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Speaker 1: Welcomed Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minkey.

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Speaker 1: We end our series of interviews today with historian Molly McGary,

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Speaker 1: Associate Professor of History at the University of California Riverside.

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Speaker 1: Dr McGary has never been shy about sharing her research.

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Speaker 1: In fact, she has curated museum exhibits at the New

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Speaker 1: York Public Library, the Jewish Museum, and the University of

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Speaker 1: California's Museum of Photography. Dr McGarry has been honored by

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Speaker 1: the Smithsonian, the American Association of Museums, and the Society

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Speaker 1: of American Archivists, among others. So we were delighted when

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Speaker 1: she agreed to sit down with researcher Carl Nellis to

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Speaker 1: discuss her book, Ghosts of Futures Past and the power

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Speaker 1: of Spiritualism in America. I think that you'll find Dr

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Speaker 1: McGarry's incredible insight into spiritualism and her consideration for what

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Speaker 1: it still means today make this conversation the perfect place

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Speaker 1: to wrap up our series. Thanks so much for listening.

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Speaker 1: Without further ado, here's our interview with Dr Molly McGarry.

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Speaker 1: This is the Unobscured Interview series for season two. I'm

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Speaker 1: Aaron Mankey. To be a spiritualist was never one thing.

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Speaker 1: There were always many spiritualisms, both in the nineteenth century

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Speaker 1: and beyond. So some people came to the science tables

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Speaker 1: seeking answers, wanting deeply to commune with lost loved ones. Um.

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Speaker 1: Others were curious investigators, looking to see for themselves with

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Speaker 1: this new technology could materialize. UM. But what I found

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Speaker 1: in what I've been most struck by is that many

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Speaker 1: spiritualists took seriously the possibility of channeling of voices of

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Speaker 1: the dead as a means of both connecting with the

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Speaker 1: past and imagining both worldly and otherworldly futures. Mhm. Let's

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Speaker 1: talk a little bit about the world where that kind

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Speaker 1: of mindset and that kind of perspective and belief could

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Speaker 1: come into being. There are religious threads and technological, scientific, historical. Um.

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Speaker 1: Maybe let's start kind of on the political side and say, UM,

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Speaker 1: dig into what historians mean when they would talk about

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Speaker 1: something like Jacksonian democracy in American life in the decades

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Speaker 1: before spiritualism alived arrived on the scene. What do we

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Speaker 1: mean by that and what influence did something like a

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Speaker 1: democratic spirit or a Jacksonian democracy have on American religion well.

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Speaker 1: Jacksonian democracy, of course, refers to a series of political

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Speaker 1: movements around the term two term presidency of Andrew Jackson seven,

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Speaker 1: and the most significant change affected by Jacksonian democracy was

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Speaker 1: the extension of the franchise of the vote to white

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Speaker 1: men over the age of twenty one who did not

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Speaker 1: own property, so that that was new um. At the

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Speaker 1: same time, those same white men who had been granted

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Speaker 1: the vote became a key constituency in keeping others from

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Speaker 1: getting the vote. So the democracy of Jacksonian is um

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Speaker 1: was always severely limited. UM. I should probably also add

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Speaker 1: that Jacksonian democracy is also intimately tied with settled colonialism,

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Speaker 1: with Indian genocide, empire building, clearing the West for a

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Speaker 1: new manifest destiny. That said, there were real changes and

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Speaker 1: forms of democratization, but maybe to cast the lens a

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Speaker 1: little bit wider um. Spiritualism was born of an era

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Speaker 1: of enormous social change and fervent anti authoritian impulses. So

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Speaker 1: for many spiritualists, small group communalism took the place of

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Speaker 1: institutionalized religion. Alternative healing placed male dominated medicine UM, and

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Speaker 1: the voices of priests and ministers were drowned out by

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Speaker 1: the spirits themselves. So this is a very different imagination

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Speaker 1: and formation of antebellum democracy. And I would also add

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Speaker 1: that actually in terms of Democrats versus Republicans, that that

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Speaker 1: in many ways that what became the Republican Party UM

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Speaker 1: was much more important for sort of fueling the and

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Speaker 1: peopling spiritualism itself. So I could say more about that,

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Speaker 1: but I think it's it's interesting that spiritualists were actually

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Speaker 1: crucial to the Free Democratic Party and then present at

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Speaker 1: the eight fifty four birth of the Republican Party, and

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Speaker 1: spiritualism actually functions as a kind of political theology which

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Speaker 1: provided the third party insurgency that became the Republican Party

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Speaker 1: UM with a deeper, open ended theology of free labor

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Speaker 1: and a deep faith in the national rebirth the kind

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Speaker 1: of millennial Second American revolution him in that context where

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Speaker 1: it is a movement that's so um that that's breaking

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Speaker 1: down or cutting against so many of these hierarchies. It's

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Speaker 1: interesting that early on spirits like Benjamin Franklin and George

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Speaker 1: Washington William Penn, white male authority figures statesmen appear to

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Speaker 1: various sound circles and translactors. Uh. Sometimes they're addressing just

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Speaker 1: one or two people through the Fox Sisters, especially the

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Speaker 1: Post Household early on records. You know, Benjamin Franklin showing

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Speaker 1: up in Isaac Post has taken down their message. UM.

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Speaker 1: But sometimes they're addressing large crowds through a translactor like

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Speaker 1: Cora Scott. And you know, I'm just saying, this is

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Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson, and he says, m M, what do these

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Speaker 1: kind of appearances tell us about, um, A relationship to

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Speaker 1: a particular kind of past, to a history in a

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Speaker 1: kind of anti authoritarian collectivist movement. Yeah, that's that's a

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Speaker 1: great question. And I think I think what Spirits said

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Speaker 1: reveals most about who they said it to. So following

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Speaker 1: that logic, seance revelations provide a kind of unique window

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Speaker 1: into what at least a segment of nineteent century Americans

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Speaker 1: might have wanted to know, both from their own dead

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Speaker 1: ancestors as well as from other actors who people to

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Speaker 1: America has passed in its history. UM. The ghost of

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Speaker 1: George Washington often offered blessings to spirit circles, presumably as

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Speaker 1: a founding father, giving national foundational stature to this seemingly

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Speaker 1: marginal movement. UM. William Penn. The spirit of William Penn

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Speaker 1: often appeared with vaguely Quaker messages of peace and of

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Speaker 1: non violence. And Benjamin Franklin was ubiquitous, the ghost of

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Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin, the Great Inventor. Um. As an inventor and

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Speaker 1: as a scientist, his spirit is often called up to

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Speaker 1: offer scientific impromoter for a new spiritualist media. Literally, um,

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Speaker 1: the wraps and knox of mediums echo the spiritualist telegraph

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Speaker 1: and spiritualist media, both in terms of mediums, but in

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Speaker 1: terms of these other kind of technologies. Um, we're very

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Speaker 1: much ameshed in conversations and investigations into electricity and spiritualists

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Speaker 1: imagine themselves investigators who who wait Benjamin Franklin would offer

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Speaker 1: blessings to I'd love to hear a little bit more

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Speaker 1: about technology, because it does seem to be so significant

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Speaker 1: for spiritualism. Um, the telegraph, new canals, opening up railroads. Um.

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Speaker 1: Thinking about people's relationship to distance and time and communication changing,

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Speaker 1: even the explosion of periodicals at the at the moment,

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Speaker 1: Can you talk a little more about spiritualism and its

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Speaker 1: relation to ship to technology. Yes, Um, so spiritualism this

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Speaker 1: popular religious practice conducted through communication with the spirits of

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Speaker 1: the dead, was born a century and popularized during a

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Speaker 1: time of newly proliferating media technologies, when speaking to the

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Speaker 1: dead may have seemed no less strained than communicating across

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Speaker 1: cables or capturing the living on film. So spiritualism at

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Speaker 1: once transformed ordinary Americans into spiritual mediums that sense of media,

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Speaker 1: and transfigured new forms of information and technological media into

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Speaker 1: the means of the movement's proliferation. So just to sort

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Speaker 1: of set up to set up the dates um, Samuel

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Speaker 1: Morris's electrical telegraph was introduced in eighteen forty four, so

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Speaker 1: it predated the Fox sisters invention of spirit rapping, but

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Speaker 1: their communication, that is spirit rapping, with its telegraphic typing,

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Speaker 1: it's encoded sequences and subsequent inscriptions of messages from the dead,

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Speaker 1: was almost immediately dubbed the spiritual telegraph, as was one

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Speaker 1: of the first spiritualist newspapers, which extended the connection as

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Speaker 1: it spread the news in this atmosphere of all these

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Speaker 1: new technologies, communication technologies reaching places they hadn't been before.

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Speaker 1: There are also other ideas about the human mind and

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Speaker 1: the way that we think, uh, what's going on inside

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Speaker 1: of our bodies and our relationship of our bodies to

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Speaker 1: something like a mind, with mesmerism and phrenology and related

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Speaker 1: practices that were kind of horizons of applied science that

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Speaker 1: people were lecturing about on the circuit um. How did

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Speaker 1: how did these kind of understandings and practices around what

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Speaker 1: a human mind was contribute to the foundations for spiritualism. Well,

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Speaker 1: there are there were a number of investigators interested in

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Speaker 1: these new sciences of head reading and mind readings and

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Speaker 1: chronology and mesmerism in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties,

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Speaker 1: and they later became spiritualists, So that's the most obvious connection.

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Speaker 1: But like mesmerism and I think phrenology to a lesser extent,

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Speaker 1: spiritualism responded to a growing interest in ecstatic experiences, so

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Speaker 1: the fits, trances and visions experienced, and religious revivals. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And they were interested in using scientific thinking and explanatory

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Speaker 1: systems to to understand the relationship between mind and body. Um.

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Speaker 1: And as you point out, mesmerism and phrenology were studies

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Speaker 1: at the horizons of applied science in the early nineteenth century.

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Speaker 1: UM addressing the meanings and connections between the soul, brain,

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Speaker 1: and psyche. Uh that these are now considered pseudosciences or

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Speaker 1: debunked sciences was not inevitable. It certainly wasn't inevitable at

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Speaker 1: the time. And all of these all of these investigations

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Speaker 1: into that kind of nexus, that triangle between religion, science

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Speaker 1: and magic were working on the same kinds of questions.

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Speaker 1: Um they were imbricated and shifting during the nineteenth century

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Speaker 1: and arguably to this day. But what roses science and

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Speaker 1: what was designated as religion or spurned as magic or

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Speaker 1: superstition was always about gate keeping about what counts as

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Speaker 1: religion proper, that is, good religion, religion that stays in

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Speaker 1: its place, real science, testable in a laboratory, and large

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Speaker 1: questions about rationality, about modernity and how you know, seemingly

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Speaker 1: marginal practices like spiritualism might fit into this. But spiritualisms

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Speaker 1: spiritualists understood themselves as investigators, as popular scientists who attended

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Speaker 1: sciences under test conditions. So spiritualism supplied both the language

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Speaker 1: and the technology to test the unseen boundary between this

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Speaker 1: world and the next. Um. So eventually, as mesmerism and

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Speaker 1: phrenology faded over the course of the nineteenth century, spiritualism

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Speaker 1: eventually became another site for a sophisticated struggle over some

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Speaker 1: of the most vexing issues of the day. UM questions

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Speaker 1: about the nature of scientific knowledge and the possibilities and

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Speaker 1: I suppose also the limits of the scientific method in

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Speaker 1: understanding phenomenon like mediumship. There are magnetizers traveling around putting

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Speaker 1: people in chances. Um. There are uh, you know, abolitionist

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Speaker 1: movements that are connected operating underground railroad to places like

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Speaker 1: Rochester where the telegraph has arrived. And we come to

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Speaker 1: your eighty and you do a beautiful job in your

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Speaker 1: work of talking about the global context of what was

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Speaker 1: going on in eight Can you can you put the

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Speaker 1: Fox Sisters in the transatlantic context? For US? Eighty eight

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Speaker 1: was a year like few others. Um, maybe was a

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Speaker 1: year like this. There are very few years that have

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Speaker 1: this almost talismanic quality where the year itself contains so

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Speaker 1: much that it's it's hard to even understand the kind

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Speaker 1: of revolutionary impulses that are swirling around the globe. So

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Speaker 1: in the year eight alone, revolutions ignited across the world

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Speaker 1: from Aunts to Brazil, but also from Sicily to the

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Speaker 1: Austrian Empire, and revolutions swept the globe during that year. UM.

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Speaker 1: Of course, also in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published

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Speaker 1: the Communist Manifesto, opening with the line a specter is

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Speaker 1: haunting Europe, the specter of communism. Um. And in that

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Speaker 1: same year, two young girls heard communications from a very

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Speaker 1: different sort of specter, giving rise to a quite different revolution.

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Speaker 1: But the revolutionary impulses that fueled these very different international

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Speaker 1: global revolutions were a kind of world spirit. Um. Each

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Speaker 1: each of them had a different specific history that um,

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Speaker 1: you know, that explains why things broke out in different

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Speaker 1: places at different times. But the year itself was one

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Speaker 1: that if reading writings from those times, the sense of

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Speaker 1: revolutionary possibility was in the air, and it was in

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Speaker 1: and it was in the air across the globe. One

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Speaker 1: of the people who is expressing that sense of revolutionary

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Speaker 1: possibility through a new publication was Frederick Douglas. He and WILLIAMS.

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Speaker 1: C Nell moved to Rochester and they launched The North Star,

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Speaker 1: the paper that would be connected with with Douglas for

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Speaker 1: the rest of his life. UM. How did they imagine

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Speaker 1: their new publication in the context of a local community

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Speaker 1: but also a global liberation movement Rochester, New York was

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Speaker 1: an interesting place in the nineteenth century, so for Frederick

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Speaker 1: Douglas and others it became a center of abolitionist organizing.

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Speaker 1: It's there where they published the abolitionist newspaper The North

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Speaker 1: Star and the celestial north Star, of course, is the

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Speaker 1: marker and the night sky, pointing the way towards freedom

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Speaker 1: from the south to the north. And not coincidentally, Rochester

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Speaker 1: is bordered on its north shore by Lake Ontario, the

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Speaker 1: waterway that separates the US from Canada, so flight to

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Speaker 1: Canada was possible at that almost visible border. Um Douglas's

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Speaker 1: North Star Circle in Rochester was a key center in

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Speaker 1: a global movement for freedom, and Douglas and Nell obviously

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Speaker 1: launched The North Star in that newspaper is crucially important.

