Speaker 1: Welcomed. Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minkey.
Speaker 1: Today's guest historian is John Buscher. He is the author
Speaker 1: of many books and articles on the history of American spiritualism,
Speaker 1: and that should be no surprise. He's the co director
Speaker 1: of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and
Speaker 1: Occult Periodicals. It's an online database where John and his
Speaker 1: team have digitized thousands of pages of newspapers, pamphlets, books
Speaker 1: and advertisements, which is a gold mine for historians and
Speaker 1: people like me. Researcher Carl Nellis talked with John about
Speaker 1: all kinds of spiritualists. Some we covered in our season
Speaker 1: of Unobscured, like Corras Scott to John Conklin, and some
Speaker 1: will introduce to you here for the first time. So
Speaker 1: let's get to the interview. Here's Dr John Buscher. This
Speaker 1: is the Unobscured Interview series for season two. I'm Aaron Mankey. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: it meant to be attached to a movement that was
Speaker 1: sometimes firmly and sometimes loosely associated. Um. These were people
Speaker 1: who felt that they could make immediate contact with the soul,
Speaker 1: so they departed and in order to do that, They
Speaker 1: typically would sit around in a around a table and
Speaker 1: join hands and UM wait for things to happen. Lights
Speaker 1: tree usually turned down fairly low, and UM. One of
Speaker 1: them would be would act as a medium, which means
Speaker 1: someone who could establish psychic contact with the spirits. Sometimes
Speaker 1: things would happen that We're not just what you might
Speaker 1: think of as messages coming out of the medium's mouth
Speaker 1: from various spirits, but sometimes UM, furniture would move, or
Speaker 1: people would feel caressings or here wraps under the table
Speaker 1: and so on. And that was more or less the
Speaker 1: practical meaning of being a spiritualist. But it was wide movement,
Speaker 1: and you didn't necessarily have to actually attend what came
Speaker 1: to be called seances in order to identify yourself with
Speaker 1: as a spiritualist. Spiritualist also developed a kind of constellational
Speaker 1: beliefs about the afterlife and about this life, and so
Speaker 1: there were spiritual conventions. There were UM a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who traveled as platform lecturers who speculated on this
Speaker 1: new theology and new doctrine and new era that was
Speaker 1: opening up that would join up heaven to earth. You know,
Speaker 1: That's what it was. In that variety of kind of
Speaker 1: events that would be considered spiritualists, from the platform lecture
Speaker 1: to the test medium investigation to the seance. When people
Speaker 1: were coming to these seances to meet with these mediums,
Speaker 1: what kinds of things were they looking for? What do
Speaker 1: they want to get out of it? Well, they they
Speaker 1: wanted to see wonder um, and one of the wonders
Speaker 1: that they saw or hoped to see was some immediate
Speaker 1: connection to their own relatives or friends in the afterlife.
Speaker 1: They were anxious about that, and if it could be
Speaker 1: proved that connection was made UM, it would of course
Speaker 1: alieve their own grieving over the departed souls of their
Speaker 1: friends and relatives, but it would also give them some conviction.
Speaker 1: They typically talked about how traditional religion was based on
Speaker 1: faith in the afterlife, but they were seeking knowledge or
Speaker 1: proof of it. So that wonder that they were seeking,
Speaker 1: I think was just larger than asking Aunt Bertha, where
Speaker 1: where that will was of Uncle Carl's that nobody knows
Speaker 1: that we can't find it? Now, where was the dresser
Speaker 1: or something? UM? Or how are you doing? Um? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it a good place that you've gone to in
Speaker 1: the afterlife? But there were larger questions about anxieties to
Speaker 1: be answered about the direction of the country, about the
Speaker 1: direction of about even about politics, about the new world
Speaker 1: that would seemed to be merging all around them. Um.
Speaker 1: So these were the kind I mean, it was a
Speaker 1: very broad spectrum of things that were going on. There
Speaker 1: were many people who tended seances that called themselves investigators,
Speaker 1: you know, as if they were amateur or sometimes professional
Speaker 1: um scientists who were looking for evidence and would regard
Speaker 1: these sessions as an opportunity to test whether or not
Speaker 1: fraud was going on, or self delusion or whatnot, as
Speaker 1: well as firm believers that what they were seeing was
Speaker 1: and was in fact true. So I think, um, it's
Speaker 1: a hard question to answer, but there were a range
Speaker 1: of motivations from people who joined in seances or even
Speaker 1: who attended platform lectures. Um. I think it's very typical
Speaker 1: reading account of a medium who would go up on
Speaker 1: stage and the audience would be mixed between firm believers,
Speaker 1: and they would usually set themselves off towards the front
Speaker 1: in a kind of cord and maybe to pretend the
Speaker 1: speaker I don't know, but and then behind them there
Speaker 1: big hecklers and people who, you know, we're sort of
Speaker 1: vaguely threatening Uh, you know, might ask embarrassing questions or
Speaker 1: try to trick medium or something like that. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: In the course of researching the movement and studying its members. Uh,
Speaker 1: You've you've fastened on some figures like John Mary Spear
Speaker 1: and John Conklin and and odeali Adista Bar and you've
Speaker 1: written book length treatments about them. Is there a common
Speaker 1: thread between the kinds of people that you have taken
Speaker 1: as your research subjects and decided to tell their their
Speaker 1: story in a kind of robust way. Well, there's two
Speaker 1: parts of that answer, Quarrel. I think one is that
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated with writing people's biographies. Um. I don't know
Speaker 1: how to write history and abstract way. Um I usually
Speaker 1: my eyes usually glaze over as I'm looking through history
Speaker 1: that depicts it as a playground of impersonal forces and
Speaker 1: working against each other and dropping out the individuals. I
Speaker 1: think all I can see about history is the stories
Speaker 1: of people to tell tales about other people, and that's
Speaker 1: what I've always been interested in. So that's one way
Speaker 1: to to talk about why I'm incasantly writing biographies. I
Speaker 1: don't know how to do it any other way. But
Speaker 1: the other issue is the people I've focused on, maybe,
Speaker 1: as you've noticed, are really wild characters. And I think
Speaker 1: I've always been I don't know if you'd say gifted,
Speaker 1: but at least fascinated by outliers. These are the sort
Speaker 1: of the wildest of the wild folks. And h I
Speaker 1: think I've always been able to, I don't know, walk
Speaker 1: along the beach sand and find some odd saying that
Speaker 1: whether people don't notice, or some piece of glass that
Speaker 1: looks shiny, uh. And these are definitely that those kinds
Speaker 1: of people, you know, within the wide range of the
Speaker 1: spiritualist movement, I seem to be able to find, you know,
Speaker 1: the toad and the hole or the serpent in the garden,
Speaker 1: if you might say. And I think by looking at
Speaker 1: those outliers, so you can see stuff that's true within
Speaker 1: the movement, but maybe harder to see stuff that's true
Speaker 1: m in potential, and that leads you into, you know,
Speaker 1: questioning main narrative about what spiritualism was and trying to
Speaker 1: follow its logic. They seem to be loose threads that
Speaker 1: you can pull and see the texture a little better.
Speaker 1: That's that's fantastic. Maybe as we as we as we
Speaker 1: talk over the next hour or so. UM, it would
Speaker 1: be awesome to hear you kind of reflect, maybe because
Speaker 1: I want to talk about both John Conklin and Cora
Speaker 1: Scott who became Corea Hatch and Cora Richmond, and maybe
Speaker 1: we'll be able to compare a little bit and talk
Speaker 1: about what the main narrative is and and who the
Speaker 1: outliers are and kind of how they played against each other. Um,
Speaker 1: over a few decades of spiritualist history. I would love
Speaker 1: that if we could do that kind of going forward.
