want
Speaker 1: to send to a national meeting to argue for your
Speaker 1: point of view is not necessarily the innocent, naive, pure
Speaker 1: passive young girl who is a spect who is effective
Speaker 1: in allowing a spirit of a deceased family member to
Speaker 1: communicate with you. So, once you start having organizations, you
Speaker 1: want people who are good conscious speakers, who are good organizers,
Speaker 1: who are strategic thinkers, UM, who have good financial sense,
Speaker 1: who can hold the purse strings, all of the more
Speaker 1: masculine characteristics that mediums were not considered to possess. So
Speaker 1: mediums felt that the wisdom of angels was being locked
Speaker 1: out when spiritualists started to form organizations. Even so, and
Speaker 1: I find this so interesting in light of that UH
Speaker 1: Cora is one of the people who all the way
Speaker 1: to the end of the century is working to form
Speaker 1: stable institutions for spiritualists. Can you talk about her role
Speaker 1: in UH in building churches and helping a certain tradition
Speaker 1: of spiritualism to form as a denomination. That's a great point.
Speaker 1: She is such a capacious figure. Cora starts as an
Speaker 1: innocent teenage girl UM who is a medium for Indian
Speaker 1: spirits and other kinds of spirits and and for deceased
Speaker 1: family members, and she moves through a long life. I
Speaker 1: described how she develops, how her career develops through her
Speaker 1: husband's and the kind of evolution of her husband's but
Speaker 1: she's also going through a personal evolution to become a
Speaker 1: figure of authority. And she does become the vice president
Speaker 1: of the National Spiritual Association, and she really is able
Speaker 1: to make that transition to a more organized group and
Speaker 1: to a role as pastor. So she has a settled
Speaker 1: congregation in Chicago, and that is something that UM is
Speaker 1: more like a church that will be part of a congregation.
Speaker 1: Then the Spiritualist associations where mediums traveled and they often
Speaker 1: didn't speak in a settled congregation. They often were speaking
Speaker 1: in uh universalist church that was being made available for
Speaker 1: the occasion, or in a town hall, or in some
Speaker 1: other kind of free church that they were permitted to
Speaker 1: youth to use, because without organization, they couldn't finance their
Speaker 1: own structure, they couldn't pay their own minister, they couldn't
Speaker 1: support a settled clergy member. But Cora really made that
Speaker 1: transition to being the pastor of an established Spiritualist church
Speaker 1: in Chicago. There was another kind of discourse that was
Speaker 1: growing in significance and that it seems to me, and
Speaker 1: I'd love to get your views on this, crashed into
Speaker 1: Spiritualism in this in these and eighties and towards the
Speaker 1: end of the century, which is um growing uh interest
Speaker 1: in new ideas about abnormal psychology and the formation of
Speaker 1: the discipline of neurology, and there are these other explanations
Speaker 1: for what's going on with a trance, with a fit,
Speaker 1: with a vision that it seems often because some of
Speaker 1: the early neurologists were very antagonistic to spiritualism competed for
Speaker 1: explanation of what a spirit voice was. Can you can
Speaker 1: you describe what was going on like with neurology and
Speaker 1: how these ideas of a new medical discipline uh competed
Speaker 1: or related with spiritualism. Well, we see the rise not
Speaker 1: only of neurology but also of gynecology as a medical specialty.
Speaker 1: And you have to remember that the study of women
Speaker 1: or of the female reproductive system takes off from a
Speaker 1: tradition that sees the womb as the cause of hysteria
Speaker 1: in women, that women lose their sanity because the womb
Speaker 1: is wandering around the body. But there certainly is an
Speaker 1: association of gynecology and neurology as having common interests in
Speaker 1: identifying the sources of female insanity, and mediumship is considered
Speaker 1: to be one of those. There are medical textbooks that
Speaker 1: describe the disease of mediomania that are um written by
Speaker 1: early gynecologists and neurologists. So there is this notion that
Speaker 1: women are more susceptible to irrationality and insanity, and that
Speaker 1: mediumship is an outgrowth of that, and that it is
Speaker 1: not a manifestation of spirit presence, but rather that mediumship
Speaker 1: is a manifestation of insanity, and there certainly were cases
Speaker 1: where people were committed to mental asylums where spiritualists were
Speaker 1: because of their conviction that they were communicating with spirits.
Speaker 1: Now that is not completely an artifact of the nineteen century.
Speaker 1: I have heard similar theories advanced in the twentieth century
Speaker 1: where I have heard um schizophrenia, for example, associated with
Speaker 1: mediumship because one of the things that mediums do that
Speaker 1: you hear when you visit a spirit medium, you will
Speaker 1: hear them speak in different voices. When different spirits speak
Speaker 1: through them, and they sound different, it sounds like they're
Speaker 1: different people speaking. And that is something that is also
Speaker 1: reported in schizophrenia, that when a different personality inhabits a person,
Speaker 1: they speak in a different voice. I have heard speculation
Speaker 1: about schizophrenia and mediumship, have no qualification to comment on it,
Speaker 1: but that idea certainly continues that people who hear voices
Speaker 1: are crazy. So there still are people who hear voices
Speaker 1: and believe that they are spirits, and there are still
Speaker 1: people who think that those people are crazy. Um. But
Speaker 1: as these medical specialties are developing for the first time
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, spiritualism but set against them, and
Speaker 1: there definitely is a a head on collision by the
Speaker 1: authority that is being wielded, and the medical doctors need
Speaker 1: to assert in order to create a new medical specialty,
Speaker 1: because in fact, the medical doctors are also somewhat suspect.