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Speaker 1: Douglas Is organizing was important. But there are also figures

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Speaker 1: like Harriet Jacobs, who went on to write Incidents in

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Speaker 1: the Life of a Slave Girl, who landed in Rochester

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Speaker 1: at the same time and not coincidentally um In Harry

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Speaker 1: Jacobs moved to Rochester to help her brother John run

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Speaker 1: the anti slavery Reading Room, which was located above the

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Speaker 1: offices where Frederick Douglas published the North Star, and at

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Speaker 1: that time and probably in that place, Jacobs also began

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Speaker 1: a lifelong friendship with Amy Post, who was a radical Quaker,

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Speaker 1: a long standing abolitionist, and early activists in in the

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Speaker 1: cause of women's rights, and not coincidentally, one of the

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Speaker 1: earliest proponents of spiritualism. UM And there's whole lots more

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Speaker 1: to say about about Amy Post, But as scholars have documented,

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Speaker 1: Jacobs told her story to Post in eighty nine, and

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Speaker 1: between that time and the time that Incidents in the

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Speaker 1: Life of Slave Girl was published in eighteen sixty one,

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Speaker 1: it's precisely those circles of abolitionists that make possible speaking

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Speaker 1: tours and um and and eventually the publication of that work.

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Speaker 1: And it's also it's also the Posts who host the

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Speaker 1: Foxes family when they arrived in Rochester and eventually send

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Speaker 1: them off to a hamlet called Hydesville. Um who were

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Speaker 1: the fox family And what was the relationship like with

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Speaker 1: the Posts in in those years, Well, I should say

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Speaker 1: a by Post was um Again, She's she's sort of deeply,

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Speaker 1: deeply involved in a series of movements. She's also the cousin.

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Speaker 1: We're gonna get into the family tree on this She

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Speaker 1: was the cousin of a man named Elias Hicks, who

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Speaker 1: had organized the Hicksite separation. But the fact was that

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Speaker 1: she came from a family of religious radicals who had

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Speaker 1: thought that the Quaker establishment had grown to orthodox, too

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Speaker 1: comfortable with the material institutions of the world, including slavery.

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Speaker 1: So it's um, it is the power of of the

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Speaker 1: posts in many ways that both radicalize the movement but

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Speaker 1: also provide a home for the Fox sisters. So as

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Speaker 1: the story goes, as you know, UM, in March of

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Speaker 1: of ety eight, Maggie Fox Margaret Fox usually called Maggie,

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Speaker 1: aged thirteen, and Kate, her younger sister, who twelve at

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Speaker 1: the time, heard the knox of a spirit of supposedly

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Speaker 1: a murdered peddler. Um. They determined that the raps were

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Speaker 1: coming from this ghost who communicated by making a knocking

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Speaker 1: sound and answer to a yes no question, or by

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Speaker 1: wrapping out letters of the alphabet. And again you see

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Speaker 1: that you see the connection with Morris's telegraph and the

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Speaker 1: particular kind of telegraphic type being in coding sequences and

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Speaker 1: subsequent inscriptions from the dead. And and and why um,

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Speaker 1: the term the spiritual telegraph would have been used so quickly,

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Speaker 1: but anyway, as soon as the raps were heard in

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Speaker 1: this little town called Hydesville, which is not far from

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Speaker 1: Rochester in central New York, um yet people came to

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Speaker 1: hear the knocks and raps from all around, and soon

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Speaker 1: they be began receiving messages from the Fox sisters about

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Speaker 1: dead relatives, about things that presumably the sisters would have

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Speaker 1: no other knowledge of. And the news of this unquiet

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Speaker 1: household spread. So the family, that is the Fox family

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Speaker 1: DeCamp to Rochester, left Hindsville to to leave the throngs

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Speaker 1: and crowds, and went to Rochester to the home of

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Speaker 1: the third Fox sister, the older sister of of Maggie

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Speaker 1: and Kate, whose name is Leah Fox fish Um later

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Speaker 1: under Hill. She was an old family friend of Isaac

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Speaker 1: and Amy Post, who later became a medium as well.

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Speaker 1: So the Posts took an early, if initially skeptical interest

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Speaker 1: in the two local celebrities in the Fox sisters, but

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Speaker 1: their interests soon grew as the girls seemed able to

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Speaker 1: communicate with recently deceased friends and loved ones, and while

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Speaker 1: some of the messages they brought from the dead were

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Speaker 1: banal or just wrong, Um, there was enough that was

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Speaker 1: right and that that it fit. And it also fit

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Speaker 1: in the context in which um, the splits and schisms

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Speaker 1: of the Quakers were all of a sudden receiving UM,

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Speaker 1: you know, messages from beyond that they were doing the

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Speaker 1: good work in the world. And word spreads pretty quickly.

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Speaker 1: It brought. It brought seekers to Hydesville first, but then

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Speaker 1: also to Rochester, and then out from Rochester the practice

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Speaker 1: of table wrappings spreads. UM. Within three years after those rapping,

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Speaker 1: spiritualism traveled to England. Um, how is it received when

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Speaker 1: it got outside of it's you know, it's the context

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Speaker 1: of its origin and in these Quakers and the religious

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Speaker 1: impulses in the burned Over district. Once spiritualism spreads outside

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Speaker 1: of that cradle, what's the response. Well, in many ways

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Speaker 1: you could argue that spiritualism in America predates the eighteen

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Speaker 1: forty eight knockings. UM. Belief in spirit communication has long

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Speaker 1: even ancient roots across cultures. Regular communication with the spirit

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Speaker 1: world features prominently in Native American cosmologies, and Europeans and

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Speaker 1: Africans brought forms of spiritism with them to American shores.

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Speaker 1: So I don't want to collapse important differences here. Um

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Speaker 1: that said, in many ways, you could argue that spiritualism

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Speaker 1: in America predates the eighteen forty eight knockings. So when

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Speaker 1: spiritualism becomes a global movement, it becomes one for the

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Speaker 1: same reasons that it had power in the United States.

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Speaker 1: So these religious reform movements, very specific ones that are

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Speaker 1: coming out of the burned over district, but others across

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Speaker 1: the world differently, but in some ways similarly, are drawing

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Speaker 1: on a kind of the twin reservoirs of elite and

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Speaker 1: folk discourse that had a sense of a form of spiritualism.

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Speaker 1: So in some cases and internationally, it's about Unitarians and universalists,

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Speaker 1: about Freemasons and free lovers, about Shakers and Quakers, and

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Speaker 1: Mormons and Millerites. But all of that rich soil that

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Speaker 1: became the kind of spiritual hotbed that that birtht American

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Speaker 1: spiritualism had enough that connected it to distinctive but older

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Speaker 1: folk traditions and you know, maybe even just older desires

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Speaker 1: for spiritual contact and connection that translated and spread m

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Speaker 1: You write that in your book that spiritualism was similar

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Speaker 1: to many of the other kind of radical anti clerical

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Speaker 1: strains of Protestantism at the time, pardon me, and and

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Speaker 1: that it sought to make religious hierarchy, and you said

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Speaker 1: this at the beginning to and kind of the control

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Speaker 1: of expertise by white men, and they're kind of the

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Speaker 1: boundaries around authority obsolete. And it wasn't that that it

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Speaker 1: eliminated the idea of revelation through a medium or that

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Speaker 1: it was mediated by someone in particular, but it changed

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Speaker 1: the rules of who could be the go between. Can

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Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about the consequence of these changes,

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Speaker 1: maybe in the context of the Seneca False Convention, which

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Speaker 1: was also part of that revolutionary spirit and they were

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Speaker 1: all connected. I mean, the most obvious and unique thing

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Speaker 1: about spiritualism is that women and sometimes young girls like

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Speaker 1: the Fox sisters, were placed at the center of spirit circles.

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Speaker 1: So at a time in the middle of the nineteenth

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Speaker 1: century where the idea of women speaking in public was anathema,

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Speaker 1: all of the sudden there were these women and children

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Speaker 1: speaking in voices that presumably were not their own, but

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Speaker 1: in doing so, they were taking center stage in a

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Speaker 1: way that had not been seen before. And actually, and

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Speaker 1: Browdie argues that that of the women speaking in public

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Speaker 1: at that time of the nineteenth century, spiritualist outnumber all

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Speaker 1: other public speakers, so it becomes a way for women

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Speaker 1: to find women and girls to find a different voice.

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Speaker 1: Although this gets really tricky because their vessels of a sort,

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Speaker 1: they're not presumably speaking in their own words, they're they're

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Speaker 1: channeling messages from beyond. So what spiritualism allows for is

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Speaker 1: a kind of remaking of women, middle class white women,

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Speaker 1: I should say, as as pure, as receptive, as passive.

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Speaker 1: All of those qualities that seemingly them unfit for public

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Speaker 1: life made them perfectly fit as the empty vessels who

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Speaker 1: could channel the spirits and the words of others from beyond.

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Speaker 1: You write that the roots of spiritualism and radical communities

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Speaker 1: and including the women's rights movement at the time, meant

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Speaker 1: that spiritualists when they went to England, spiritualists like Maria

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Speaker 1: hayden Um had access to some well known reformers and

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Speaker 1: and uh utopians like Robert Owen and other European radicals.

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Speaker 1: Can you briefly describe the political situation in England uh

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Speaker 1: kind of at the time that would have opened space

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Speaker 1: for people like Robert Owen and for spiritualists who had

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Speaker 1: connections to him again, this goes beyond on the scope

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Speaker 1: of my knowledge, and I'm taking this up in the

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Speaker 1: morn No. But it's super but it's but it's super fascinating.

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Speaker 1: And that that the kind of Anglo American movement, the

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Speaker 1: movement back and forth across the Atlantic, is absolutely crucial

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Speaker 1: to the to the structuring practice of spiritualism. And it's

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Speaker 1: not just that that mediums moved back and forth, or

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Speaker 1: that there were speakers who you know, went on circuits

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Speaker 1: and traveled. But you know, as you point out, that

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Speaker 1: there were there were these connections of of of folks

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Speaker 1: and what it meant is that it opened very powerful

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Speaker 1: doors very quickly. So what I know about that particular

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Speaker 1: case is that medium um was very well connected and

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Speaker 1: and you know, someone who can who knows more can

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Speaker 1: tell you about it. But that combination of mediumship media,

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Speaker 1: which is to say a lot of people who had

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Speaker 1: relationships with the press, that was that was that enabled

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Speaker 1: to kind of mediation of these um, of these experiences

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Speaker 1: and of this movement meant that door swung open in

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Speaker 1: ways that they that seems really surprising from our vantage.

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Speaker 1: Let's jump to uh spiritualism and the institution of marriage.

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Speaker 1: We've been talking about kind of the instant, the anti

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Speaker 1: institutional impulse, uh, and its relationship to spiritualism. UH. Marriages

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Speaker 1: like Cora Hatch's marriage to Benjamin Hatch or Victoria Woodhall's

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Speaker 1: early marriage to Kenning. Um, what did they tell us

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Speaker 1: about marriage and gendered power more broadly in American life

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Speaker 1: in the eighteen forties, fifties, sixties, in eighteen seventies, where

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Speaker 1: people like Victoria would Hall really challenge the well, I

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Speaker 1: get a Victoria Woodhall. But to begin with the question

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Speaker 1: that you asked in the eighteen forties and fifties, it's

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Speaker 1: probably worth saying that coverture, which is the legal doctrine

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Speaker 1: in which the married woman is literally covered politically, socially,

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Speaker 1: and economically by her husband, meant that marriage was an

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Speaker 1: institution which women gave up their power figuratively and literally. Uh.

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Speaker 1: So spiritual is become among the group of folks, and

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Speaker 1: really starting in the eighteen fifties, they allie um in

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Speaker 1: some ways with also free love advocates. And I should say, um,

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Speaker 1: from our vandam point, free love sounds very sixties or seventies, UM,

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Speaker 1: And it's you know, it sounds like a kind of

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Speaker 1: untrammeled sexual license, which it really wasn't um. Free love advocates,

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00:27:12,880 --> 00:27:16,879
Speaker 1: who often had ties to the abolition movement, frequently invoked

402
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Speaker 1: comparisons between marriage and chattel slavery. However deeply problematic that is,

403
00:27:22,040 --> 00:27:24,399
Speaker 1: for you know, these these white free love advocates to

404
00:27:24,440 --> 00:27:28,200
Speaker 1: do UM. But nonetheless, spiritualism and free love, with its

405
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Speaker 1: idea of elected affinities, directly attacked the often coercive bodily

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Speaker 1: bonds of marriage. So the idea was is that UM

407
00:27:40,080 --> 00:27:43,359
Speaker 1: gets complicated, but the notion of spiritual affinities is such

408
00:27:43,480 --> 00:27:48,240
Speaker 1: that UM, in some versions, everyone has a spiritual affinity,

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Speaker 1: a spiritual mate that they might find in this world

410
00:27:51,080 --> 00:27:54,920
Speaker 1: or perhaps the next. But free love advocates dissolved their

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Speaker 1: marriages with much more frequency than did many of their contemporaries.

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Speaker 1: And then i teenth century, and the idea was is,

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Speaker 1: if there was a spiritual affinity that would override the

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Speaker 1: earthly bonds of marriage, then that earthly legal marriage should

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Speaker 1: be dissolved for the more UM spiritually affinitive that's not

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Speaker 1: a word or a different kind of spiritual affinity. That

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Speaker 1: would be the you know, the real, the real, the

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Speaker 1: real love UM so that's that, and Um, Cora Hatch

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Speaker 1: is married for five times Andrew Jackson Davis, who is

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00:28:32,040 --> 00:28:35,840
Speaker 1: a male medium at the time, again, who who actually

421
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Speaker 1: uses a lot of those same Victorian ideas, at least

422
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Speaker 1: when he's young, about being susceptible, impressionable, virtuous, pious um,

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Speaker 1: and and is able to kind of to to use

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Speaker 1: those those characteristics that would not be fitting for a

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Speaker 1: different kind of active man. Um becomes a way for

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Speaker 1: him to also create a kind of uh unconventional notion

427
00:29:03,960 --> 00:29:08,480
Speaker 1: of of masculinity. But but most significantly, he dissolves his

428
00:29:08,520 --> 00:29:10,520
Speaker 1: marriage is over and over in this kind of free love.

429
00:29:10,600 --> 00:29:14,840
Speaker 1: So so that connection between free love and spiritualism is real. Um.

430
00:29:14,880 --> 00:29:17,120
Speaker 1: It is also true that many spiritualists at the time

431
00:29:17,240 --> 00:29:22,000
Speaker 1: decried free love and refuse the connection and saw free

432
00:29:22,040 --> 00:29:26,160
Speaker 1: love is really tarnishing the especially religious impulses of spiritualism.