Speaker 1: Um m hm. You're one of those people who has
Speaker 1: done a great service to academia with the with I
Speaker 1: apps up in digitizing and working to collect digitized periodicals
Speaker 1: from spiritualist history. Uh. With with the team there, can
Speaker 1: you talk about what originally drew you to the to
Speaker 1: that work and uh and what you've done with that organization? Yes,
Speaker 1: I can tell you. UM, I put a few things
Speaker 1: on the web. M. I don't know fifteen eighteen years ago. UM,
Speaker 1: that struck me as important and fascinating about history of spiritualism.
Speaker 1: Mostly you get to know spiritualism I think from the
Speaker 1: ground up as a historian. UM. And the ground was
Speaker 1: missing here. There is plenty of secondary material. But if
Speaker 1: you read secondary material people who already have a take
Speaker 1: on it, and maybe we were not as familiar as
Speaker 1: they could have been with this primary material, then you're
Speaker 1: not really getting down into where the history was being formed.
Speaker 1: And it was also my conviction that all of the
Speaker 1: material I was looking for was present in the periodicals
Speaker 1: and newspapers that spiritualists themselves were producing back in those days.
Speaker 1: You know, they would often give lists of platform mediums
Speaker 1: and where they were going in their lecture tours and
Speaker 1: so on. They would also give criticisms of one another,
Speaker 1: um on this point at that point, who was marrying who,
Speaker 1: who was dissing who? Um. Those kinds of things are
Speaker 1: not readily available, and they were only in these periodicals.
Speaker 1: So in order to get hold of these periodicals, I mean,
Speaker 1: these were this is ephemera, you know, and a lot
Speaker 1: of if you think about it, librarians, who an archivists,
Speaker 1: who would be expected to um collect and preserve such materials,
Speaker 1: they were inclined. Over the century and a half since
Speaker 1: these things were produced, they were quite inclined to de
Speaker 1: accession these things at at their first chance, either about
Speaker 1: of their own convictions or simply because I thought oh,
Speaker 1: this is kind of crazy, and I need the space here,
Speaker 1: and let's throw away these fourteen volumes of the Banner
Speaker 1: of Light or something. So in practice, what that meant
Speaker 1: was if you wanted to do primary research in that area. UM.
Speaker 1: The collections were scattered all over the country, in fact,
Speaker 1: all over the world. You might have a volume collected
Speaker 1: here or in Washington and the Library Congress, or there
Speaker 1: might be one UM at the New York Public Library.
Speaker 1: And so UM there was three or four of us
Speaker 1: who decided, maybe we're getting to be sort of retired
Speaker 1: gentlemen here or whatever, men of leisure or something like that,
Speaker 1: and we're of the same conviction that we really couldn't
Speaker 1: rely on UM secondary material. So we set off sort
Speaker 1: of quixotic project to collect all this stuff. And one
Speaker 1: of us, in particular, Mark Damrest, was quite skilled, and
Speaker 1: UM I t and decided that we could elect all
Speaker 1: this and put it on a server. We could scan it,
Speaker 1: We could go dust off stuff, travel here and there
Speaker 1: on our own resources, and use our time and talent
Speaker 1: to either photograph these things stuck in a corner somewhere
Speaker 1: here and there, UM or shell out some bugs to
Speaker 1: get the libraries themselves to make microfilm roles that we
Speaker 1: could turn into O c R stuff and call it
Speaker 1: at all and put it on the web. And wouldn't
Speaker 1: that be a wonderful resource for everybody, so people wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to go trudging around and sort of work in
Speaker 1: the darkness. So that was the that's the inspiration for it.
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, it really has been such a service.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, of course I've been in offended from
Speaker 1: it for this project, but just as I've been sorting
Speaker 1: through the more recent secondary material that's been written since
Speaker 1: those resources have been on the web, Uh, I see,
Speaker 1: I see the debt to you and Mark and and
Speaker 1: the folks who have joined you over Power Vaney, the
Speaker 1: other guy who has joined us was retired lawyer from
Speaker 1: New York. He had spent probably years collecting microfilm roles
Speaker 1: sticking him in his study. He bought a microfilm reader
Speaker 1: and would put, you know, just for enjoyment. Instead of
Speaker 1: other people who might, you know, turn on a football game,
Speaker 1: he would go into his study and load one of
Speaker 1: these microfilm rolls on and read the Um Spiritual Telegraph
Speaker 1: from eighteen sixty four and just to have a good
Speaker 1: old time. So he was a really primary resource for
Speaker 1: us at the beginning, especially at the beginning. Uh, this
Speaker 1: kind of creates an interesting bridge back to what spiritual
Speaker 1: us we're doing with publishing. How would you describe what
Speaker 1: spiritualists were doing with various kinds of technology. I mean,
Speaker 1: there was lots of experience, experimentation, and interest in both
Speaker 1: spreading news but also figuring out how to communicate across
Speaker 1: new horizons. And I see almost some parallels between I mean,
Speaker 1: what kind of what we're doing now with podcasting, but uh,
Speaker 1: you know where every kind of group has a podcast
Speaker 1: or a website or a blog, or what you were
Speaker 1: doing with digitizing saying we can put this out on
Speaker 1: the web. We can. Um, can you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about how spiritualists in the nineteenth century engage technology
Speaker 1: and communication and how that was really tied into the movement. Well,
Speaker 1: there's several things that we could talk about there. One
Speaker 1: of them is essentially the newspapers from periodicals themselves. There
Speaker 1: weren't that many spiritualists around the country, but um, they
Speaker 1: formed a definite group and had related interest. And the
Speaker 1: newspapers weren't local newspapers, they were national newspapers. They were
Speaker 1: always conceived of is that way, um, And so they
Speaker 1: functioned as a sort of social media platform I guess
Speaker 1: you could say, in a primitive way, uniting people who
Speaker 1: were surrounded by seeds of unbelievers and had you know,
Speaker 1: allowed them to basically talk to each other. So that's uh,
Speaker 1: that's one way in which they used their you know,
Speaker 1: the emerging technology of newspaper distributions and subscription lists and
Speaker 1: cross references and so on. So it was an interesting
Speaker 1: time in the history of newspapers itself in the United States,
Speaker 1: and spirituals took full use of that made you full
Speaker 1: use of that. So that's one thing. But there's another
Speaker 1: issue that's quite striking about spiritualism in general. There was
Speaker 1: an emergence during this time of new technology that was
Speaker 1: an inspiration to them religiously. I think you'd have to say, Um,
Speaker 1: it looked to them like harnessing of previously invisible forces
Speaker 1: steam electricity, and there were inventions that suggested to them
Speaker 1: that there was there were things in the world that
Speaker 1: hadn't been seen before, powers and potentialities that were being
Speaker 1: revealed to them unmistakably. Spiritual telegraph, which is the name
Speaker 1: of one of the main papers back then took its
Speaker 1: name from this kind of inspiration. The electronic telegraph had
Speaker 1: just been demonstrated, and it was a miracle. Basically, too
Speaker 1: many many people, and there was some real conviction that
Speaker 1: there were things going on, that we're turning the times
Speaker 1: into a new era, a new age, and that it
Speaker 1: was it was you could think of it as a
Speaker 1: sort of secular millennium. Heaven and Earth were being joined,
Speaker 1: the visible and invisible, Spirit and matter were coming close together. UM,
Speaker 1: the dead and the living would walk together. Space and
Speaker 1: time would be annihilated. And it was exciting too many
Speaker 1: people and a hopeful and optimistic time that it was
Speaker 1: also somewhat distressing, UM annihilated. I think if you look
Speaker 1: at there's one particular story of called the Celestial Railroad
Speaker 1: that was written by UM David Thorow, and this story
Speaker 1: is about a gentleman who gets on the railroad at
Speaker 1: some place I forget anyway, All the points along the
Speaker 1: way are are named for the points of progress that
Speaker 1: the pilgrim makes in the old Pilgrim's Progress story. And
Speaker 1: by getting on the railroad, he just sails on past
Speaker 1: the slough of Despond and Vanity Fair. He just sees
Speaker 1: out the window and it sails right onto you know,
Speaker 1: the Heavenly City. But as he's moving into the Heavenly City,
Speaker 1: waiting for the final stop, it does occur to him
Speaker 1: whether or not this this is going to be heaven
Speaker 1: or it's something like it's reverse. Um. There was plenty
Speaker 1: of anxiety as well as optimism about it. And I
Speaker 1: think this is one of the things that made people,
Speaker 1: you know home for the best with the secular millennium
Speaker 1: that was upon him. So I think the spiritualists were
Speaker 1: both impressed and put somewhat at sea with the rest
Speaker 1: of everybody else about this new world that was opening
Speaker 1: up before them. And there are a few spiritualist inventors
Speaker 1: who try to create technologies that will capture or become themselves.