Speaker 1: They dig up cadavers and dissect them, and uh, they
Speaker 1: are also struggling for authority and credibility in the same
Speaker 1: way that spirit mediums are. Not in the same way,
Speaker 1: but perhaps in a related dynamic um to what is
Speaker 1: going on in the religious sphere. We opened our conversation
Speaker 1: in the thirties and forties with religious practices like camp
Speaker 1: meetings and started preaching in a new privileging of religious enthusiasm,
Speaker 1: second grade awakening. Spiritualism kind of grew out of religious ferment.
Speaker 1: What was its place in American religion at the end
Speaker 1: of the century. Well, at the end of the century,
Speaker 1: religious ferment continues. It looks a lot different, and we're
Speaker 1: heading towards new religious ferment and ferment in the early
Speaker 1: twenty century where heading towards the fundamentalists liberalism crisis in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, where American religion is really going to
Speaker 1: become very polarized between theological liberals and conservatives and social
Speaker 1: liberals and conservatives, and the mainstream churches are going to
Speaker 1: turn one way, and some of the newer evangelical denominations
Speaker 1: and movements are going to turn another. UM. But there
Speaker 1: is a third element here, and it is new thought,
Speaker 1: which is overlapping really with everything UM. New thought is
Speaker 1: is UM part of the notion of progress in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century and spiritual evolution. And there are lots of
Speaker 1: developments and there continue to be new religious movements. We
Speaker 1: in the late nineteenth century. We have UM in we
Speaker 1: have the World's Colombian Exhibition, where we have Americans exposed
Speaker 1: to many of the religions religions of Asia for the
Speaker 1: first time, and we have Swamy's and other Asian religious
Speaker 1: leaders recruited to come to the United States and teach
Speaker 1: Americans about their faith. And so we have the whole
Speaker 1: movement of Theosophy which is attempting, attempting to combine the
Speaker 1: wisdom of the East and make it accessible to westerners.
Speaker 1: UM and spiritualism moves in and out of all of
Speaker 1: these developments, because spiritualism is always available, you can always
Speaker 1: talk to the dead, and in any movement whether you
Speaker 1: think that wisdom is going to come from Egypt or
Speaker 1: from Tibet, or from South America or from Australia, you
Speaker 1: can always make contact with the spirit from one of
Speaker 1: those places who can give you wisdom that draws on
Speaker 1: those traditions and on esoteric um practices from another part
Speaker 1: of the world. So as the world becomes smaller in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, spiritualism continues for a vehicle of all
Speaker 1: kinds of channeled documents and channeled wisdom, and it continues
Speaker 1: to move into and out of many other new religious movements.
Speaker 1: When our listeners are hearing this narrative history from the
Speaker 1: fifties to about of spiritualism and its place in American life,
Speaker 1: what do you hope as a historian that they will
Speaker 1: take away from this history or learn from it. I
Speaker 1: hope that they will be open to people whose views
Speaker 1: are different from their own. And I hope that they
Speaker 1: will be open to people who they may have dismissed
Speaker 1: as crazy because of their religious beliefs, but whose religious
Speaker 1: convictions allowed them to act with conviction in ways that
Speaker 1: we now find enormously admirable. And they would not have
Speaker 1: been able to do that without the spiritual inspiration and
Speaker 1: liberation that they found in spiritualism. That's beautiful. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much. You're welcome. Are we done? We're done? Hey, folks,
Speaker 1: it's Aaron here. I hope today's interview helped you deepen
Speaker 1: your understanding of everything involved in the world of spiritualism.
Speaker 1: But we're not done yet. We have more interviews to
Speaker 1: share with you, so stick around after this brief sponsor
Speaker 1: break to hear a preview of next week's interview. Next
Speaker 1: time on un Obscured, she will not accept the fact
Speaker 1: that her son has been sold, and she basically campaigns
Speaker 1: all over the neighborhood of Ulster County, rilling people about this,
Speaker 1: and especially the Quakers because it is against the law.
Speaker 1: But what enslaved woman has the wherewithal to challenge the
Speaker 1: slave power. Well Bell did, and she got help from
Speaker 1: the Quakers, and she eventually was able to get her
Speaker 1: son back, but she raised a huge ruck buss A
Speaker 1: lot of the slaveholders were angry with her for having
Speaker 1: done this. The Quakers were adamantly anti slavery, and they
Speaker 1: helped her get a lawyer and eventually get this boy back.
Speaker 1: Within a year he was back, and when she got
Speaker 1: him back. She went to court and got him back.
Speaker 1: He was covered with bruises. He told her that the
Speaker 1: man who had purchased him, who was also a New
Speaker 1: Yorker who had moved to Alabama, had had his horse
Speaker 1: hoof the boy. The boy, her son's name was Peter.
Speaker 1: In the face, he had a big gash in his
Speaker 1: forehead where the man's horse had hoofed him. And she
Speaker 1: was so angry that she asked God for retribution, and
Speaker 1: she told him to render unto them double for everything
Speaker 1: they had done to her son. As far as she
Speaker 1: was concerned, that was her curse that she was leveling
Speaker 1: against this family. And within a few months, the woman
Speaker 1: who was married to the man who had sold her
Speaker 1: son and brutalized him, was killed by her husband, and
Speaker 1: in a very brutal way. He basically, according to the narrative,
Speaker 1: he had cut her wind pipe out in a drunken fit.
Speaker 1: Un Obscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced
Speaker 1: by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership
Speaker 1: with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season
Speaker 1: is all the work of my right hand man, Carl
Speaker 1: Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack.
Speaker 1: Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links
Speaker 1: to our other shows over at history unobscured dot com
Speaker 1: and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Monkey. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts for my Heart radiocs, iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. All