433
00:29:26,200 --> 00:29:28,480
Speaker 1: So there there is many There are many as many

434
00:29:28,520 --> 00:29:33,520
Speaker 1: detractors of free love within the worlds of spiritualism as

435
00:29:33,520 --> 00:29:37,600
Speaker 1: there are spiritualists to become free lovers. Um. But when

436
00:29:37,600 --> 00:29:42,600
Speaker 1: you think of someone like like Cora Hatch, but really

437
00:29:43,720 --> 00:29:48,160
Speaker 1: Victoria Woodhall and Tennessee Claflin and Tennessee. Claflin is Victoria

438
00:29:48,160 --> 00:29:52,520
Speaker 1: woodhall sister. And they attacked the double standard, the sexual

439
00:29:52,560 --> 00:29:55,920
Speaker 1: double standard, as well as the sort of hypocrisies of marriage,

440
00:29:56,200 --> 00:29:59,920
Speaker 1: and they attacked them in print, and they attacked powerful man.

441
00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:03,000
Speaker 1: And um, it's it's kind of amazing looking back on

442
00:30:03,080 --> 00:30:07,840
Speaker 1: it in this moment, because so Cleveland described, i would say,

443
00:30:07,960 --> 00:30:12,000
Speaker 1: modestly explained her incredibly radical project that she and her sister,

444
00:30:12,120 --> 00:30:16,200
Speaker 1: Victoria Woodhold took up. And she she wrote, we've we've tried,

445
00:30:16,440 --> 00:30:19,360
Speaker 1: and this was a kind of attack on the rights

446
00:30:19,480 --> 00:30:22,240
Speaker 1: that the Rakish man had and that that the woman

447
00:30:22,320 --> 00:30:24,240
Speaker 1: was made to bear the blame of this, the sexual

448
00:30:24,240 --> 00:30:28,200
Speaker 1: double standard. So Cleveland rights, we've tried to make rake

449
00:30:28,600 --> 00:30:31,960
Speaker 1: as disgraceful as horror. We can't do it. And now

450
00:30:32,080 --> 00:30:34,960
Speaker 1: we are determined to take the disgrace out of horror.

451
00:30:36,480 --> 00:30:42,200
Speaker 1: That's in the eighteen seventies. I still find that incredibly.

452
00:30:42,720 --> 00:30:45,440
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's it's amazing that that. It's just

453
00:30:45,600 --> 00:30:48,240
Speaker 1: it's so ahead of its time and in so many ways,

454
00:30:48,440 --> 00:30:50,760
Speaker 1: so so folks like Cleveland and Woodhall are are at

455
00:30:50,760 --> 00:30:55,760
Speaker 1: theater edges of spiritualism. That said, the movement made room

456
00:30:55,960 --> 00:30:58,040
Speaker 1: for a kind of range of ways of being the

457
00:30:58,080 --> 00:31:01,200
Speaker 1: world that would not have, um, that would not have

458
00:31:01,280 --> 00:31:04,120
Speaker 1: fit in many, certainly religious communities in the United States

459
00:31:04,160 --> 00:31:07,600
Speaker 1: at the time, um, but also political communities. Let's let's

460
00:31:07,600 --> 00:31:10,600
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about that, because, um, you

461
00:31:10,640 --> 00:31:14,720
Speaker 1: have mediums like the Fox sisters and Cora and Emma

462
00:31:14,800 --> 00:31:17,760
Speaker 1: Britain who were closer towards the center of spiritualism. You

463
00:31:17,800 --> 00:31:22,480
Speaker 1: have the wood Halls who well, well, Victoria Woodhall and

464
00:31:22,720 --> 00:31:27,280
Speaker 1: Tenny who who restore up trouble for spiritualism when they

465
00:31:27,480 --> 00:31:29,840
Speaker 1: you know, with those attachments. But you also have male

466
00:31:29,920 --> 00:31:32,240
Speaker 1: mediums like you mentioned Andrew Jackson Davis, and we're talking

467
00:31:32,280 --> 00:31:36,440
Speaker 1: a bit about Daniel Douglas whom as well. UM, can

468
00:31:36,440 --> 00:31:40,280
Speaker 1: you say a little bit more about masculinity and femininity

469
00:31:40,440 --> 00:31:45,800
Speaker 1: and gender and power in spiritualism and how maybe by

470
00:31:45,840 --> 00:31:50,880
Speaker 1: contrasting these these figures, um, how they they challenged or

471
00:31:50,960 --> 00:31:55,040
Speaker 1: adapted or remixed some of these ideas about what a

472
00:31:55,160 --> 00:32:02,440
Speaker 1: man or a woman should do or be. Spiritualism provided

473
00:32:03,600 --> 00:32:08,160
Speaker 1: a different kind of home for a range of gendered

474
00:32:08,160 --> 00:32:11,760
Speaker 1: masculinities and femininities that would not have fit comfortably into

475
00:32:11,880 --> 00:32:18,360
Speaker 1: every Victorian community. And part of that was about embracing

476
00:32:18,400 --> 00:32:22,880
Speaker 1: a notion of receptivity, so you know, mediums open themselves

477
00:32:22,880 --> 00:32:27,560
Speaker 1: to other spirits. There they take up nineteenth century Victorian

478
00:32:27,640 --> 00:32:31,160
Speaker 1: notions of the virtues of white female womanhood that allow

479
00:32:31,920 --> 00:32:34,680
Speaker 1: certain kinds of power for women and girls to speak

480
00:32:34,680 --> 00:32:37,560
Speaker 1: in public, as we talked about before, but also a

481
00:32:37,720 --> 00:32:40,880
Speaker 1: range of masculinities for men who might have sat you know,

482
00:32:40,960 --> 00:32:44,760
Speaker 1: outside that the strictures or boundaries of what was possible

483
00:32:44,800 --> 00:32:48,960
Speaker 1: for Victorian men. So um Andrew Jackson Davis, who starts

484
00:32:48,960 --> 00:32:52,240
Speaker 1: his career very young, and he then goes on to

485
00:32:52,280 --> 00:32:54,800
Speaker 1: become one of the major writers and figures of nineteenth

486
00:32:54,760 --> 00:32:58,480
Speaker 1: century spiritualism. But when he begins, he's he's very young,

487
00:32:58,760 --> 00:33:03,360
Speaker 1: and he is developed by a mesmerist um. And and

488
00:33:03,440 --> 00:33:06,320
Speaker 1: that even the term developed, the idea of being developed

489
00:33:06,320 --> 00:33:10,640
Speaker 1: as a medium is passive. It it happens to the

490
00:33:10,680 --> 00:33:14,560
Speaker 1: medium developed like film, I mean these kind of media technology.

491
00:33:14,880 --> 00:33:17,800
Speaker 1: It's it's more than analogy, but it's everywhere as analogy

492
00:33:17,800 --> 00:33:21,760
Speaker 1: and metaphor. So once a medium like Andrew Jackson Davis

493
00:33:21,840 --> 00:33:24,440
Speaker 1: is developed as a medium, he was then he then

494
00:33:24,640 --> 00:33:29,280
Speaker 1: followed this stronger control who was also a man um

495
00:33:29,360 --> 00:33:31,840
Speaker 1: later in his life Andrew Jackson Davis marries a much

496
00:33:31,880 --> 00:33:36,440
Speaker 1: older woman. The idea of her strength and age was

497
00:33:36,600 --> 00:33:39,160
Speaker 1: that she would also be a more powerful control. So

498
00:33:39,400 --> 00:33:42,719
Speaker 1: you have this kind of shifting notions of of gender

499
00:33:42,720 --> 00:33:47,360
Speaker 1: and power that again exceed what was possible in in

500
00:33:47,560 --> 00:33:53,360
Speaker 1: many Victorian communities at the time. Um. As spiritualism grew,

501
00:33:53,560 --> 00:33:56,960
Speaker 1: and it grew pretty fast. Um, how did the various

502
00:33:57,040 --> 00:34:00,640
Speaker 1: church traditions or some of these can unities that were

503
00:34:00,680 --> 00:34:04,480
Speaker 1: really centered around institutions that are being challenged, Uh, how

504
00:34:04,520 --> 00:34:07,440
Speaker 1: did they respond to spiritualism and the challenges opposed to

505
00:34:07,640 --> 00:34:13,480
Speaker 1: hierarchy across these various avalances. The most honest answer is

506
00:34:13,480 --> 00:34:16,120
Speaker 1: it worked differently, and it worked differently across different traditions.

507
00:34:16,320 --> 00:34:21,080
Speaker 1: So you have Quakers, especially Hicksite Quakers, uh, you know,

508
00:34:21,200 --> 00:34:24,959
Speaker 1: creating the foundation for spiritualism to grow in a place

509
00:34:25,000 --> 00:34:28,600
Speaker 1: like Rochester at on. You know, on the other end,

510
00:34:28,640 --> 00:34:33,600
Speaker 1: you have someone like Orestes Brownson writing um publicly that

511
00:34:33,680 --> 00:34:38,880
Speaker 1: he was converting to Catholicism because the feminized, you know,

512
00:34:39,640 --> 00:34:42,799
Speaker 1: weak kinds of movements that are coming out of this

513
00:34:43,360 --> 00:34:48,640
Speaker 1: feminization of American Protestantism, UM made him yearn for the

514
00:34:48,680 --> 00:34:51,680
Speaker 1: strictures and hierarchies of the Catholic Church. So both on

515
00:34:51,680 --> 00:34:55,120
Speaker 1: the individual level and on the collective community level, they're

516
00:34:55,160 --> 00:34:59,160
Speaker 1: they're real. There's a real range of response. I don't

517
00:34:59,160 --> 00:35:03,719
Speaker 1: know if churches actually came out against spiritualists or how that,

518
00:35:03,800 --> 00:35:05,880
Speaker 1: how that might have worked. I think a lot of

519
00:35:05,880 --> 00:35:09,640
Speaker 1: the major denominations refer to ignore spiritualism and hope it

520
00:35:09,640 --> 00:35:13,359
Speaker 1: would go away, like how is this possibly going to last? Um?

521
00:35:13,400 --> 00:35:15,960
Speaker 1: But within the movement and within the press, which you know,

522
00:35:16,040 --> 00:35:18,480
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time reading, there's a lot of

523
00:35:18,920 --> 00:35:22,640
Speaker 1: UM correspondence discussing, you know, what what some pastor has said,

524
00:35:22,800 --> 00:35:26,480
Speaker 1: or the attacks coming from someone who was leaving, you know,

525
00:35:26,560 --> 00:35:30,759
Speaker 1: to to to find a more proper good religion, and

526
00:35:30,760 --> 00:35:35,640
Speaker 1: and spiritualism then becomes that the foil against which these

527
00:35:35,800 --> 00:35:41,120
Speaker 1: you know, properly ministered and institutional churches can define themselves against.

528
00:35:42,960 --> 00:35:46,360
Speaker 1: Spiritualism was also often positioned sometimes in the press, sometimes

529
00:35:46,360 --> 00:35:50,399
Speaker 1: by spiritualists themselves in their own press vehicles. UM kind

530
00:35:50,440 --> 00:35:55,280
Speaker 1: of at an interesting midpoint between what we could crudely

531
00:35:55,320 --> 00:35:58,839
Speaker 1: call like faith and science. Uh. For believers, it was

532
00:35:59,000 --> 00:36:02,120
Speaker 1: sometimes you know, a field of empirical proofs for a

533
00:36:02,120 --> 00:36:06,239
Speaker 1: belief in the spirit world. Um. While for materialists or dissenters,

534
00:36:06,320 --> 00:36:09,360
Speaker 1: it was uh kind of a horizon of knowledge in

535
00:36:09,400 --> 00:36:13,680
Speaker 1: the natural world. Um. Was this kind of liminal zone?

536
00:36:14,080 --> 00:36:16,200
Speaker 1: Was it more of an asset or a liability? For

537
00:36:16,239 --> 00:36:21,560
Speaker 1: spiritualists in the eighteen fifties, I would say it was

538
00:36:21,719 --> 00:36:27,520
Speaker 1: absolutely an assets. That idea of a little zone I

539
00:36:27,560 --> 00:36:33,320
Speaker 1: think is exactly right. Spiritualists refused the distinction between religion

540
00:36:33,320 --> 00:36:37,799
Speaker 1: and science. They denied that a warfare or even that

541
00:36:37,880 --> 00:36:42,080
Speaker 1: a divide exists between religion and science, and instead offered

542
00:36:42,160 --> 00:36:47,400
Speaker 1: up and al chemical combination of religion and science wrapped

543
00:36:47,400 --> 00:36:51,680
Speaker 1: in popular positivism. So spiritualism was a vernacular science, and

544
00:36:51,719 --> 00:36:55,839
Speaker 1: spiritualists saw I should say most spiritualists saw themselves as

545
00:36:55,920 --> 00:36:59,920
Speaker 1: vernacular scientists, as investigators. Um. It was also a religious

546
00:37:00,000 --> 00:37:04,520
Speaker 1: practice and sometimes just excellent theater. But the language around

547
00:37:04,560 --> 00:37:08,360
Speaker 1: spiritualism was all about that relationship between faith and science.

548
00:37:08,800 --> 00:37:11,759
Speaker 1: So a very um well known book from the time

549
00:37:11,840 --> 00:37:15,160
Speaker 1: was called proof Palpable, the idea that that the manifestations

550
00:37:15,160 --> 00:37:19,000
Speaker 1: of spiritual spiritualists provide proof palpable that could be studied

551
00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:22,120
Speaker 1: in the lab, that can be shown by investigators UM

552
00:37:22,400 --> 00:37:24,799
Speaker 1: of the existence of the spirit world. So from the

553
00:37:24,920 --> 00:37:29,960
Speaker 1: very beginning, the connections to technology, to science, all of

554
00:37:30,000 --> 00:37:35,120
Speaker 1: that was was born into the movement. You mentioned the

555
00:37:35,160 --> 00:37:38,920
Speaker 1: spiritualist press. What were the banner of light in the

556
00:37:38,960 --> 00:37:42,360
Speaker 1: Herald of progress and why we're periodicals like these important

557
00:37:43,080 --> 00:37:49,400
Speaker 1: for the history of spiritualism. Spiritual is published voluminously throughout

558
00:37:50,040 --> 00:37:52,120
Speaker 1: the especially throughout the second half of the of the

559
00:37:52,160 --> 00:37:56,240
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, and it is what has made the research

560
00:37:56,320 --> 00:37:58,959
Speaker 1: possible that many of us have done. So there's there's

561
00:37:59,000 --> 00:38:02,399
Speaker 1: there's voluminous writings by spirituals in the nineteenth century. There's

562
00:38:02,440 --> 00:38:05,879
Speaker 1: now an almost equally extensive historiography on the subject UM.