Speaker 1: A spiritual telegraph that will allow spirits to speak to people.
Speaker 1: You you write about John Mary Spear and there's a
Speaker 1: god machine. Uh. Decades later, there's the psychophone, right. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's a whole a series of machines for connecting humans
Speaker 1: with the other world. Um. And one of our co
Speaker 1: directors on the IP project, Brandon Hodge, really has made
Speaker 1: that his specialty. He's a collector. If you walk through
Speaker 1: his house. It's kind of scary anyway. But he's collected
Speaker 1: plan chats and whigy board to do all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1: He's very well up on this. This is really his his,
Speaker 1: He's Bailey Wick. But yes, there was But they didn't
Speaker 1: just focus on machines to contact make contact between the
Speaker 1: living and the dead, but they also put their minds
Speaker 1: at work to try to get inspiration spirit help to
Speaker 1: invent new machines that would that would help everybody. John
Speaker 1: Murray spirit you mentioned, he worked on under the conviction
Speaker 1: that the spirits could give him and his fellow workers
Speaker 1: new ideas for patenting. They would avoid the patents of
Speaker 1: the singer and how for perfecting the sewing machine and
Speaker 1: spend quite a bit of time trying to um materialize
Speaker 1: those I guess you would say, into a workable machine.
Speaker 1: Another spirit actualist you claim to have invented vacuum canning.
Speaker 1: I think she did actually, So there were people that
Speaker 1: were looking who who are thinking about inspiration in a
Speaker 1: new way, were open to ideas that they didn't know
Speaker 1: where where they were coming from. I think everybody actually
Speaker 1: has such experience of feeling that they've been inspired by
Speaker 1: in the creative act inspired by ideas that don't seem
Speaker 1: to them to be connected with anything that they actually
Speaker 1: tried to figure out to work from. And spirituals were very, very,
Speaker 1: very much of that mind that goes way back right
Speaker 1: to the idea of the muse. Yes, I think so.
Speaker 1: I think the muses personific asian of something mysterious that
Speaker 1: that works inside you. You know, in some ways you
Speaker 1: can you can see there something that connects spiritualist movement
Speaker 1: which began late eighteen forties with the earlier Romantic movement UM.
Speaker 1: They two were very much impressed with UM the idea
Speaker 1: that poetry was a holy art and you could be
Speaker 1: inspired by resorting to non non rational faculties and powers
Speaker 1: that were beyond your little self, And in the thirties
Speaker 1: and forties kind of seating the ground for modern spiritualism.
Speaker 1: There was all kind of interest in uh mesmerism and
Speaker 1: animal magnetism and um magna of ties, chances and some
Speaker 1: of those practices that were considered kind of new horizons
Speaker 1: of applied science of the of the human person, of
Speaker 1: the mind of the soul. Can you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about how those ideas laid the groundwork for what
Speaker 1: would become spiritualism. Okay um. Historically, there was a French
Speaker 1: mesmerist who whose name was Charles Poya, who decided to
Speaker 1: come to America and give a series of Mesmerick demonstrations,
Speaker 1: as he called them, and spent most of his time
Speaker 1: around New England giving demonstrations of what we would recognize
Speaker 1: as hypnosis, and it very much impressed people. Um, and
Speaker 1: it created a rowing mass of other mesmeric demonstrators, demonstrators
Speaker 1: who applied their way around the country, showing off what
Speaker 1: was possible here and the sort of miraculous things that
Speaker 1: that people under hypnotic control could be expected to do,
Speaker 1: one of which was clairvoyance. Some of their mesmeric subjects
Speaker 1: were seemed to be capable of leaving their bodies and
Speaker 1: traveling other places, coming back and reporting to the audience
Speaker 1: details that they couldn't know. Um. They might be able
Speaker 1: to report being able to see into other people's bodies
Speaker 1: and figuring out diagnosing their diseases and prescribing what would
Speaker 1: cause them to heel. Um. This was a shock to people,
Speaker 1: and I think it was, as he said, laid the
Speaker 1: groundwork for the possibility that um, well, you know, in
Speaker 1: a larger sense, I think you can see him during
Speaker 1: that time that what we call the self was a
Speaker 1: mystery was being revealed as a mystery, that that it
Speaker 1: wasn't unitary, or there was something underneath, hidden underneath, beyond
Speaker 1: what was on top of your consciousness that usually identified
Speaker 1: as yourself. You know, people who are speaking about main
Speaker 1: narratives here. It is often said that one of the
Speaker 1: crises of modernism a modern man that threw man into
Speaker 1: a dizzy. I mean capital M. Here was um for
Speaker 1: a for ad Darwin. But in Fred's case it was
Speaker 1: that he discovered and made plausible the notion of a
Speaker 1: subconscious But in fact um this was an issue, had
Speaker 1: been an issue um and a matter of much anxiety
Speaker 1: back into the late eighteenth century. And the people that
Speaker 1: were wandering around showing off their mesmerism, Um, we're certainly
Speaker 1: part of that. I don't know what you called uh
Speaker 1: discussion or um in the broader public realm didn't demonstrating
Speaker 1: that there were other things going on inside the self
Speaker 1: that might not be a parent At the same time, Uh,
Speaker 1: there are also changes in American religion. You write a
Speaker 1: lot in your book The Other Side of Salvation about
Speaker 1: connections between especially universalist ministers and spiritualists in the eighteen
Speaker 1: forties and eighteen fifties. Can you talk a bit about, um,
Speaker 1: the way that Universalism's place in American religion, uh was
Speaker 1: another piece uh of preparing the ground for spiritualism. Yes, okay. Um.
Speaker 1: Universalists were people who generally were what they called come
Speaker 1: outers of established religion. Now come outers as a term
Speaker 1: that they lifted out of a reference to the Book
Speaker 1: of Revelation where the Holy people are advised to come
Speaker 1: out of Babylon the fallen and go off into the wilderness,
Speaker 1: separate themselves. And so yeah, Um, there were many people
Speaker 1: who formed groups that I thought of themselves as come
Speaker 1: outers from either established religion or established government. And um,
Speaker 1: America was full of utopian projects and communes and so on,
Speaker 1: always has been, and the universe less in particular work
Speaker 1: come outers of what they called orthodoxy. That it's probably
Speaker 1: a too narrow a term to really understand without comment.
Speaker 1: What they meant by orthodoxy was a form of congregationalism
Speaker 1: based on mostly on what they understood of John Calvin.
Speaker 1: And the reason they came out of it was or
Speaker 1: or said that they came out was because they they
Speaker 1: were anxious. Seemed they were oppressed by the notion that, um,
Speaker 1: that there could be a god who would ah force
Speaker 1: people into endless misery and that such people couldn't act
Speaker 1: two affect that from their reading of Calvinism, it seemed
Speaker 1: that they were cut off from heaven, they were cut
Speaker 1: off from any effort to change their destiny, and that's
Speaker 1: a hard load to bear, and so they declared for
Speaker 1: universal salvation instead. All people would be saved in some ways.
Speaker 1: It's taking Calvin and turning him on his head. M
Speaker 1: So that was how exactly they came out, um, but
Speaker 1: I mean humans are humans. So they immediately began arguing about, well,
Speaker 1: if if everybody goes to heaven straight off, no matter
Speaker 1: what they've done on earth, then that means, for example,
Speaker 1: that Judas, who hung himself after betraying Christ, got to
Speaker 1: heaven before Jesus did his master are you know, posing
Speaker 1: sort of extreme consequences on each other to try to
Speaker 1: figure out, well, maybe there is some thing going on
Speaker 1: in the afterlife that would be evolution. The soul would progress,
Speaker 1: it would move higher and higher, And that notion of
Speaker 1: progression in the afterlife was one of the things that
Speaker 1: definitely disposed universalists, particularly of the conviction that there was
Speaker 1: progress in the afterlife. You couldn't you couldn't just say
Speaker 1: that everyone was immediately saved, so you could speak to
Speaker 1: maybe spirits who would tell you about what they were
Speaker 1: doing here and have conversations with you. And the afterlife
Speaker 1: was a place very much like this, except everybody was
Speaker 1: moving upward, you know, a little bit better day by day. Um.
Speaker 1: So that notion was really part of spiritualism from the beginning,
Speaker 1: and it was what you might say, both attracted universalists
Speaker 1: to it as well as I think you could say
Speaker 1: that early spiritualism was you know, which was at the
Speaker 1: very beginning was a very chaotic group of phenomena, but
Speaker 1: it was Universalists, mostly ministers, that that coagulated around it,
Speaker 1: gloamed onto it, that formed it's it's most basic convictions
Speaker 1: about this. So, with it being these come outers who
Speaker 1: are so helpful in addressing and building up a kind
Speaker 1: of a reputation for spiritualism, how did it then relate
Speaker 1: to those established tradition Christian traditions. Um, with it being
Speaker 1: so involved with universalism, what was kind of the response
Speaker 1: of the the other Christian traditions other than universalism to
Speaker 1: spiritualism following, you know in the okay Um. It's a
Speaker 1: very complex thing about the relationship between spiritualism and Christianity.
Speaker 1: In some ways, you can really see it as a
Speaker 1: sort of this is a loaded word, but a sort
Speaker 1: of parasitic upon Christian belief. Um or is codependent with
Speaker 1: Christian belief, mainline Christian belief, but um clearly the history
Speaker 1: of Christianity is very much in the direction that, hey,
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to call up the dead and talk
Speaker 1: to them. That's from absolutely forbidden UM. And that's that's
Speaker 1: just the way it always was. So most of the
Speaker 1: um Christian population the United States thought that this was
Speaker 1: not only crazy and full of fraud and duplicity, but
Speaker 1: it was also demonic. It was it had to do
Speaker 1: with idle worship and a resort to witches and soothsayers,
Speaker 1: fortune tellers and so on. So there was there was that,
Speaker 1: and they found that the spirituals found themselves quite a
Speaker 1: quite hammered on because Christians vaulted them for all that.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, spiritualists themselves were often conceived of
Speaker 1: themselves as as if they were part of what you
Speaker 1: might call the second wave of the perfection of the
Speaker 1: Protestant Revolution, which was itself a sort of coming out.
Speaker 1: They were come outers, the early Protestants from the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1: So um, they themselves were of divided opinion about their
Speaker 1: relationship with Christianity. Some of them, some of the most
Speaker 1: famous spiritualists, saw themselves as having come out completely out
Speaker 1: of Christianity into um secularism, atheism, free thought, and saw
Speaker 1: Spiritualism as the enemy of Christianity. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say that they were the majority of spiritualists.
Speaker 1: The majority of spiritualists I think saw themselves as sort
Speaker 1: of Christianity plus m hm hm. With the kind I
Speaker 1: answer that, yeah, that's great, that's okay. Um, with the
Speaker 1: kind of opposition to spiritualism that you just described, uh,
Speaker 1: where the majority of Christians take a very negative view,
Speaker 1: whether because they see it as idle worship or fraudulent
Speaker 1: or demonic. Um. It seems maybe surprising that spiritualism spread
Speaker 1: so quickly and even became a global movement, got picked up,
Speaker 1: you know, traveling back to France and to England and
Speaker 1: to Germany and the Caribbean and Australia. Um. What made
Speaker 1: this kind of distinctive modern spiritualism attractive beyond the context
Speaker 1: in which it first appeared. Well, I think it's probably
Speaker 1: common human aspiration to try to know about the afterlife.
Speaker 1: Death is a worrisome thing. If there's an answer somewhere
Speaker 1: and you can be made to believe it, it's certainly
Speaker 1: something you'd want to pay attention to, no matter where
Speaker 1: you were on earth. That's one way to answer your question,
Speaker 1: I suppose. UM. Another way is to sort of comb
Speaker 1: into the final details of what actually did get spread.
Speaker 1: There is a variety might say, of spiritualism that was
Speaker 1: shared through personal contacts and through English language. UM, that
Speaker 1: you could think of as Anglo American spiritualism, and this
Speaker 1: was something that was has always been predominant in the
Speaker 1: United States, in Britain, in Australia. But there is a
Speaker 1: wider form of spiritualism that I think was inspired by
Speaker 1: the early experiences of American spiritualists and referred to it,
Speaker 1: often referred to it. But this form was developed by
Speaker 1: essentially and and was essentially spread by the writings of
Speaker 1: a French um. He called himself a spiritist to distinguish
Speaker 1: himself from spiritualists, and his name was Alan Cardack. That
Speaker 1: was his pseudonym anyway. And the big difference I think
Speaker 1: there is that he believed in and wrote in his
Speaker 1: all his works um reincarnation, reincarnation, and that was something
Speaker 1: that was absolutely surprising and even an athema too Anglo
Speaker 1: American spiritualists who regarded the afterlife and the soul's further
Speaker 1: progression is something that was onward and upward, maybe with
Speaker 1: varying degrees of velocity, but it wasn't coming back to
Speaker 1: Earth as a materialized being. So that's uh. That form
Speaker 1: of spiritualism is something that at took cold in France
Speaker 1: and southern parts of Europe and then spread through Brazil
Speaker 1: other parts of other parts of the world. M. Most
Speaker 1: of the Brazilians in Brazil is has a huge population
Speaker 1: and a large probably the largest spirit is population of
Speaker 1: any country in the world, and their followers of Cardeck
Speaker 1: and therefore reincarnation is a part of their belief M hmm,
Speaker 1: thank you. Yeah, that's great. Um, let's jump into the
Speaker 1: stories of a few particular mediums. Um. So I'll ask you,
Speaker 1: I didn't have him in this outline that I prepared
Speaker 1: for us, but okay, springing on me, Well, you've written
Speaker 1: about it. I remember the name. I don't know, well,
Speaker 1: it's John Dods. It's John Bovi Dodds, who you've written about.