563
00:38:05,960 --> 00:38:08,360
Speaker 1: But it was incredibly important for the movement for spreading

564
00:38:08,360 --> 00:38:14,080
Speaker 1: the word UM. Spiritualists in many ways were UM organized

565
00:38:14,080 --> 00:38:16,240
Speaker 1: in their home circles and their science circles in small

566
00:38:16,280 --> 00:38:21,400
Speaker 1: group communalism. But the community of print of readers who

567
00:38:21,800 --> 00:38:26,160
Speaker 1: met in camp meetings and in lecture and lecture circuit

568
00:38:26,280 --> 00:38:28,680
Speaker 1: was only one part of the spiritualist community. I mean,

569
00:38:28,680 --> 00:38:31,120
Speaker 1: when you think of all of the readers UM, this

570
00:38:31,200 --> 00:38:34,600
Speaker 1: kind of imagined community that was made possible by the

571
00:38:34,880 --> 00:38:41,600
Speaker 1: hugely burgeoning, incredibly diverse nationalist spiritualist press UM, then you

572
00:38:41,680 --> 00:38:44,680
Speaker 1: get a sense of um, of the kind of power

573
00:38:44,760 --> 00:38:49,279
Speaker 1: of the spreading of this word, and spiritualism has. One

574
00:38:49,320 --> 00:38:52,160
Speaker 1: of one of the difficulties of studying spiritualism is that

575
00:38:52,200 --> 00:38:55,759
Speaker 1: it doesn't it doesn't provide the same kind of obvious

576
00:38:55,840 --> 00:39:00,520
Speaker 1: means of either counting or accounting for spiritualism. So there

577
00:39:00,560 --> 00:39:04,520
Speaker 1: are no membership roles UM, there are no churches. You

578
00:39:04,640 --> 00:39:07,480
Speaker 1: can't count you know, adherents in the same way that

579
00:39:07,520 --> 00:39:12,200
Speaker 1: you could with a more traditional religious study UM. And

580
00:39:12,280 --> 00:39:15,799
Speaker 1: it isn't until really late in the waning days of

581
00:39:15,840 --> 00:39:19,920
Speaker 1: spiritualism that they become interested. Well, there there's interest earlier,

582
00:39:20,239 --> 00:39:22,160
Speaker 1: but it's only in the waning days at the end

583
00:39:22,200 --> 00:39:25,560
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century that spiritualist institutions really start going.

584
00:39:26,120 --> 00:39:29,480
Speaker 1: So the press for much of the nineteenth century is

585
00:39:29,560 --> 00:39:33,680
Speaker 1: that institution. It's the it's the network, it's the the

586
00:39:33,680 --> 00:39:38,359
Speaker 1: the interweaving of um, of people in places that were um,

587
00:39:38,440 --> 00:39:41,919
Speaker 1: that were brought together in this um, in this kind

588
00:39:41,960 --> 00:39:45,560
Speaker 1: of well, in this imagined community, and of the net

589
00:39:45,680 --> 00:39:48,120
Speaker 1: I mean you also probably say like networks also played

590
00:39:48,400 --> 00:39:53,200
Speaker 1: a vital role within spiritualist circles, whether it's networks of

591
00:39:53,400 --> 00:39:56,840
Speaker 1: rope held by participants in some say, once circles to

592
00:39:56,880 --> 00:40:00,680
Speaker 1: connect them like the you know, like like the ectromagnetic

593
00:40:00,719 --> 00:40:05,200
Speaker 1: flows in a battery. Um. They created a vast network

594
00:40:05,440 --> 00:40:10,000
Speaker 1: of communications between heaven and earth. Um networks of transportation.

595
00:40:10,040 --> 00:40:12,520
Speaker 1: Obviously that these knew what networks of transportation from the

596
00:40:12,600 --> 00:40:15,360
Speaker 1: railroad to the Erie Canal, which where was Rochester is

597
00:40:15,880 --> 00:40:20,280
Speaker 1: connected right in the call that as well as networks

598
00:40:20,280 --> 00:40:24,160
Speaker 1: of subtle energies that were connecting that we're connecting people

599
00:40:24,200 --> 00:40:28,960
Speaker 1: in science circles. When it comes to some of the

600
00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:33,520
Speaker 1: early tallies, there is that interesting point in four when

601
00:40:33,640 --> 00:40:36,160
Speaker 1: interest in spiritualism had grown so much that although we

602
00:40:36,160 --> 00:40:38,880
Speaker 1: don't have kind of a a sum total number of

603
00:40:38,880 --> 00:40:42,960
Speaker 1: the movement, there's that one expression of a swell of

604
00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:46,640
Speaker 1: interest in the fifteen thousand people petition the United States

605
00:40:46,680 --> 00:40:51,200
Speaker 1: Senate to fund a scientific commission to investigate spiritualism. UM.

606
00:40:51,239 --> 00:40:57,520
Speaker 1: What was the result of that attempt? It was tabled,

607
00:40:57,920 --> 00:41:01,359
Speaker 1: but it created more publicity for the movement. So that

608
00:41:01,480 --> 00:41:05,560
Speaker 1: moment in eighteen fifty four, when Senator James Shields, then

609
00:41:05,560 --> 00:41:07,680
Speaker 1: of Illinois he went on to be a senator in

610
00:41:07,800 --> 00:41:10,880
Speaker 1: two other states as well, when he takes these fifteen

611
00:41:10,880 --> 00:41:16,520
Speaker 1: thousand signatures to Congress. He's at once met with some derision,

612
00:41:17,800 --> 00:41:23,239
Speaker 1: but the argument was that Congress was funding investigations into electricity,

613
00:41:23,280 --> 00:41:26,720
Speaker 1: so why not spiritualism, And that they're seen as similar

614
00:41:26,760 --> 00:41:31,280
Speaker 1: at that time is so extraordinary to me. But um,

615
00:41:31,320 --> 00:41:34,480
Speaker 1: nothing happened with that particular petition, but the fact of

616
00:41:34,560 --> 00:41:39,360
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand people signing it um was huge. And again

617
00:41:39,440 --> 00:41:42,360
Speaker 1: even though it was tabled, the investigation didn't happen. Congress

618
00:41:42,400 --> 00:41:46,359
Speaker 1: didn't move forward, the Senate didn't move forward. Um, the

619
00:41:46,360 --> 00:41:50,720
Speaker 1: publicity around it increased interest for the movement, without question.

620
00:41:51,440 --> 00:41:52,960
Speaker 1: So that's a kind of key moment in a lot

621
00:41:52,960 --> 00:41:56,719
Speaker 1: of ways. I think let's shuffle a little even a

622
00:41:56,760 --> 00:42:01,279
Speaker 1: little more into political history of the era, because this

623
00:42:01,360 --> 00:42:05,080
Speaker 1: is the decade after the the American invasion of Mexico

624
00:42:05,400 --> 00:42:09,200
Speaker 1: and the gold Rush, the Compromise of eighteen fifty the

625
00:42:09,280 --> 00:42:13,400
Speaker 1: Kansas Nebratas Nebraska Acts eighteen fifty four, um. So at

626
00:42:13,440 --> 00:42:16,800
Speaker 1: this point, how were Americans in the East thinking about

627
00:42:16,800 --> 00:42:19,040
Speaker 1: the West? What was what was the presence of the

628
00:42:19,080 --> 00:42:22,839
Speaker 1: West in the imagination of some of these groups in

629
00:42:22,880 --> 00:42:27,319
Speaker 1: New York that were if there's a center to spiritualism,

630
00:42:27,360 --> 00:42:30,799
Speaker 1: which is a really dispersed movement. Um. How is the

631
00:42:30,840 --> 00:42:35,879
Speaker 1: West featuring in the imagination of spiritualism at the time. Well,

632
00:42:35,880 --> 00:42:38,400
Speaker 1: I think in multiple ways. UM. On the one hand,

633
00:42:38,680 --> 00:42:41,920
Speaker 1: that this, especially before the Civil War, the West was

634
00:42:42,680 --> 00:42:44,920
Speaker 1: seen by many Americans on the East coast is what

635
00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:47,680
Speaker 1: was called the Great Desert that there that it was

636
00:42:47,719 --> 00:42:51,520
Speaker 1: this you know, open open plain and waiting to be

637
00:42:51,560 --> 00:42:55,200
Speaker 1: conquered with the spirit of manifest destiny. On the other hand,

638
00:42:55,239 --> 00:42:59,680
Speaker 1: spiritualist moved to the West coast. So there's spiritualists encampments

639
00:43:00,160 --> 00:43:03,080
Speaker 1: that can be traced throughout the West. So that I

640
00:43:03,120 --> 00:43:07,200
Speaker 1: mean just as one example or a Hatch's father goes

641
00:43:07,320 --> 00:43:11,600
Speaker 1: to Wisconsin to um to form a kind of version

642
00:43:11,600 --> 00:43:15,000
Speaker 1: of Hopedale there. So there are these movements west forming

643
00:43:15,280 --> 00:43:19,400
Speaker 1: um forming communities in the West. UM. California yesterday is

644
00:43:19,440 --> 00:43:23,239
Speaker 1: today has become a kind of spiritual hotbed. So eventually

645
00:43:23,280 --> 00:43:28,560
Speaker 1: spiritualist moved to San Diego and Madame Tingley's Loma Land. Um.

646
00:43:28,600 --> 00:43:33,280
Speaker 1: Spiritualism comes west to just a place near Santa Barbara

647
00:43:33,360 --> 00:43:37,920
Speaker 1: that is still called Summerland, named after the spiritualist idea

648
00:43:38,000 --> 00:43:42,239
Speaker 1: of the afterlife, not justification spot. UM. So these on

649
00:43:42,239 --> 00:43:44,200
Speaker 1: the one hand, there is this imagination of the West

650
00:43:44,200 --> 00:43:47,480
Speaker 1: as this, at least among you know, certain certain kind

651
00:43:47,480 --> 00:43:50,040
Speaker 1: of theological conception of the West is wide open for

652
00:43:50,200 --> 00:43:53,440
Speaker 1: the taking. They're also real spiritualists who are looking at that,

653
00:43:53,560 --> 00:43:56,280
Speaker 1: especially the West coast, as a place that would become

654
00:43:56,640 --> 00:44:00,040
Speaker 1: the kind of UM next movement forward, the next the

655
00:44:00,120 --> 00:44:03,480
Speaker 1: next place for UM for building a spiritualist community, and

656
00:44:03,480 --> 00:44:07,719
Speaker 1: they do from from very early on, and you've also

657
00:44:07,800 --> 00:44:13,080
Speaker 1: written a lot about this um spiritualisms. Spiritualists claimed to

658
00:44:13,200 --> 00:44:16,320
Speaker 1: be under the control of Native American spirit guides. Indian

659
00:44:16,360 --> 00:44:19,880
Speaker 1: spirit guides controls UM. What does this tell us about

660
00:44:20,040 --> 00:44:28,600
Speaker 1: what spiritualists thought about Native nations, native peoples. It's complicated.

661
00:44:30,160 --> 00:44:38,640
Speaker 1: Um Spiritualists relied on a Anglo American cultural understanding of

662
00:44:38,719 --> 00:44:43,560
Speaker 1: Native Americans as highly spiritual and mapped onto the spirit

663
00:44:43,560 --> 00:44:48,440
Speaker 1: world the colonial relationship of the Indian as a figure

664
00:44:49,160 --> 00:44:52,960
Speaker 1: as a guide for the white man. So spiritualist positioned

665
00:44:53,040 --> 00:44:57,600
Speaker 1: Native Americans as spirit guides as vital links between this

666
00:44:57,640 --> 00:45:00,960
Speaker 1: world in the next um. It was Indian guide who

667
00:45:00,960 --> 00:45:05,960
Speaker 1: could bring spiritualists through the veil, tracing the invisible footprints

668
00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:10,400
Speaker 1: beyond UM. That said, these performances were a way of

669
00:45:10,520 --> 00:45:16,680
Speaker 1: staging Indians vanishing their disappearance right their Indian ghosts. So,

670
00:45:16,800 --> 00:45:20,920
Speaker 1: on the one hand, spiritualists are interested in um in

671
00:45:21,320 --> 00:45:25,000
Speaker 1: spectral Indians, which is to say, dead Indians UM, and

672
00:45:25,120 --> 00:45:30,239
Speaker 1: as such they're they're part of um of a larger

673
00:45:30,480 --> 00:45:37,080
Speaker 1: kind of national engagement with um uh notion of the

674
00:45:37,160 --> 00:45:40,600
Speaker 1: vanishing Indian and vanishing tribes. There's a huge literature in

675
00:45:40,640 --> 00:45:43,759
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, the Last of the Mohicans being the

676
00:45:44,200 --> 00:45:48,840
Speaker 1: most famous among them. But from these nostalgic, nostalgic portrayals

677
00:45:48,880 --> 00:45:53,640
Speaker 1: of dying warriors and lost tribes um to an idea

678
00:45:53,640 --> 00:45:57,359
Speaker 1: of playing Indian, as Philip Gloria has termed it um.

679
00:45:57,680 --> 00:46:02,480
Speaker 1: Nineteent century subjects produced themselves as Americans through an engagement

680
00:46:02,600 --> 00:46:05,719
Speaker 1: with national fantasies of a white man's Indian, which is

681
00:46:05,760 --> 00:46:10,280
Speaker 1: to say, an appropriated um version as opposed to actual

682
00:46:10,400 --> 00:46:15,400
Speaker 1: Native Americans. So while native actual native nations are being

683
00:46:15,560 --> 00:46:20,880
Speaker 1: literally absented from the national landscape through ongoing dispossession, removal acts,

684
00:46:21,280 --> 00:46:25,240
Speaker 1: acts of war, acts of genocide, the figure, the literary figure,

685
00:46:25,320 --> 00:46:30,560
Speaker 1: especially of the vanishing Indian, often took on um an apparitional,

686
00:46:30,760 --> 00:46:35,960
Speaker 1: if metaphorical form, and the figure, the figure of the

687
00:46:35,960 --> 00:46:40,480
Speaker 1: Indian ghost is profoundly ambiguous. And the figure of the

688
00:46:41,000 --> 00:46:45,400
Speaker 1: of the Indian ghost appears in antebellty fiction, in plays, again, poetry.

689
00:46:45,560 --> 00:46:49,520
Speaker 1: It's everywhere, um, but it's it's very it's a very

690
00:46:49,560 --> 00:46:55,200
Speaker 1: ambiguous figure. Often the Indians, whether it's its spiritual sciences

691
00:46:55,600 --> 00:47:02,040
Speaker 1: or in other literary manifestations, register your dissatisfaction with the

692
00:47:02,080 --> 00:47:05,799
Speaker 1: European conquest of the Americans. But the fact that they

693
00:47:05,840 --> 00:47:11,160
Speaker 1: are ghosts testifies seemingly contradictorily to the success of that

694
00:47:11,280 --> 00:47:18,480
Speaker 1: very conquest. Um. It's a complicated logic of absension, of abstraction,

695
00:47:18,920 --> 00:47:22,280
Speaker 1: and and of appropriation of a kind of love and theft.