Speaker 1: He was one of those univer Sist ministers gets into
Speaker 1: spiritualism at one point. Here comes an opponent of spiritualism
Speaker 1: over the course of the eighteen fifties, and then comes
Speaker 1: back to it. So I found his story really interesting. Um.
Speaker 1: Can you can you walk us through kind of who
Speaker 1: he was in his relationship to spiritualism or are you
Speaker 1: comfortable with that? I think though, I don't know if
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be able to say much more than you
Speaker 1: just I'll give her my bed shot. Um, he was
Speaker 1: John Bovie Dodds. I won't go into all the de
Speaker 1: deals about always got that name, but it was a
Speaker 1: kind of family name. Anyway, he was he was He
Speaker 1: first had his spirit experience walking through the woods one day. Um.
Speaker 1: This was about eighteen o seven eight something like that. Um,
Speaker 1: when he encountered the spirit of his father, who spoke
Speaker 1: to him and told him some things. When when the
Speaker 1: boy got home, he told his family that he'd seen
Speaker 1: his father out in the woods, and they thought he
Speaker 1: was crazy or you know, sick somehow. Um, but he
Speaker 1: did encounter his father's spirit in the woods repeatedly, and
Speaker 1: then he also later the spirit of another relative of
Speaker 1: his who had committed suicide. And so, according to again Orthodoxy,
Speaker 1: I suppose it's I put it in quotation marks for
Speaker 1: everybody at this point orthodox he would would definitely consigned
Speaker 1: to everlasting misery. She appeared to him as a glorious
Speaker 1: spirit clothed in light and told him that things were
Speaker 1: coming to a head and he would be revealed. Things
Speaker 1: would be revealed to him that wouldn vert him from
Speaker 1: um mistaken beliefs. And after that he started experiencing um
Speaker 1: parent what we would call it a paranormal phenomenon. M
Speaker 1: Furniture would start to move across the room, people who
Speaker 1: are in the house would hear heard. I think one
Speaker 1: group of them experienced hearing but not seeing, a cannonball
Speaker 1: traveling across the room and then jumping onto the bed
Speaker 1: one day, depressing the mattress, and all of this by
Speaker 1: some sort of invisible thing that couldn't possibly be material. Um.
Speaker 1: One day, this glorified spirit grabbed off his hat and
Speaker 1: threw it in the air and sailed around for a
Speaker 1: mile or so. He watched in the air and it
Speaker 1: came back and landed on his head. He became you
Speaker 1: can imagine that he developed fairly strong beliefs about the
Speaker 1: reality of not only the afterlife, but also because of
Speaker 1: this experience that he is supposedly damnable relative and achieved
Speaker 1: some high and glorious state. He also came to question
Speaker 1: Orthodoxy as well. So that was his early experience. He
Speaker 1: became a Universalist minister, and then got really fascinated with
Speaker 1: the mesmeric demonstrations of Koyan and some of his fellow
Speaker 1: Universalist ministers, and became m He came a demonstrator himself,
Speaker 1: and spent quite a bit of time um essentially doing
Speaker 1: experiments and hypnosis on himself and his family members and
Speaker 1: anybody else they could drag into. And and he even,
Speaker 1: as I recall, he even tried it on his congregation.
Speaker 1: Um to what extent, I can't I don't know, but
Speaker 1: I'm imagining him standing on you know, on the platform
Speaker 1: in front of the congregation, trying to put his trying
Speaker 1: to put his congregation in a trance of sub guide.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure there's some comic potential there, Carl, Like
Speaker 1: you know, you could develop it later into stuff. They um,
Speaker 1: the sources are not clear enough for me to imagine
Speaker 1: it very well, but anyway, um. As a result of this,
Speaker 1: he developed this theory that there were, in fact, um
Speaker 1: there were two minds at work. In other words, one
Speaker 1: of his critics said, every man is engaged in thinking
Speaker 1: thoughts of which he is profoundly unconscious. He carries in
Speaker 1: his own brain a separate world of mind, endowed with
Speaker 1: the power of sustaining masterly arguments, imparting various and astounding
Speaker 1: information before wholly unknown, and answering with readiness many difficult
Speaker 1: questions without his own knowledge of the fact. And yes,
Speaker 1: this was what he was proposing, that there was what
Speaker 1: we would call subconscious at work. The mind was something
Speaker 1: that may have been machine, but it was made up
Speaker 1: of wheels within wheels, that there were things going on
Speaker 1: that we were not conscious of. This was a big
Speaker 1: pill to swallow for a lot of people. Essentially, what
Speaker 1: it did was it moved him off a spirit interpretation
Speaker 1: of his own experiences onto a more materialistic explanation. And
Speaker 1: for a long time he taught that. He wrote, in fact,
Speaker 1: a long book, and a very influential one about spiritualism,
Speaker 1: in which he basically dissolved it into something that was
Speaker 1: a physical or mental phenomenon. And the opponents of spiritual
Speaker 1: him were very grateful for his book and used it
Speaker 1: quite a bit. But what happened to him was, Um,
Speaker 1: the spirit started coming back to him and be rating
Speaker 1: him repeatedly that he aired he'd gone off the track
Speaker 1: here and just such a strong degree did they did?
Speaker 1: They appear to him that he was made to repent
Speaker 1: his materialism and go back to being a spiritualist. So
Speaker 1: that was the way he continued to be a spiritualist
Speaker 1: into UM be an activist in the spiritualist movement, UM
Speaker 1: based in New York for a long time until his death.
Speaker 1: M Um, that's great, thank you. UM. Let's jump to
Speaker 1: another one of the figures that you've written about a lot,
Speaker 1: but that a few other historians and scholars seem to
Speaker 1: have really explored, and that's John Conklin. Um. The I
Speaker 1: had to dig him up out of the grave, Corl. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and and I'm so glad you did so. Uh introduce
Speaker 1: him to to our listeners into the world, you know,
Speaker 1: who was on Conklin and how did he get involved
Speaker 1: in spiritualism? And then of course we'll walk toward the
Speaker 1: White House with him as as we go. Okay. John
Speaker 1: Benjamin Conklin was a member of the proletariat. It was
Speaker 1: sailor Baker. He had various odd jobs. Um. He was
Speaker 1: born well and up in New York, I mean Upper
Speaker 1: New York City near Bronx and uh it's been a
Speaker 1: long time um working on the docks and in the ships.
Speaker 1: And he'd always been fascinated by magic, performing magic apparently.
Speaker 1: And when spiritualism first broke and he began hearing about
Speaker 1: raps on the tables and people going into trances and
Speaker 1: connecting with spirits of the dead, he was He was
Speaker 1: an early adopter and transformed himself into a medium who
Speaker 1: used it to make a living. He opened up offices
Speaker 1: in New York City which he moved from time to time.
Speaker 1: And not only did he take um individuals for consultations
Speaker 1: in which they would pay him for um for his
Speaker 1: being able to contact dead spirit which should I say
Speaker 1: living spirits anyway, but they He also set up a
Speaker 1: kind of mm hmm exhibition space, performance space, I guess
Speaker 1: quite near Arnama's Museum, and people would come to that
Speaker 1: as part of their experience of the Big city, they
Speaker 1: would visit Arneam's museum. They might take in some other sites,
Speaker 1: but they would also visit his spirit room, in which
Speaker 1: they would sit around in a big circle, rows and
Speaker 1: rows of of people who looked at what was going
Speaker 1: on in the center, and he would face off basically
Speaker 1: against a table, a table between them, someone of the
Speaker 1: of the audience, and it was like, you know, the
Speaker 1: people who were sitting around the outside would take a number.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if this is a game. It
Speaker 1: was exactly true, I don't remember. But when their turn
Speaker 1: came up, and that was their time to go down
Speaker 1: and sit opposite the table of Conquin and uh, he
Speaker 1: would um. In those kinds of situations, he would um
Speaker 1: answer their questions um and usual, often by this excuse me,
Speaker 1: this method of having the person right. Little questions that
Speaker 1: they wanted answered by the spirits are a piece of
Speaker 1: a slip of paper, and they would roll up the
Speaker 1: slip of paper, bunchet up so that he couldn't see it,
Speaker 1: ostensibly as a guard against fraud. And then he would
Speaker 1: take these pieces of paper and roll them up in
Speaker 1: his hands and then throw them down with a bunch
Speaker 1: of other suppostly blank slips of paper. UM. This was
Speaker 1: called billet reading or ballot reading. UM. The billets were
Speaker 1: the little slips of paper and then he would pull
Speaker 1: out one or two who slips of paper and hold
Speaker 1: it against forehead and answer the question that was written
Speaker 1: on it. These are questions directed to spirits basically that
Speaker 1: the people wanted to contact. He also held private more
Speaker 1: or less private seances in which UM. There was the
Speaker 1: use of a wrapping board. In the early days of spiritualism.
Speaker 1: You know, there are these just random wraps that would
Speaker 1: um emerge in a dark room and these were attributed
Speaker 1: to spirits. Well, they were attributed earlier to ghosts. So
Speaker 1: what was it? What was the big deal here? Well,
Speaker 1: the big deal was that these ghosts or spirits could
Speaker 1: be communicated with. There was a spiritual telegraph you could
Speaker 1: you could the wraps could be interpreted as like the
Speaker 1: clicks on a telegraph. So the means that was used
Speaker 1: was UM. You would count there was one wrap, it
Speaker 1: was an A. If there were two raps it was
Speaker 1: a B, and so on through the alpha. But so
Speaker 1: basically had to sit around and wait for a message UM,
Speaker 1: which would be a series of wraps UM and I
Speaker 1: can't imagine, but it was boring to sit around and
Speaker 1: wait for the whole message to to wrap itself out
Speaker 1: one not time. Anyway, he would do this. This was
Speaker 1: the early technology, might say of of spiritualism. But it did.
Speaker 1: It did develop into a more efficient system as things
Speaker 1: went along. Um. But he he used whatever he could
Speaker 1: that way. Anyway. He got to be one of four
Speaker 1: or five pretty famous or notorious you might say, um
Speaker 1: spiritualist operators in New York City at the time before
Speaker 1: the war. Emma Harding is another one, Emma Harding Britain
Speaker 1: that we're following, and he was in her milieu, right.
Speaker 1: They knew each other, they sometimes worked together. Yes, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure how much they actually worked together, that's a
Speaker 1: that's an interesting question. But I do know that Emma
Speaker 1: Harding was essentially converted by him. She went to a
Speaker 1: seance in which there were these raps, one of these
Speaker 1: ones I've described wrapping out a message, and the spirits
Speaker 1: were um allegedly delivering a message that she regarded as blasphemous,
Speaker 1: and so she freaked out and and left, and but
Speaker 1: she went back curious a couple of times and became
Speaker 1: convinced that spiritualism was real, and I suppose she also
Speaker 1: became convinced that it wasn't blasphemous but something elevated. Um.
Speaker 1: So that was her connection. That was her direct connection
Speaker 1: with Conklin. Anyway, and there's Uh, there's another interesting moment
Speaker 1: in his life where he's he wrote about what you
Speaker 1: called a raucous public science in where there was kind
Speaker 1: of a debate between the spirits of Daniel Webster, Uh
Speaker 1: spoken through another medium and Henry Clay spoken through Conklin.
Speaker 1: And this creates a connection to Lincoln for him. Can
Speaker 1: you talk about that science? What strikes me about that
Speaker 1: particular science is that there were two people entranced at
Speaker 1: the same time who were delivering messages in the voice
Speaker 1: of two actors. It was sort of improv wasn't it.
Speaker 1: Um One was playing off the other in a way
Speaker 1: that we wouldn't expect except outside of or modern improvisational theater,
Speaker 1: and neither one knew what the other one was going
Speaker 1: to say. But they've been prepped, or they'd prepped themselves,
Speaker 1: of course obviously with knowledge of who these actors were,
Speaker 1: what their political positions were, and so on. And so
Speaker 1: we're in a way that or making making riffs on
Speaker 1: the position of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster. It was
Speaker 1: a kind of dramatization, wasn't it, of of what these
Speaker 1: now deceased people would would say on the issue. That's
Speaker 1: probably not what you're driving at, though, is it. Well, no,
Speaker 1: that's right. There's just in what you wrote about Conklin,
Speaker 1: because Henry Clay was such a mentor figure and an
Speaker 1: inspiration to Lincoln. Um, you mentioned in your in your
Speaker 1: book about Conklin that this might have been the moment
Speaker 1: when he caught Lincoln's attention in that would then perhaps
Speaker 1: have brought him into Lincoln's orbit during the war in Washington.
Speaker 1: But let's just let's just step to that time. It
Speaker 1: may have happened that way, But um, I am fairly
Speaker 1: sure that Lincoln had seen him before and had sat
Speaker 1: in his New York Um exhibition room. Um, maybe not
Speaker 1: in a fully engaged way, but in a curious sort
Speaker 1: of way and asked him questions, submitted questions to him before.
Speaker 1: So then when we get to the war years, John Conklin,
Speaker 1: along with Nettie Colburn and a few others, were spiritualists
Speaker 1: mediums who claimed to have influenced Lincoln, even to the
Speaker 1: point of some claims about UH directly dictating the emancipation
Speaker 1: Proclamation from the spirits to him and those kinds of things. Um,
Speaker 1: how much do we know about the seances in the
Speaker 1: Lincoln White House and how involved these mediums were? Well,
Speaker 1: I hope that everything we know is in the book
Speaker 1: I just published, as I certainly tried to put everything
Speaker 1: I knew about it in there. But UM, it's a
Speaker 1: lot of it. What we claimed to know or claim
Speaker 1: to be false. UM came out UM essentially much later,
Speaker 1: around eight nine, when a medium spirit spirit medium who
Speaker 1: had been in Washington during the Lincoln years and who
Speaker 1: had certainly been in the White House and involved with
Speaker 1: other spiritualists at the time, published her memoirs. UM. I
Speaker 1: happen to believe that UM Nanty Colburn. While while she
Speaker 1: was a medium and working in Washington, she wasn't a
Speaker 1: professional medium, and she may not even have been noticed
Speaker 1: much by other more famous mediums at the time. UM.
Speaker 1: She was a member of group of friends who were
Speaker 1: spiritualists and more or less direct access to the president.