696
00:47:24,080 --> 00:47:28,719
Speaker 1: So Indians appear, and they begin to appear really early, um,

697
00:47:29,680 --> 00:47:32,680
Speaker 1: very very early after the forty eight knockings, and is

698
00:47:32,680 --> 00:47:36,240
Speaker 1: the first one that I found. Um. Indians spirits begin

699
00:47:36,360 --> 00:47:40,480
Speaker 1: to appear as guides to the afterworld, as healers, often

700
00:47:40,520 --> 00:47:45,279
Speaker 1: as kind of disembodied envoys of American historiography, and all

701
00:47:45,320 --> 00:47:49,120
Speaker 1: of this relies on a cultural understanding of Native Americans

702
00:47:49,160 --> 00:47:53,720
Speaker 1: again as highly spiritual that would map onto the spirit world.

703
00:47:53,840 --> 00:47:57,640
Speaker 1: This colonial relationship as Indians as guides, um, whether as

704
00:47:57,680 --> 00:48:01,360
Speaker 1: spirit guides in the seance or the you know, the

705
00:48:01,440 --> 00:48:04,280
Speaker 1: kind of older portrayal of the Indian's role as guiding

706
00:48:04,280 --> 00:48:10,080
Speaker 1: the white man, as helpers in this in this manifest destiny. UM.

707
00:48:10,200 --> 00:48:14,120
Speaker 1: So that said, spiritual what what I found in like that?

708
00:48:14,160 --> 00:48:17,200
Speaker 1: We know right that that that ninete century Anglo Americans

709
00:48:17,200 --> 00:48:19,600
Speaker 1: have this, this this notion of the vanished Indian. It

710
00:48:19,640 --> 00:48:23,960
Speaker 1: becomes an easy way to see themselves as not um

711
00:48:24,080 --> 00:48:28,479
Speaker 1: implicated in Indian genocide. They can weep sentimental tears over

712
00:48:28,600 --> 00:48:33,040
Speaker 1: po Hotton Um or you know, the figure of the vanishing,

713
00:48:33,120 --> 00:48:37,759
Speaker 1: the vanishing Mohican, the last Mohican. But the strange thing

714
00:48:38,200 --> 00:48:42,040
Speaker 1: happened because it turns out that when spirits show up

715
00:48:42,040 --> 00:48:44,239
Speaker 1: as a science, they don't always say what you want

716
00:48:44,280 --> 00:48:51,080
Speaker 1: them to. So spirit guides, Indian guides came to spiritualist

717
00:48:51,120 --> 00:48:57,600
Speaker 1: science demanding justice in this material world, and some spiritualists,

718
00:48:59,239 --> 00:49:04,200
Speaker 1: many more than other nineteenth century Anglo Americans, begin to

719
00:49:04,280 --> 00:49:08,720
Speaker 1: work for the cause of Native Americans. So Um, using

720
00:49:08,800 --> 00:49:11,160
Speaker 1: the publications of the spiritualist pressed to speak out against

721
00:49:11,200 --> 00:49:15,959
Speaker 1: particular particular outrages. UM eventually to work against the DAWs Act,

722
00:49:16,040 --> 00:49:20,759
Speaker 1: which is a um the idea putting breaking up tribes

723
00:49:20,800 --> 00:49:24,840
Speaker 1: and putting them on reservations. So there is again it's ambiguous,

724
00:49:24,880 --> 00:49:30,200
Speaker 1: it's complicated, it's at once appropriation. But also these at

725
00:49:30,280 --> 00:49:33,359
Speaker 1: least some spiritualists took seriously the messages that they were

726
00:49:33,360 --> 00:49:36,640
Speaker 1: being given from these spiritual Indian guides and used them

727
00:49:36,680 --> 00:49:40,840
Speaker 1: as a way to create relationships with the act actually

728
00:49:40,920 --> 00:49:47,080
Speaker 1: ongoing disappearance, genocidal vanishing of um of native nations in

729
00:49:47,280 --> 00:49:50,560
Speaker 1: that nineteenth century present. So let's jump back into the

730
00:49:50,640 --> 00:49:55,000
Speaker 1: late eighteen fifties. Um, there's a big crash in seven

731
00:49:55,040 --> 00:49:58,640
Speaker 1: market crash, How did it affect the American mood in

732
00:49:58,680 --> 00:50:02,160
Speaker 1: the years before the Civil War? And did that have

733
00:50:02,200 --> 00:50:10,080
Speaker 1: any influence on spiritualists? Seven crash? The panic of eighteen

734
00:50:10,120 --> 00:50:17,680
Speaker 1: seventy eight seven was the again like overexpansion of whatever

735
00:50:17,760 --> 00:50:21,760
Speaker 1: they declining international economy blah blah blah blah blah. But um,

736
00:50:21,840 --> 00:50:27,040
Speaker 1: the panic of eighteen fifty seven becomes the financial crisis

737
00:50:27,680 --> 00:50:33,360
Speaker 1: that was really the first worldwide economic crisis. So because

738
00:50:33,440 --> 00:50:36,080
Speaker 1: and across the across the nineteenth century, there will be

739
00:50:36,160 --> 00:50:39,960
Speaker 1: panics there, and they get worse as the nineteenth century

740
00:50:40,000 --> 00:50:42,200
Speaker 1: goes on. And part of the reason why they get

741
00:50:42,200 --> 00:50:44,840
Speaker 1: worse is because people for the first time were m

742
00:50:44,920 --> 00:50:48,040
Speaker 1: imbricated in the cash economy, they were paid wages, they

743
00:50:48,080 --> 00:50:51,440
Speaker 1: were often renters, They didn't own their own property. UM,

744
00:50:51,520 --> 00:50:54,239
Speaker 1: they were increasingly urbanized, that they didn't have that little

745
00:50:54,280 --> 00:50:56,720
Speaker 1: plot of land and you know, a way to grow food.

746
00:50:56,920 --> 00:50:59,560
Speaker 1: They were out of work. So with each of those crashes,

747
00:50:59,600 --> 00:51:03,239
Speaker 1: with each of those panics, m things get worse. I'm

748
00:51:03,280 --> 00:51:07,239
Speaker 1: not sure that the crash had that much or or

749
00:51:07,280 --> 00:51:10,000
Speaker 1: I have not found that the crash really affected the

750
00:51:10,040 --> 00:51:15,680
Speaker 1: mood um of spiritualists in the way that it um,

751
00:51:15,760 --> 00:51:18,359
Speaker 1: the way that it's you know, something obviously, something like

752
00:51:18,520 --> 00:51:22,480
Speaker 1: the Civil War, that that, at least in what I

753
00:51:22,520 --> 00:51:26,279
Speaker 1: was reading UM this sense and of course they're lad,

754
00:51:26,360 --> 00:51:31,600
Speaker 1: but the sense of personal loss, of of of death UM,

755
00:51:31,680 --> 00:51:33,920
Speaker 1: whether it was on a global skill or in you know,

756
00:51:34,040 --> 00:51:38,160
Speaker 1: in the familiar situation, seemed to be much more important

757
00:51:38,480 --> 00:51:41,000
Speaker 1: in UM in bringing people to the seance table than

758
00:51:41,040 --> 00:51:45,440
Speaker 1: the kind of anxieties caused by a panic. And and interestingly,

759
00:51:45,480 --> 00:51:48,080
Speaker 1: they're you know, they're they're called panics of the nineteenth century.

760
00:51:48,080 --> 00:51:50,240
Speaker 1: And I think, as the story goes, it's it's Herbert,

761
00:51:50,360 --> 00:51:53,680
Speaker 1: one of Herbert Hoober's advisors, who says, don't call it

762
00:51:53,680 --> 00:51:55,560
Speaker 1: a panic. People panic. If you call it a panic,

763
00:51:55,640 --> 00:51:58,480
Speaker 1: call it a depression, UM, and then it's called a

764
00:51:58,480 --> 00:52:01,560
Speaker 1: depression is starting with the great compression UM. But the

765
00:52:01,640 --> 00:52:04,400
Speaker 1: question of why these are already always named after moods

766
00:52:04,520 --> 00:52:08,399
Speaker 1: is no psychic states and not psychological states has yet

767
00:52:08,440 --> 00:52:10,759
Speaker 1: another issue. But to the best of my knowledge, of

768
00:52:10,760 --> 00:52:13,799
Speaker 1: the seven PANICCK did not have a great deal of

769
00:52:13,800 --> 00:52:19,200
Speaker 1: connection to UM, to the growth or or UM really

770
00:52:19,239 --> 00:52:21,240
Speaker 1: affect the spiritual's movement. To the best of my knowledge,

771
00:52:21,800 --> 00:52:25,279
Speaker 1: that said, UM, the nineteenth century was a time of

772
00:52:25,320 --> 00:52:32,040
Speaker 1: tremendous loss. Women died in childbirth, epidemics, decimated communities. Cholera

773
00:52:32,560 --> 00:52:36,799
Speaker 1: was the epidemic disease of the nineteenth century. It was

774
00:52:36,840 --> 00:52:38,840
Speaker 1: to the nineteenth century what the plague was to the

775
00:52:38,840 --> 00:52:42,960
Speaker 1: fourteen UM. And there were deadly upbreaks in the United

776
00:52:42,960 --> 00:52:45,719
Speaker 1: States and in eighteen forty nine. I mean, in some

777
00:52:45,760 --> 00:52:48,520
Speaker 1: ways I hate of those kind of cause explanations, but

778
00:52:48,560 --> 00:52:51,319
Speaker 1: you know, you could argue that eighteen forty eighteen forty

779
00:52:51,440 --> 00:52:55,000
Speaker 1: nine UM, massive death plus this new technology would bring

780
00:52:55,040 --> 00:52:58,680
Speaker 1: people to spiritualism. And then obviously the American Civil War

781
00:52:58,760 --> 00:53:03,759
Speaker 1: had devastating death tolls on both sides, which is kind

782
00:53:03,760 --> 00:53:07,919
Speaker 1: of hard to wrap one's head around. Just in terms

783
00:53:07,920 --> 00:53:11,319
Speaker 1: of pure numbers, right, So on the two sides, at

784
00:53:11,400 --> 00:53:15,680
Speaker 1: least six and twenty thousand soldiers died from diseases and wounds.

785
00:53:17,239 --> 00:53:21,000
Speaker 1: That number is equivalent to two of the entire population

786
00:53:21,080 --> 00:53:24,840
Speaker 1: the US population at the time. Two percent of Americans

787
00:53:24,840 --> 00:53:29,680
Speaker 1: today equals six million people. So thinking about the equivalent

788
00:53:29,800 --> 00:53:32,640
Speaker 1: of a war in four years in which six million

789
00:53:32,680 --> 00:53:37,080
Speaker 1: people died, it's just it's so massive, and it just

790
00:53:37,360 --> 00:53:41,000
Speaker 1: was not a war that people got over. Um. That said,

791
00:53:41,080 --> 00:53:44,400
Speaker 1: spiritualism begins before the Civil War, So all of these things,

792
00:53:44,440 --> 00:53:47,960
Speaker 1: all of these things are linked. And um, you know,

793
00:53:48,160 --> 00:53:52,840
Speaker 1: commuting understanding those those forms of massive loss is something

794
00:53:52,920 --> 00:53:56,600
Speaker 1: that you know, no, no technology really provides us needs

795
00:53:56,640 --> 00:53:59,600
Speaker 1: to do. Well, let's let's point towards the Civil War

796
00:53:59,600 --> 00:54:02,719
Speaker 1: a little it, um, maybe starting with another kind of

797
00:54:02,719 --> 00:54:06,759
Speaker 1: big picture question. Um, with spiritualism's background in all of

798
00:54:06,760 --> 00:54:12,760
Speaker 1: these Eutopean radical Northern reformist movements, how was spiritualism received

799
00:54:12,760 --> 00:54:17,799
Speaker 1: across the South? Really differently, Spiritualism is most popular in

800
00:54:18,400 --> 00:54:23,000
Speaker 1: areas of the Northeast, sometimes the Midwest. Eventually California with

801
00:54:23,160 --> 00:54:28,239
Speaker 1: the largest grouping of those post Calvinist Protestant Anglo Americans,

802
00:54:28,400 --> 00:54:32,160
Speaker 1: again the northeast the west, but there were also small

803
00:54:32,200 --> 00:54:36,480
Speaker 1: groupings in the South. So New Orleans, with its French, Creole,

804
00:54:36,719 --> 00:54:43,360
Speaker 1: Afro Caribbean and Catholic syncretic mixture, became a kind of

805
00:54:43,360 --> 00:54:48,799
Speaker 1: hotbed of spiritualism, and there are relatively smaller numbers of

806
00:54:48,840 --> 00:54:52,200
Speaker 1: spiritualists across the South. There are many fewer, But I

807
00:54:52,400 --> 00:54:57,560
Speaker 1: just learned that before the Civil War, the states of Alabama,

808
00:54:57,680 --> 00:55:01,240
Speaker 1: that is, the Alabama and South carol line of legislatures,

809
00:55:02,080 --> 00:55:06,400
Speaker 1: prohibited sciences and other gatherings in their states, which I

810
00:55:06,440 --> 00:55:10,080
Speaker 1: found particularly interesting because we we know the way that

811
00:55:10,760 --> 00:55:14,040
Speaker 1: religion was prohibited and was seen um for enslaved people

812
00:55:14,040 --> 00:55:16,640
Speaker 1: as a way to organize. So some religious gatherings at

813
00:55:16,640 --> 00:55:20,160
Speaker 1: certain times in different states across the South were made illegal.