Speaker 1: But by the time her memoirs came out, it obviously
Speaker 1: been amplified by people during that time, and I mean
Speaker 1: by that the nineties, who had a lot of stake
Speaker 1: at claiming that Lincoln was essentially being directed by spirits
Speaker 1: all the time. And so I try to sort through
Speaker 1: those claims in the book. And Natie may not have
Speaker 1: been the most um famous or or even notorious medium
Speaker 1: who was in the Lincoln's orbit, but she definitely was there.
Speaker 1: John Conklin was definitely there too, although a lot a
Speaker 1: lot of the action seems to have taken place off stage,
Speaker 1: as it were, in the home of postmaster, not a postmaster,
Speaker 1: but a post office and employee, a civil service employee, UM,
Speaker 1: whose family was quite devoted to spiritualist men who thought
Speaker 1: of themselves as mediums. That was, they lived into Georgetown,
Speaker 1: and Lincoln visited there. I'm pretty sure of that. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of testimony that's quite solid that he did that.
Speaker 1: And I think it's also pretty solid that Mrs Lincoln
Speaker 1: in particular was devoted to a full believer in spiritualism, UM,
Speaker 1: that she invited mediums to the White House, that they
Speaker 1: conducted seances there. I'm inclined to believe that her husband
Speaker 1: took part in at least as an interested observer. In
Speaker 1: many of those seances. Typically the line of historians has been, well,
Speaker 1: he just went to protect his wife, which may have
Speaker 1: been the case actually in some in some respects, but
Speaker 1: I think it's the evidence is pretty clear that he
Speaker 1: was listening very very closely, and Conklin was one of those.
Speaker 1: There were others. There was there was a medium who
Speaker 1: was probably brought down to the White House too. I
Speaker 1: think you'd have to say minister to the Lincoln after
Speaker 1: their son had died, and she had a reputation for
Speaker 1: being a healum healing medium who could see inside the
Speaker 1: body and prescribe healing medications and so on. Um. I
Speaker 1: think there was also they were well, they were well
Speaker 1: protected by their guards. There was a cordon of people
Speaker 1: ranging from secretary to um, you know, all kinds of
Speaker 1: folks who were very protective of his reputation and did
Speaker 1: not particularly want the idea that Lincoln was listening to
Speaker 1: mediums in the White House and getting advice on the
Speaker 1: conduct of the war to get out. So it's pretty
Speaker 1: difficult to sort through those kinds of conflicting and you know,
Speaker 1: conflicting testimonies. I did my best here. Um, do you
Speaker 1: have any comments on Colchester? Well? He was a rogue.
Speaker 1: He was um, a man often prosecuted for fraud um um.
Speaker 1: And by that I mean presenting himself as an exhibitor
Speaker 1: of messages from the spirits that were he was caught
Speaker 1: in as having faked UM. He was amount of bank.
Speaker 1: He warned. He was giving exhibitions that were in Washington,
Speaker 1: d c. That were well attended by all the upper
Speaker 1: segments of society there. He was brought into the White
Speaker 1: House to to give seances for Mary Todd Lincoln and
Speaker 1: was investigated. I mean, I think this is this is
Speaker 1: the source of where you're here, that Lincoln had to
Speaker 1: protect his wife from unscrupulous mediums, because this is basically
Speaker 1: what he did with with Colchester. He had the because
Speaker 1: he was suspicious of the guy. He had the UM.
Speaker 1: I think he was the head of the Smithsonian Institute.
Speaker 1: UM recommend somebody to come in, you know, give his
Speaker 1: opinion on this guy, and he essentially declared him um fake.
Speaker 1: And Lincoln's friends, one of them was a journalist UM
Speaker 1: essentially Collard Colchester and told him to get out of
Speaker 1: town um or you know, he'd make things hot for him,
Speaker 1: which he did um. Before he made off with the
Speaker 1: White House Silver basically and yeah, and there's records I've
Speaker 1: looked at the uh what was published in the newspapers
Speaker 1: about Colchester's later jugglery trial, the fraud the fraud trial. UM. Yeah, Um.
Speaker 1: So then you've also written about a lock of hair
Speaker 1: that was probably given to the Lorries the family of mediums. Um.
Speaker 1: Can you describ vibe that lock of hair and why
Speaker 1: it would have been that they would have been able
Speaker 1: to take possession of it? Well, the problem was presented
Speaker 1: to me as something that appeared on the internet. Um.
Speaker 1: The Chicago Museum UM displayed to the public as a
Speaker 1: sort of what would you say, um, mystery for them
Speaker 1: to solve. Here's a bunch of fun things that we
Speaker 1: have in our in our possession that we don't know
Speaker 1: what about. And one of these things was a lock
Speaker 1: of hair. They have a lot of Lincoln curio as
Speaker 1: a memorabila by the way, and they reproduced a piece
Speaker 1: of paper that came along with it, and it said
Speaker 1: Lincoln lock of hair taken him immediately after death, and
Speaker 1: there were names at the bottom. They were a little
Speaker 1: difficult to read, but not not very difficult to read.
Speaker 1: And I looked at it and I recognized those names.
Speaker 1: The names were of the two of the members of
Speaker 1: the Lorrie family I've already talked about lived in Georgetown,
Speaker 1: mother and the daughter. And so it occurred to me,
Speaker 1: I mean not only just hey, Chicago Museum, I know
Speaker 1: who these people are, but how, how and why they
Speaker 1: would have gotten hold of this thing, um? And I
Speaker 1: think it's by by pursuing my question. Um. I looked
Speaker 1: in detail at the last moments of Lincoln's life before
Speaker 1: he passed away and the following Almonds and discovered descriptions
Speaker 1: of the physicians being asked by Mary Todd Lincoln too
Speaker 1: cut her a lock of hair from Lincoln's head, and
Speaker 1: the physicians themselves, a couple of them, did the same
Speaker 1: and took those And the person I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about in this context is Henry Steele Allcott, um, because
Speaker 1: he comes in he's one of the investigators of the
Speaker 1: Lincoln assassination and then becomes a figure important to spiritualism
Speaker 1: and then theosophy later. Can you introduce him to us?
Speaker 1: Who was Henry Steele Alcott? Henry Steel Alcott was a
Speaker 1: man of many professions. He was a professional lawyer, he
Speaker 1: he was he was a journalist. He had been sent,
Speaker 1: for example, by the UM I think it was the
Speaker 1: New York Tribune to um covered John Brown's execution in
Speaker 1: Harper Ferry, Harper's Ferry, which involves some undercover work on
Speaker 1: his part because basically that the public weren't wasn't invited
Speaker 1: to that UM. He wound up wandering the town there
Speaker 1: and writing his account of that. At the same time
Speaker 1: that Alan Pengerton, who wound up as the head of
Speaker 1: the essentially what became the Secret Service for the United
Speaker 1: States during the during the Civil War, was also there
Speaker 1: UM or undercover UM. So he was involved with John Brown.
Speaker 1: He was an abolitionist, he was a reformer, and I
Speaker 1: think from an early age, like maybe fourteen, he was
Speaker 1: quite interested in spiritualism, uh, and it was part of
Speaker 1: that interest while he was UM working on assignment for
Speaker 1: the New York Daily Graphic. I think it's okay that
Speaker 1: he was sent to investigate and probably he this was
Speaker 1: his own idea, But anyway, he was sent up to
Speaker 1: Vermont to investigate this amazing place run by a family
Speaker 1: named Eddie. They had set up a sort of I
Speaker 1: don't know what you'd call it, the Spiritualists. Branson Missouri
Speaker 1: or something. They had a spirit house where they would
Speaker 1: give exhibitions of materialized spirits, and guitars would float around
Speaker 1: in the air and ethereal music would come and um
Speaker 1: phosphorescent hands would float about, um in the air, and
Speaker 1: so on. So he was set up there, and when
Speaker 1: he was up there, he was up there for a
Speaker 1: long time, many weeks. He met a one named Helena
Speaker 1: Blavatsky who was also there too investigate what was going on.