814
00:55:20,680 --> 00:55:24,799
Speaker 1: But the fact that Alabama and South Carolina bother to

815
00:55:24,840 --> 00:55:29,560
Speaker 1: put this newly into their laws suggest that perhaps there

816
00:55:29,640 --> 00:55:31,960
Speaker 1: was there was something going on, and that the spread

817
00:55:32,200 --> 00:55:35,239
Speaker 1: of spiritualism, like the spread of the abolitionist publications that

818
00:55:35,280 --> 00:55:38,800
Speaker 1: were making their way south from the North um was

819
00:55:38,840 --> 00:55:44,680
Speaker 1: seen as particularly dangerous. When when the Civil War begins,

820
00:55:45,480 --> 00:55:51,400
Speaker 1: how do spiritualists respond? There? They're almost universally pro union,

821
00:55:52,520 --> 00:55:59,239
Speaker 1: but they're also kind of amazing ways that the spiritualist

822
00:55:59,239 --> 00:56:05,920
Speaker 1: press positions itself. So various spiritualist newspapers UH talk about

823
00:56:05,960 --> 00:56:10,360
Speaker 1: the importance of spirit helpers in getting the numbers and

824
00:56:10,400 --> 00:56:14,560
Speaker 1: the news of the war quicker, faster, and arguably more

825
00:56:14,640 --> 00:56:19,919
Speaker 1: accurate than could other forms of news distribution. UM. And

826
00:56:20,400 --> 00:56:23,399
Speaker 1: I mean the thing again, so that the amazing thing,

827
00:56:23,400 --> 00:56:24,880
Speaker 1: the sort of a hard thing that I can never

828
00:56:24,960 --> 00:56:27,319
Speaker 1: quite wrap my head around about the Civil War is

829
00:56:27,400 --> 00:56:32,319
Speaker 1: that most soldiers died as unknown soldiers. There were no

830
00:56:32,560 --> 00:56:37,400
Speaker 1: dog tags in the nineteenth century. Often UM soldiers would

831
00:56:37,520 --> 00:56:41,640
Speaker 1: place letters in their pockets UM with the hope that

832
00:56:41,680 --> 00:56:43,319
Speaker 1: if their body was found, the letter would be sent

833
00:56:43,360 --> 00:56:45,759
Speaker 1: to their loved ones. But there was no system for

834
00:56:45,920 --> 00:56:50,600
Speaker 1: identifying the dead, identifying the wounded, knowing where people could be.

835
00:56:50,880 --> 00:56:53,840
Speaker 1: I mean, eventually there was, but because of that that

836
00:56:54,080 --> 00:56:58,040
Speaker 1: huge lack of of knowing where people were, the spiritualist

837
00:56:58,080 --> 00:57:02,280
Speaker 1: press takes on this kind of metaphysical quality where people

838
00:57:02,280 --> 00:57:05,200
Speaker 1: are turning to it to provide and to and to

839
00:57:05,280 --> 00:57:08,480
Speaker 1: get news of the war and presumably news of their

840
00:57:08,520 --> 00:57:12,360
Speaker 1: loved ones, whether that or alive. Can you talk a

841
00:57:12,360 --> 00:57:15,680
Speaker 1: little about the letters of mourning that we're published in

842
00:57:15,760 --> 00:57:22,600
Speaker 1: spiritualist periodicals. Yeah, these are so amazing to me. And like,

843
00:57:22,800 --> 00:57:25,160
Speaker 1: after my book is published, actually got an email from

844
00:57:25,240 --> 00:57:28,800
Speaker 1: someone who had just lost just lost a child and

845
00:57:28,880 --> 00:57:31,280
Speaker 1: she was reading this book and talking about it in

846
00:57:31,520 --> 00:57:33,720
Speaker 1: with a group of women who had also lost children.

847
00:57:33,720 --> 00:57:37,200
Speaker 1: But that idea that the only the only people who

848
00:57:37,280 --> 00:57:42,400
Speaker 1: understand mourning are those who have experienced lost themselves and

849
00:57:42,520 --> 00:57:45,880
Speaker 1: the spiritualist press um. I think that the Schekna is

850
00:57:46,080 --> 00:57:49,640
Speaker 1: one of the first spirituals publications to include pages of

851
00:57:49,760 --> 00:57:54,400
Speaker 1: letters from readers to the editor man in Samuel Britten,

852
00:57:55,200 --> 00:57:59,480
Speaker 1: asking for comfort, asking for consolation, and sometimes asking for

853
00:57:59,520 --> 00:58:04,320
Speaker 1: assistant in contacting dead loved ones. So their letters of mourning,

854
00:58:04,320 --> 00:58:06,800
Speaker 1: their letters of loss, and there's sometimes letters asking for

855
00:58:06,840 --> 00:58:10,360
Speaker 1: help and making the connections. So thinking about again multiplying

856
00:58:10,360 --> 00:58:14,280
Speaker 1: the idea of media and mediation that the mediums often

857
00:58:14,360 --> 00:58:17,960
Speaker 1: worked for the media, that is the spiritualist news newspapers.

858
00:58:18,320 --> 00:58:20,840
Speaker 1: So UM. The Banner of Light, which is one of

859
00:58:20,880 --> 00:58:25,360
Speaker 1: the largest and most widely read spiritualist publications at mid century,

860
00:58:25,960 --> 00:58:31,720
Speaker 1: regularly published a column called The Messenger, which included communications

861
00:58:31,720 --> 00:58:34,440
Speaker 1: to readers from spirits of the dead and they had

862
00:58:34,480 --> 00:58:38,520
Speaker 1: a medium exclusively for the banner of light. So again

863
00:58:38,560 --> 00:58:41,440
Speaker 1: you have this community in print that's bringing people together

864
00:58:41,840 --> 00:58:45,800
Speaker 1: beyond the science circle. And those those letters of mourning

865
00:58:46,160 --> 00:58:50,080
Speaker 1: um I were so different than the kind of elaborate

866
00:58:50,120 --> 00:58:55,720
Speaker 1: morning cultures that um have been um so well documented

867
00:58:55,760 --> 00:59:00,120
Speaker 1: in middle class morning cultures with you know, elaborate dress

868
00:59:00,240 --> 00:59:05,600
Speaker 1: rituals and clothing and the shifting of colors and crape

869
00:59:05,640 --> 00:59:09,120
Speaker 1: covered houses and like the kind of etiquette around those

870
00:59:09,200 --> 00:59:13,480
Speaker 1: Victorian morning cultures are so different than reading these letters,

871
00:59:13,480 --> 00:59:18,680
Speaker 1: which are just so raw and and and and and

872
00:59:19,480 --> 00:59:23,080
Speaker 1: a really different kind of archive into the nineteenth century

873
00:59:23,080 --> 00:59:28,640
Speaker 1: history of loss mm hm. When we're talking about kind

874
00:59:28,640 --> 00:59:34,160
Speaker 1: of the middle class expectations, especially around something like mourning

875
00:59:34,200 --> 00:59:38,600
Speaker 1: that was often coded feminine um. And we're looking at

876
00:59:38,640 --> 00:59:45,080
Speaker 1: the seventies, what can we say about the connections between

877
00:59:45,080 --> 00:59:50,240
Speaker 1: the women's rights movement and spiritualists and maybe women in

878
00:59:50,480 --> 00:59:54,800
Speaker 1: class kind of between all those points. How was spiritualism

879
00:59:54,800 --> 01:00:05,720
Speaker 1: operating in that space in the seventies mhm isous question? No,

880
01:00:05,840 --> 01:00:09,200
Speaker 1: I like it. I like it, um Yeah. I mean

881
01:00:10,040 --> 01:00:13,320
Speaker 1: as the story goes, spiritualism rises and falls in the

882
01:00:13,320 --> 01:00:15,760
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies, is a kind of you know, death rattle.

883
01:00:15,800 --> 01:00:19,680
Speaker 1: I don't think that's true, but many historians do. But

884
01:00:19,760 --> 01:00:22,439
Speaker 1: in the in the eighteen seventies, you have you have

885
01:00:22,520 --> 01:00:25,439
Speaker 1: people like Victoria Woodhall who on the one hand are

886
01:00:25,640 --> 01:00:30,120
Speaker 1: galvanizing a national stage UM and on the other are

887
01:00:30,640 --> 01:00:36,240
Speaker 1: seen as pushing the edges, pushing spiritualism beyond beyond a

888
01:00:36,320 --> 01:00:41,360
Speaker 1: kind of fringe. But in terms of class, I mean,

889
01:00:41,840 --> 01:00:46,520
Speaker 1: one of the earliest writings on um on spiritualism came

890
01:00:46,800 --> 01:00:49,160
Speaker 1: was written by Lawrence Moore about the medium as a

891
01:00:49,160 --> 01:00:52,840
Speaker 1: new profession in the nineteenth century. So mediumship very early

892
01:00:52,880 --> 01:00:56,440
Speaker 1: on became way for women to work and get paid

893
01:00:56,480 --> 01:00:59,800
Speaker 1: for what they do. And there's a lot of discussion

894
01:00:59,840 --> 01:01:01,960
Speaker 1: in this spiritual espress about weather not mediums should be

895
01:01:02,000 --> 01:01:05,040
Speaker 1: paid and but but it becomes his way, it becomes

896
01:01:05,040 --> 01:01:08,520
Speaker 1: a form of wage work. Um. By the eighteen seventies,

897
01:01:09,440 --> 01:01:14,760
Speaker 1: that's not so shocking, and those discussions disappear. But um

898
01:01:14,760 --> 01:01:17,880
Speaker 1: that I don't know if there's actually a shift in

899
01:01:17,920 --> 01:01:20,080
Speaker 1: adherence and how that shifts around class. I mean. The

900
01:01:20,320 --> 01:01:22,160
Speaker 1: criticue of the women sufrage movement, of course is that

901
01:01:22,200 --> 01:01:27,760
Speaker 1: it was mainly peopled are largely peopled by um more

902
01:01:27,760 --> 01:01:31,720
Speaker 1: affluent elite women, white women women. But Ambrodi can run

903
01:01:31,720 --> 01:01:38,280
Speaker 1: that that history beautifully again. Um. But speaking of white

904
01:01:38,320 --> 01:01:42,600
Speaker 1: women in positions in these movements, UM, sojourn or truth,

905
01:01:42,840 --> 01:01:47,440
Speaker 1: Harriet Jacobs other black spiritualist women like Harriet Wilson UM

906
01:01:47,480 --> 01:01:52,040
Speaker 1: often faced bigotry even in ambolitionists and equal rights circles,

907
01:01:52,080 --> 01:01:55,880
Speaker 1: as well as utopian and reformist movements. Um. Can you

908
01:01:55,880 --> 01:01:58,000
Speaker 1: describe some of the forces at work in these movements

909
01:01:58,040 --> 01:02:02,440
Speaker 1: that maintained race attitudes and relationships even as these groups

910
01:02:02,720 --> 01:02:05,560
Speaker 1: lobbied for social reform, for abolition before the war, that

911
01:02:05,640 --> 01:02:13,720
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Yeah, I think the spiritualists were often reformers,

912
01:02:13,800 --> 01:02:20,320
Speaker 1: some were radicals. But abolitionism is not equivalent to anti racism.

913
01:02:20,360 --> 01:02:24,480
Speaker 1: And it's well known that especially white suffrages were very

914
01:02:24,480 --> 01:02:27,240
Speaker 1: clear that they deserve the vote and black men didn't,

915
01:02:27,440 --> 01:02:30,840
Speaker 1: and black women were, you know, another another thing altogether.

916
01:02:31,480 --> 01:02:36,880
Speaker 1: So white supremacy structured these reform movements even as many

917
01:02:37,200 --> 01:02:41,000
Speaker 1: of of the people involved and abolished the white you know,

918
01:02:41,080 --> 01:02:43,840
Speaker 1: the white women, the white people involved in abolitionism, involved

919
01:02:43,920 --> 01:02:49,920
Speaker 1: in in suffragism and spiritualism, were on some ways outside

920
01:02:49,960 --> 01:02:52,240
Speaker 1: of their time in other ways those movements were as

921
01:02:52,240 --> 01:02:57,600
Speaker 1: structured by um anti black racism as the rest of

922
01:02:57,640 --> 01:02:59,920
Speaker 1: the culture. And I say that not as an apologia,

923
01:03:00,040 --> 01:03:02,880
Speaker 1: but just as an explanation, because I think the fantasy

924
01:03:03,120 --> 01:03:07,240
Speaker 1: is that, you know, here were these incredible interracial groups,

925
01:03:07,280 --> 01:03:10,880
Speaker 1: but in a place like Rochester was actually very unique

926
01:03:11,000 --> 01:03:16,760
Speaker 1: in that it did provide for um for interracial organizing

927
01:03:16,800 --> 01:03:21,080
Speaker 1: around abolition. But Isaac and Amy Posts were actually thrown

928
01:03:21,200 --> 01:03:26,280
Speaker 1: out of their of their Genesee Quakers group for as

929
01:03:26,280 --> 01:03:30,440
Speaker 1: the story goes, having hosted a wedding of two African

930
01:03:30,480 --> 01:03:33,320
Speaker 1: American friends of theirs. So they're at the sort of

931
01:03:33,560 --> 01:03:37,200
Speaker 1: center of what one would imagine would be the most freethinking,

932
01:03:37,320 --> 01:03:41,840
Speaker 1: most anti racists, you know, communities in the country. You know,

933
01:03:42,200 --> 01:03:46,000
Speaker 1: it's still it's it's still there. What kind of pressures

934
01:03:46,040 --> 01:03:51,920
Speaker 1: on the spiritualist movement created a space for materialization mediums?

935
01:03:51,960 --> 01:03:55,600
Speaker 1: And then what did those materialization mediums mean for people

936
01:03:55,640 --> 01:03:57,000
Speaker 1: who had been in the movement for a long time

937
01:03:57,000 --> 01:04:03,600
Speaker 1: that were maybe translectors or spirit burst I suppose you

938
01:04:03,640 --> 01:04:07,919
Speaker 1: could see this as a kind of development of relationship

939
01:04:08,000 --> 01:04:11,680
Speaker 1: to to sound and media. So if those those first

940
01:04:11,840 --> 01:04:15,160
Speaker 1: raps and knocks American spirituals was always a sonic experience,

941
01:04:15,200 --> 01:04:19,240
Speaker 1: and those first raps and knocks that were heard were, um,

942
01:04:19,280 --> 01:04:22,880
Speaker 1: we're a kind of acoustic connection to the to the

943
01:04:23,000 --> 01:04:26,080
Speaker 1: to the world of the dead. It was only later

944
01:04:26,240 --> 01:04:32,360
Speaker 1: that spiritualists began to materialize spiritualist materialized spirits um and

945
01:04:32,400 --> 01:04:35,480
Speaker 1: then eventually ectoplasm and all sorts of other things. You know,

946
01:04:35,600 --> 01:04:40,000
Speaker 1: guitars would play, pianos would float, you know, disembodied hands

947
01:04:40,040 --> 01:04:45,400
Speaker 1: would appear in seances. But it does. The materialization sciences

948
01:04:45,560 --> 01:04:50,880
Speaker 1: were critiqued from some areas of the movement as overly

949
01:04:51,000 --> 01:04:59,720
Speaker 1: showy as just theater. That said, they also convinced investigators

950
01:04:59,760 --> 01:05:02,280
Speaker 1: and way that the earlier raps and knox or they

951
01:05:02,320 --> 01:05:05,360
Speaker 1: you know, they convinced some investigators so famously in the

952
01:05:05,440 --> 01:05:08,320
Speaker 1: again in the eighteen seventies, William Crooks Um, who was

953
01:05:08,480 --> 01:05:11,000
Speaker 1: one of the one of the scientists who became devoted

954
01:05:11,000 --> 01:05:15,440
Speaker 1: devoted spiritualists, kind of falls in love with a spirit

955
01:05:15,520 --> 01:05:21,160
Speaker 1: named Katie King who appeared at it at a science. Um.

956
01:05:21,280 --> 01:05:26,600
Speaker 1: She's she's manifested by another medium, a woman named Florence Cook.

957
01:05:27,400 --> 01:05:32,200
Speaker 1: And it's precisely the materialization of those figures that at

958
01:05:32,240 --> 01:05:35,040
Speaker 1: least for Crooks, and presumably for many others, that was

959
01:05:35,080 --> 01:05:38,960
Speaker 1: the proof palpable. So it's as if spiritualism had um

960
01:05:39,080 --> 01:05:41,000
Speaker 1: had sort of up to its game, moving from the

961
01:05:41,040 --> 01:05:43,400
Speaker 1: sounds of the raps and the knox of the telegraph

962
01:05:43,880 --> 01:05:48,480
Speaker 1: to the development of these new manifestations, paralleling the new

963
01:05:48,480 --> 01:05:55,919
Speaker 1: developments in photography and then eventually spirit photography. M hm, UM,

964
01:05:56,040 --> 01:06:00,720
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit more about some of those investigators. UM.

965
01:06:00,760 --> 01:06:04,360
Speaker 1: Can you describe the Societies for Psychical Research that formed

966
01:06:04,360 --> 01:06:07,400
Speaker 1: first in London and then in the United States and

967
01:06:07,840 --> 01:06:12,680
Speaker 1: their approach to spiritualism that happens later And here I

968
01:06:12,680 --> 01:06:15,880
Speaker 1: would say, debor Blum is your person. And it's so

969
01:06:15,960 --> 01:06:19,800
Speaker 1: interesting to me the way that people scholars of William

970
01:06:19,880 --> 01:06:22,760
Speaker 1: James and Henry James for that matter, UM, really do

971
01:06:23,120 --> 01:06:27,960
Speaker 1: very little around his work around abnormal psychology and and

972
01:06:27,960 --> 01:06:31,479
Speaker 1: and the founding of the Society's for Psychical Research. But

973
01:06:31,480 --> 01:06:35,080
Speaker 1: but James later in the century sort of turns and

974
01:06:35,120 --> 01:06:37,360
Speaker 1: there's there's probably more to me said about the relationship

975
01:06:37,400 --> 01:06:41,920
Speaker 1: between elite science and spiritualism. So very early on, UM,

976
01:06:42,000 --> 01:06:44,040
Speaker 1: I think it's it's really is like eighteen fifty eighteen

977
01:06:44,080 --> 01:06:47,800
Speaker 1: fifty two, a scientist named Robert Hare, respected chemists at

978
01:06:47,800 --> 01:06:53,120
Speaker 1: the University of Pennsylvania, becomes a devoted spiritualist, and there

979
01:06:53,120 --> 01:06:57,000
Speaker 1: are a number of very prominent scientists, so Hair Crooks,

980
01:06:57,040 --> 01:07:02,880
Speaker 1: Michael Faraday, Beacons experimenting the kind of elite scientists start

981
01:07:03,320 --> 01:07:06,560
Speaker 1: looking at spiritualism and and seeing if there's anything there.

982
01:07:07,160 --> 01:07:09,240
Speaker 1: Once James takes it on, you know, going towards the

983
01:07:09,240 --> 01:07:12,040
Speaker 1: turn of the century. He's very clear and addresses the

984
01:07:12,080 --> 01:07:16,720
Speaker 1: American UM Society for Psychical Research, and I guess it's

985
01:07:16,760 --> 01:07:19,560
Speaker 1: the first or second here that he's president about how

986
01:07:19,880 --> 01:07:23,600
Speaker 1: how important it is that that that spiritualism and the

987
01:07:23,720 --> 01:07:27,280
Speaker 1: psychic states have been taken out of the darkened rooms

988
01:07:27,320 --> 01:07:31,040
Speaker 1: and rat hole sellers that's a quote UM and into

989
01:07:31,080 --> 01:07:34,840
Speaker 1: the you know, the bright light of the laboratory. So

990
01:07:35,360 --> 01:07:37,560
Speaker 1: James is one of the many men at that time

991
01:07:37,640 --> 01:07:41,840
Speaker 1: who are who are deeply interested in the same thing

992
01:07:41,840 --> 01:07:44,560
Speaker 1: that spiritualism, are interested in the in the relationship between

993
01:07:44,600 --> 01:07:48,960
Speaker 1: the brain, soul and psyche, of psychic states, of abnormal psychology.

994
01:07:49,120 --> 01:07:53,240
Speaker 1: And you know, many of those investigators went on to

995
01:07:53,240 --> 01:07:58,320
Speaker 1: to bring that work into academic institutions. So UM psychical

996
01:07:58,360 --> 01:08:01,680
Speaker 1: research goes to Duke University, the first parapsychology lab is

997
01:08:03,240 --> 01:08:06,040
Speaker 1: has started there. So there are these connections and it's James,

998
01:08:06,040 --> 01:08:08,160
Speaker 1: but it's a number of other people as well, and

999
01:08:08,200 --> 01:08:13,120
Speaker 1: it's a whole fascinating world. That's great. So let's talk

1000
01:08:13,120 --> 01:08:16,680
Speaker 1: a little more about new thinking about kind of abnormal

1001
01:08:16,720 --> 01:08:21,160
Speaker 1: psychology towards the end of the century of the nineteenth century. Um,

1002
01:08:21,160 --> 01:08:23,639
Speaker 1: how did new ways of thinking about the human mind

1003
01:08:24,920 --> 01:08:28,880
Speaker 1: either relate to interest in spiritualism? Where did they? Did

1004
01:08:28,920 --> 01:08:32,840
Speaker 1: they draw interest away or did they push interests towards spiritualism? Um?

1005
01:08:32,840 --> 01:08:34,920
Speaker 1: How did how did this kind of new thinking that

1006
01:08:35,040 --> 01:08:37,759
Speaker 1: was displacing some of the discrediting some of the older

1007
01:08:37,800 --> 01:08:42,400
Speaker 1: sciences of mesmerism and or magnetism, that kind of stuff

1008
01:08:42,400 --> 01:08:45,519
Speaker 1: we talked about before? How did new thinking about the mind? Uh?

1009
01:08:45,840 --> 01:08:51,040
Speaker 1: Change the way that people related to spiritualism. The amazing

1010
01:08:51,080 --> 01:08:55,559
Speaker 1: thing about the eighteen seventies is that during that time,

1011
01:08:56,040 --> 01:09:00,040
Speaker 1: over the course of about fifteen years, a group of

1012
01:09:00,080 --> 01:09:03,640
Speaker 1: the most prominent Anglo American medical men took up the

1013
01:09:03,720 --> 01:09:07,479
Speaker 1: question of spiritualism. So, in in answer to your question,

1014
01:09:07,560 --> 01:09:09,760
Speaker 1: how did you thinking about a normal psychology in new

1015
01:09:09,760 --> 01:09:12,880
Speaker 1: ways of thinking about the mind? Sap interest in spiritualism,

1016
01:09:12,920 --> 01:09:16,720
Speaker 1: it actually increased it, um, but increased it in a

1017
01:09:16,760 --> 01:09:19,920
Speaker 1: way that was pathologizing. So in the eighteen seventies, a

1018
01:09:20,160 --> 01:09:23,280
Speaker 1: doctor named Frederick Marvin, who is in New York, coins

1019
01:09:23,360 --> 01:09:27,480
Speaker 1: the term medio mania, the notion that spiritualism was causing

1020
01:09:27,560 --> 01:09:31,479
Speaker 1: this kind of mass mania, both in individual psyches but

1021
01:09:31,560 --> 01:09:36,280
Speaker 1: also in the collective mania and madness. But there were

1022
01:09:36,320 --> 01:09:41,240
Speaker 1: doctors at that time who were neurologists and UM. In

1023
01:09:41,240 --> 01:09:44,760
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century there's there's basically a split between neurologists

1024
01:09:44,800 --> 01:09:47,599
Speaker 1: who were studying the mind, the brain, the psyche through

1025
01:09:47,680 --> 01:09:52,479
Speaker 1: the nerves, and alienists who were the asylum keepers. So

1026
01:09:52,360 --> 01:09:55,680
Speaker 1: so so during this time, neurologists are really looking to

1027
01:09:55,720 --> 01:10:00,599
Speaker 1: professionalize their you know, their their own little turf, and

1028
01:10:00,960 --> 01:10:04,479
Speaker 1: they do it in many ways, but but you know,

1029
01:10:04,920 --> 01:10:07,560
Speaker 1: not in a small way over the bodies of female mediums.

1030
01:10:08,080 --> 01:10:12,360
Speaker 1: So neurologists like William Hammond, Silas Ware Mitchell, George Beard

1031
01:10:13,200 --> 01:10:16,799
Speaker 1: Um and then also prominent alienis in um in London

1032
01:10:16,840 --> 01:10:22,240
Speaker 1: as well, all launch a polemical attack on spiritualism, and

1033
01:10:23,600 --> 01:10:29,360
Speaker 1: reading this medical barrage, um well suggest that doctors were

1034
01:10:29,360 --> 01:10:32,800
Speaker 1: concerned with both clinical and epistemological issues But all of

1035
01:10:32,800 --> 01:10:35,960
Speaker 1: it is about much of it is about medical professionalization.

1036
01:10:36,479 --> 01:10:40,040
Speaker 1: They become, they become the experts um in in the

1037
01:10:40,080 --> 01:10:44,439
Speaker 1: new worlds of the soul, in the psyche. Did this

1038
01:10:44,600 --> 01:10:52,000
Speaker 1: kind of formation of these disciplines as fields, neurology, alienists

1039
01:10:52,120 --> 01:10:55,720
Speaker 1: distinguished from each other, distinct from each other? Um, this

1040
01:10:55,880 --> 01:11:00,519
Speaker 1: interesting professionalization, did it express anything more all the about

1041
01:11:00,560 --> 01:11:10,160
Speaker 1: changes in American culture? Well? Yeah, um. In the late

1042
01:11:10,240 --> 01:11:13,040
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, medical doctors were in the process of forming

1043
01:11:13,040 --> 01:11:18,439
Speaker 1: a profession around the caretaking of the diseased spirit or psyche,

1044
01:11:19,400 --> 01:11:22,920
Speaker 1: which would have been a duty traditionally left to religion.

1045
01:11:23,960 --> 01:11:28,920
Speaker 1: So that warfare between science and religion that that spiritualist

1046
01:11:29,000 --> 01:11:34,559
Speaker 1: refused was one that doctors were taking on and not

1047
01:11:34,960 --> 01:11:37,320
Speaker 1: you know, not all And certainly William James is really

1048
01:11:37,320 --> 01:11:42,720
Speaker 1: beautiful about his his insistence in in not um pathologizing

1049
01:11:42,840 --> 01:11:44,920
Speaker 1: mystical experience in the ways that some of them do.

1050
01:11:46,040 --> 01:11:54,360
Speaker 1: But medical doctors claimed to jurisdiction over insanity rested upon um.

1051
01:11:54,400 --> 01:11:56,280
Speaker 1: All they could do to minister was to ministered to

1052
01:11:56,320 --> 01:11:59,479
Speaker 1: the body right, and they did so with blood letting

1053
01:11:59,680 --> 01:12:03,080
Speaker 1: in all of these forms of quote unquote heroic medicine,

1054
01:12:03,120 --> 01:12:07,160
Speaker 1: which were actually really pretty savage, and the mind was

1055
01:12:07,240 --> 01:12:12,960
Speaker 1: a new terrain. UM. So spiritualists laid claim and doctors

1056
01:12:13,040 --> 01:12:19,000
Speaker 1: late counterclaim, and they began to study female mediums, sometimes

1057
01:12:19,040 --> 01:12:23,200
Speaker 1: against their will, sometimes with the you know, full collaboration.

1058
01:12:23,400 --> 01:12:28,080
Speaker 1: But it's a fascinating moment. And it's if historians of

1059
01:12:28,280 --> 01:12:31,759
Speaker 1: psychoanalysis are very clear that psychoanalysis, at least in Europe,

1060
01:12:31,880 --> 01:12:34,960
Speaker 1: was formed around the body and speech of the female hysteric.

1061
01:12:35,680 --> 01:12:39,160
Speaker 1: In the United States, you could argue that the American

1062
01:12:39,160 --> 01:12:42,040
Speaker 1: science of neurology was formed around the figure of the

1063
01:12:42,080 --> 01:12:47,559
Speaker 1: female medium. So in late eighteen eighties we have all

1064
01:12:47,600 --> 01:12:50,479
Speaker 1: these kinds of things going on. We also have the

1065
01:12:50,520 --> 01:12:55,960
Speaker 1: development of theosophy and New Thought and other kinds of

1066
01:12:56,000 --> 01:13:00,479
Speaker 1: new movements, new communities that are forming UH in some

1067
01:13:00,560 --> 01:13:04,160
Speaker 1: of the same space where spiritualism had been UM. And

1068
01:13:04,160 --> 01:13:11,160
Speaker 1: then Maggie Fox publishes a book that claims her sciences

1069
01:13:11,160 --> 01:13:13,080
Speaker 1: were a fraud. Of course there's someone else writing it

1070
01:13:13,160 --> 01:13:17,800
Speaker 1: for her, but apparently her testimony. What's the effect on

1071
01:13:17,880 --> 01:13:21,120
Speaker 1: spiritualism as a whole when Maggie Fox, one of the

1072
01:13:21,160 --> 01:13:26,240
Speaker 1: Fox sisters UH, publishes this kind of revelation, Well, it

1073
01:13:26,280 --> 01:13:29,599
Speaker 1: makes them press, as you know, But the actual effect

1074
01:13:29,760 --> 01:13:33,840
Speaker 1: on spiritualism as a whole was little. That's the trick

1075
01:13:35,640 --> 01:13:40,879
Speaker 1: throughout the history of spiritualism. There have been doubters and debunkers,

1076
01:13:40,960 --> 01:13:47,280
Speaker 1: and often those moments of confession actually create more publicity

1077
01:13:47,320 --> 01:13:50,000
Speaker 1: for the movement and have the defenders come back even stronger.

1078
01:13:50,439 --> 01:13:55,200
Speaker 1: Plus Maggie Fox recants, she really you know, that dissipated

1079
01:13:55,240 --> 01:13:57,519
Speaker 1: and broke. Maggie Fox would go on to her forty

1080
01:13:57,600 --> 01:14:01,840
Speaker 1: years or forty more years after the original Rochester knockings

1081
01:14:02,280 --> 01:14:07,240
Speaker 1: to debunk spiritualism and admit to the very manipulations of

1082
01:14:07,320 --> 01:14:11,120
Speaker 1: bone and joint that doctors had earlier accused her and

1083
01:14:11,160 --> 01:14:16,759
Speaker 1: her sisters of. Um. It not only confirms the triumph

1084
01:14:16,760 --> 01:14:20,280
Speaker 1: of science over the triumph of science over superstition, but

1085
01:14:20,320 --> 01:14:23,120
Speaker 1: it really did very little to to sort of change

1086
01:14:23,120 --> 01:14:28,200
Speaker 1: the dial among people who were in that said the

1087
01:14:28,240 --> 01:14:30,880
Speaker 1: movement was fading, so you know, she got another she

1088
01:14:30,960 --> 01:14:34,439
Speaker 1: got to do another tour, um, you know whatever people's

1089
01:14:34,520 --> 01:14:38,320
Speaker 1: last act, you know. Um. This is also the period

1090
01:14:38,360 --> 01:14:42,880
Speaker 1: where as spiritualism is fading. UM, there are some spiritualists

1091
01:14:42,920 --> 01:14:47,639
Speaker 1: like Cora now Cora Richmond, who were working to create

1092
01:14:47,720 --> 01:14:53,320
Speaker 1: something that would be stable and last for Spiritualists going forward.

1093
01:14:53,400 --> 01:14:58,720
Speaker 1: She was central to founding the National Spiritualist Association. Um.

1094
01:14:58,800 --> 01:15:02,800
Speaker 1: What was core ros investment in creating a lasting institutional

1095
01:15:02,840 --> 01:15:06,280
Speaker 1: base for spiritualism, Uh, for this movement that had been

1096
01:15:06,320 --> 01:15:11,840
Speaker 1: so anti institutional, anti hierarchical um. Maybe not corporate in particular,

1097
01:15:11,840 --> 01:15:14,000
Speaker 1: but can you describe kind of the spiritualist dedication to

1098
01:15:14,080 --> 01:15:17,120
Speaker 1: creating enduring institutions in the in the eighteen eighties and

1099
01:15:17,240 --> 01:15:22,439
Speaker 1: nineties as time kind of stretches on, Well, Core Hatch

1100
01:15:22,479 --> 01:15:25,519
Speaker 1: was getting old. She was an aging child star, a

1101
01:15:25,600 --> 01:15:28,479
Speaker 1: diva who needed to invest her faith in institutions that

1102
01:15:28,520 --> 01:15:31,080
Speaker 1: would outlast her. I mean, I really think that that's

1103
01:15:31,120 --> 01:15:33,760
Speaker 1: there's there's something to that in terms of understanding her,

1104
01:15:34,760 --> 01:15:37,519
Speaker 1: her her importance to this movement. But that was very

1105
01:15:37,600 --> 01:15:41,480
Speaker 1: much an impulse of the era, and historians have described

1106
01:15:41,560 --> 01:15:44,920
Speaker 1: that air is you know, an age of corporation, incorporation

1107
01:15:45,120 --> 01:15:49,760
Speaker 1: when Americans become you know, more likely to build institutions

1108
01:15:49,880 --> 01:15:52,800
Speaker 1: and you know, to to move away from the kind

1109
01:15:52,800 --> 01:15:56,760
Speaker 1: of anti authoritarian communal impulses of the fervent of the

1110
01:15:56,760 --> 01:16:00,280
Speaker 1: Antebellum years. So some of it is that. But think

1111
01:16:00,320 --> 01:16:06,000
Speaker 1: what's true is that that spiritualist institutions. Spiritualist national institutions

1112
01:16:06,040 --> 01:16:08,360
Speaker 1: never really get off the ground because spiritualists are rather

1113
01:16:08,439 --> 01:16:11,960
Speaker 1: anti authoritarian as a lot. Um, So even in the

1114
01:16:12,000 --> 01:16:15,839
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties and nineties, it's almost two it's kind of ending,

1115
01:16:16,000 --> 01:16:18,880
Speaker 1: you know. So it always read to me a bit

1116
01:16:18,960 --> 01:16:23,120
Speaker 1: like a last gasp. So I'm interested in in your

1117
01:16:23,200 --> 01:16:26,800
Speaker 1: your view on the pretty common comparison of spiritualism in

1118
01:16:26,840 --> 01:16:30,360
Speaker 1: the United States after the Civil War and in Europe

1119
01:16:30,400 --> 01:16:33,360
Speaker 1: after the First World War. Do you have thoughts on

1120
01:16:33,360 --> 01:16:36,120
Speaker 1: that comparison that's often made and used to talk about

1121
01:16:36,200 --> 01:16:41,280
Speaker 1: kind of national mourning after a cataclysm mcgloss at that scale, Well,

1122
01:16:41,320 --> 01:16:45,320
Speaker 1: there's certainly a resurgence after World War One. Obviously, comparing

1123
01:16:45,360 --> 01:16:48,479
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties or the eighteen seventies with the nineteen twenties,

1124
01:16:49,200 --> 01:16:52,200
Speaker 1: so much it changed across the turn of that long

1125
01:16:52,520 --> 01:16:59,599
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, but so much hadn't changed. Um. World War

1126
01:16:59,680 --> 01:17:02,960
Speaker 1: One decimated Europe with a kind of violence and carnage

1127
01:17:03,120 --> 01:17:08,080
Speaker 1: never seen before. Um. The new twentieth century had invented

1128
01:17:08,080 --> 01:17:11,599
Speaker 1: new weapons of war, but offered little new to help

1129
01:17:11,680 --> 01:17:16,320
Speaker 1: survivors grapple or cope with the aftermath. Um, you know,

1130
01:17:16,439 --> 01:17:20,400
Speaker 1: people were and are still asking how can the dead

1131
01:17:21,439 --> 01:17:23,879
Speaker 1: speak to the living as something other than the haunting,

1132
01:17:24,000 --> 01:17:28,280
Speaker 1: seating presence of absence. The resurgence is real. I mean

1133
01:17:28,439 --> 01:17:32,960
Speaker 1: it's a different resurgence, but I mean I'm now, I'm

1134
01:17:32,960 --> 01:17:36,639
Speaker 1: now in the nine twenties, and Um, Thomas Edison hits

1135
01:17:36,800 --> 01:17:40,920
Speaker 1: the press with the news that he is building an

1136
01:17:40,920 --> 01:17:45,800
Speaker 1: apparatus to contact the dead. Um, and all of the

1137
01:17:45,840 --> 01:17:47,880
Speaker 1: press is framing it at the time, you know, from

1138
01:17:47,880 --> 01:17:50,840
Speaker 1: the New York Times to the Scientific America as a

1139
01:17:50,840 --> 01:17:57,599
Speaker 1: new resurgence and spiritualism after the war. That's great. Um.

1140
01:17:57,640 --> 01:18:00,120
Speaker 1: Stepping back just a bit, but kind of still in

1141
01:18:00,160 --> 01:18:03,080
Speaker 1: that space of the turn of the nineteenth century into

1142
01:18:03,120 --> 01:18:05,879
Speaker 1: the twenties. You say, in the in the eighties and nineties,

1143
01:18:05,920 --> 01:18:11,240
Speaker 1: spiritualism is in decline, Um, what is its status? Its position?

1144
01:18:11,280 --> 01:18:15,400
Speaker 1: And maybe in the American religious or social landscape at

1145
01:18:15,400 --> 01:18:20,360
Speaker 1: the turn of the century, but it had found its

1146
01:18:20,360 --> 01:18:24,360
Speaker 1: way to theosophy, which does grow during that time. Um.

1147
01:18:24,560 --> 01:18:27,439
Speaker 1: You know, spirituals are still meeting in camp meetings in

1148
01:18:27,560 --> 01:18:29,960
Speaker 1: the you know, in the eighteen eighties and beyond, they're

1149
01:18:30,000 --> 01:18:33,880
Speaker 1: still doing their work. I think what's true is because

1150
01:18:34,080 --> 01:18:38,519
Speaker 1: the newspapers become less important and the community becomes more diverse.

1151
01:18:39,160 --> 01:18:42,080
Speaker 1: And because many historians look at the northeast and and

1152
01:18:42,160 --> 01:18:45,519
Speaker 1: don't look at the west quite as much, that you know,

1153
01:18:45,680 --> 01:18:48,680
Speaker 1: they've missed a lot of the rebuilding that goes on

1154
01:18:48,800 --> 01:18:51,120
Speaker 1: in the eighteen eighties and the kind of experiments that

1155
01:18:51,160 --> 01:18:56,040
Speaker 1: are happening outside the northeast or the you know, central

1156
01:18:56,040 --> 01:18:58,719
Speaker 1: New York in that area that had worth the original movement.

1157
01:18:59,160 --> 01:19:03,080
Speaker 1: So I think the it's less that spiritualism declines. I mean,

1158
01:19:03,080 --> 01:19:05,120
Speaker 1: that would be one way to see it, but it

1159
01:19:05,200 --> 01:19:08,120
Speaker 1: just becomes more difficult to see for all sorts of reasons.

1160
01:19:08,360 --> 01:19:12,160
Speaker 1: And and it moves it you know, it moves into

1161
01:19:12,160 --> 01:19:15,720
Speaker 1: different different formations, but but it doesn't die. And then

1162
01:19:15,760 --> 01:19:19,080
Speaker 1: the fact that that in it can the resurgence can

1163
01:19:19,160 --> 01:19:23,760
Speaker 1: happen again so quickly despite the radical differences across that

1164
01:19:23,960 --> 01:19:27,200
Speaker 1: you know, long nineteenth century and into um speaks to

1165
01:19:27,200 --> 01:19:31,439
Speaker 1: a kind of enduring power. We're going to cover the

1166
01:19:31,479 --> 01:19:37,200
Speaker 1: formation of Cassadega, the Cassadega community in that's there, you go,

1167
01:19:37,439 --> 01:19:41,120
Speaker 1: that's it. Yeah, where it moves outside of the Northeast,

1168
01:19:41,160 --> 01:19:44,719
Speaker 1: but there are places where people decide to build something

1169
01:19:44,880 --> 01:19:49,400
Speaker 1: and what they build less yeah. Um. So as kind

1170
01:19:49,400 --> 01:19:53,680
Speaker 1: of maybe a final wrap up question, Um, what do

1171
01:19:53,800 --> 01:19:58,839
Speaker 1: you hope that listeners will take away from uh twelve

1172
01:19:58,880 --> 01:20:07,680
Speaker 1: hour narrative exploration of nineteenth century spiritualism? Oh my, oh,

1173
01:20:08,600 --> 01:20:16,559
Speaker 1: you know I've answered that question really differently over time. UM.

1174
01:20:16,600 --> 01:20:19,680
Speaker 1: I mean, I think part of the only reason to

1175
01:20:19,680 --> 01:20:22,160
Speaker 1: study history, history is what hurts. The only reason to

1176
01:20:22,160 --> 01:20:24,000
Speaker 1: study history is to be able to kind of think

1177
01:20:24,000 --> 01:20:26,240
Speaker 1: differently about our present, to write a history of the present.

1178
01:20:27,160 --> 01:20:30,920
Speaker 1: And um, I think it's very easy to sort of

1179
01:20:31,000 --> 01:20:34,480
Speaker 1: look back at the past and see irrationality and superstition

1180
01:20:34,600 --> 01:20:38,840
Speaker 1: and a kind of secularization narrative in which we, you know,

1181
01:20:38,960 --> 01:20:42,519
Speaker 1: are are no longer part of this kind of you know,

1182
01:20:42,600 --> 01:20:47,120
Speaker 1: community community of believers are dupes or the credulous, the

1183
01:20:47,120 --> 01:20:49,960
Speaker 1: credulous ones. And you know, I live in Los Angeles.

1184
01:20:50,280 --> 01:20:55,360
Speaker 1: I most people know their sun sign, if not their

1185
01:20:55,479 --> 01:20:58,519
Speaker 1: rising sign. When you know, people don't know their blood

1186
01:20:58,560 --> 01:21:02,719
Speaker 1: type and they know their astrology. This hasn't gone away.

1187
01:21:02,800 --> 01:21:06,639
Speaker 1: I mean, what can be seen as a kind of um,

1188
01:21:06,680 --> 01:21:11,799
Speaker 1: you know, spurious consolation or after dinner pastime is speaks

1189
01:21:11,800 --> 01:21:16,120
Speaker 1: to a real need for people for for contact, for connection,

1190
01:21:16,439 --> 01:21:19,000
Speaker 1: and it's you know, it's it's easy to see as

1191
01:21:19,040 --> 01:21:23,839
Speaker 1: as as superstition UM or you know, as a child's

1192
01:21:24,000 --> 01:21:26,519
Speaker 1: kids parlor game. But but it was really, it was

1193
01:21:26,520 --> 01:21:30,160
Speaker 1: really powerful, and I originally started doing this work because

1194
01:21:30,240 --> 01:21:34,120
Speaker 1: I was here we are again UM. The rise of

1195
01:21:34,160 --> 01:21:38,120
Speaker 1: the evangelical right was very, very prominent, and obviously again

1196
01:21:38,280 --> 01:21:42,920
Speaker 1: remained so. But the histories of UM the spiritual or

1197
01:21:42,960 --> 01:21:45,839
Speaker 1: religious left are harder to find. And it was amazing

1198
01:21:45,880 --> 01:21:50,840
Speaker 1: to me the way that the imagination, the possibility that

1199
01:21:50,960 --> 01:21:54,759
Speaker 1: spiritualists could could cross from this world to the next

1200
01:21:55,640 --> 01:22:01,000
Speaker 1: allow them to collapse distinctions between worlds, between body, between genders,

1201
01:22:01,080 --> 01:22:06,120
Speaker 1: between races in some cases. That that that that cosmology

1202
01:22:06,320 --> 01:22:10,960
Speaker 1: allowed for a remaking of things in this world, and

1203
01:22:11,080 --> 01:22:26,479
Speaker 1: that material connection UM, I think remains very powerful. Un

1204
01:22:26,560 --> 01:22:29,680
Speaker 1: Obscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by

1205
01:22:29,680 --> 01:22:33,400
Speaker 1: Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with

1206
01:22:33,439 --> 01:22:36,640
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is

1207
01:22:36,680 --> 01:22:39,120
Speaker 1: all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis

1208
01:22:39,240 --> 01:22:42,360
Speaker 1: and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack.

1209
01:22:42,880 --> 01:22:46,800
Speaker 1: Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links

1210
01:22:46,840 --> 01:22:51,160
Speaker 1: to our other shows over at History unobscured dot com

1211
01:22:51,200 --> 01:23:02,000
Speaker 1: and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured is a

1212
01:23:02,000 --> 01:23:04,360
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Menkey. For more

1213
01:23:04,360 --> 01:23:06,639
Speaker 1: podcasts for My heart Radio, visit i heeart radio app,

1214
01:23:06,720 --> 01:23:09,200
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