Speaker 1: She was also a spiritualist at least at that time,
Speaker 1: and had come to New York and was living there,
Speaker 1: and they met and he became attached to her, enamored
Speaker 1: of her. And when they got back to New York,
Speaker 1: he published his findings that disappointed a lot of people
Speaker 1: but also inspired a lot of people because he essentially said, well,
Speaker 1: there's um a lot of miraculous things going on there
Speaker 1: I can't explain. So that was regarded as a sort
Speaker 1: of positive assessment of the Eddie Families performances. He and
Speaker 1: Madame Blavatsky were instrumental in forming a sort of paranormal
Speaker 1: research society or fraud I don't know what you call,
Speaker 1: like a fraud investigatory, uh, society that would allegedly go
Speaker 1: around and try to expose different fraudulent spiritualist practices. But
Speaker 1: that then turned into just just a little while. It
Speaker 1: turned into under especially under Madam Bobosky's influence, turned into
Speaker 1: a more you might say positive, um society that had
Speaker 1: its own goals, and that was what turned into Theosophical
Speaker 1: Society that was just a couple of years later. I
Speaker 1: think it was. Um, that's great. Let's uh, there are
Speaker 1: a number of other well, we've talked about Conklin, We've
Speaker 1: talked a little bit about Alcott. Um. They're a number
Speaker 1: of other people who were following in the course of
Speaker 1: our kind of narrative history of spiritualism. Um. And there's one.
Speaker 1: We're going to step back a little bit in time
Speaker 1: because I'd really like to talk about Cora Hatch and
Speaker 1: her significance to spiritualism. And you know, so we'll go
Speaker 1: back and kind of start in the eighteen fifties, but
Speaker 1: go forward from there. Um, she she becomes a really
Speaker 1: significant medium. Uh what do we know about her early life?
Speaker 1: Can you talk at all about who she was and
Speaker 1: where she came from? Yes, Corey Scott was born in
Speaker 1: the town of Cuba, New York it's an Alleghany County
Speaker 1: in eighteen o four, and her family, as she described
Speaker 1: it later, was entirely free of the bonds of any orthodoxy.
Speaker 1: I think you can read that in considering what her
Speaker 1: father finally did as being open to certainly to universalist doctrine,
Speaker 1: but maybe two other things, more free thought like stuff. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he was a lumbermill operator up there, and he got
Speaker 1: interested in the doctrines of a fairly famous Universalist come
Speaker 1: out or who had named Aidan Balue, who had formed
Speaker 1: a colony, a settlement about forty miles west of Boston
Speaker 1: that he named Opdale in eighteen and the family. He
Speaker 1: took his family back and forth basically between Cuban, New York,
Speaker 1: and Hopedale throughout Corp's early life. She was um. I
Speaker 1: think she was probably ten when they decided to move
Speaker 1: to Hopedale, and they did for a little while, but
Speaker 1: for one reason or another they found it maybe too
Speaker 1: crowded or not entirely do their liking. They set out
Speaker 1: for west to Um finally wound up near Waterloo, Wisconsin
Speaker 1: and made a home there. And it was while she
Speaker 1: was there, I think she was eleven years old when
Speaker 1: she would have her first conversion to although I don't
Speaker 1: know what it means to be converted to a belief
Speaker 1: when you're eleven years old, but had her conversion to
Speaker 1: some kind of spiritualist experience. Meanwhile, back in Hopedale, that
Speaker 1: community was in full swing. Spiritualist interested Blue was by
Speaker 1: that time giving sermons to his followers in a sort
Speaker 1: of elevated trance state, supposedly under the direction of spirits,
Speaker 1: because there were wrappings going on all around the room. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there was obviously connection between Hopedale and the little community
Speaker 1: in Waterloo, Wisconsin, and it was in that environment that
Speaker 1: she developed herself into a medium. I think the first media,
Speaker 1: first spirit control as it were, that she had was
Speaker 1: the son of Aiden Blue, Aidan Augustus Blue, who died
Speaker 1: early in his life and I'm not quite sure how
Speaker 1: to um express this, but became her voice. She lent
Speaker 1: her body and voice to him, at least to his spirit,
Speaker 1: and that was the main way that she became known
Speaker 1: as a spiritualist and made her career as someone who
Speaker 1: in trance would be taken over by various spirits, mostly
Speaker 1: of the well known and authoritative figures who were um
Speaker 1: you know, her spirit control. She also had it developed
Speaker 1: a series of Indian spirit controls. One of them was
Speaker 1: named Weena. One of them was named Shannondoah. There are
Speaker 1: a bunch of those as well. In her early career
Speaker 1: she also did some I don't know what you'd call it,
Speaker 1: spiritualist laying on of hands healing um healing work, but
Speaker 1: it was under the direction of somebody she described as
Speaker 1: a German physician, uh, spirit of a German physician. So
Speaker 1: that was her early work. But it was basically basically
Speaker 1: chorus ut um. Career consisted of standing before an audience
Speaker 1: personating as I would say, I wouldn't say impersonating, but
Speaker 1: personating I guess that's a stronger term. Personating. The spirits
Speaker 1: of the famous departed Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Um, Theodore
Speaker 1: Parker was was long time spirit control of hers and
Speaker 1: speaking in those as as if they were present there.
Speaker 1: That was That was her career. She was very obviously,
Speaker 1: very gifted, very gifted improvisational speaker um and she produced
Speaker 1: a lot of a spur of the momentum poetry. Uh
Speaker 1: you'd have to make your own judgment about the value
Speaker 1: of the poetry, but there's no denying that. If it
Speaker 1: was done truly without preparation, Um, it was pretty impressive.
Speaker 1: Mhm um do we do you do you have a
Speaker 1: sense of the kinds of things that spirits were saying
Speaker 1: through Cora. Was there some consistency between these different figures.
Speaker 1: Was there some affinity to certain ideas or theologies that
Speaker 1: she would speak that her spirit controls would deliver through
Speaker 1: her at these at these translectors. I don't think it
Speaker 1: was so much um at Carl. I think it was
Speaker 1: her speaking to the events and the anxieties at the moment.
Speaker 1: She could um become the mouthpiece of Henry Clay, she
Speaker 1: could become the mouthpiece of John C. Calhoun, She could
Speaker 1: become the mouthpiece of Abraham Lincoln. She could become the
Speaker 1: mouthpiece of pretty much anybody who was who people were
Speaker 1: looking to or might be looking to for advice. UM.
Speaker 1: A cynic might say she was looking for an angle
Speaker 1: that would appeal to a lot of people about subjects
Speaker 1: that were in the news at the time, and we're
Speaker 1: anxiously seeking some kind of advice about She was good
Speaker 1: at that. Can you describe it? She was also good
Speaker 1: at convincing people from high to low positions in the
Speaker 1: government and society that she was in fact giving them
Speaker 1: the advice that say Abraham Lincoln was would have given
Speaker 1: if he were still with us after the war. She
Speaker 1: quite influenced the thinking of high ranking congressmen who were
Speaker 1: involved in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson to believe
Speaker 1: that he was involved in an assassination conspiracy. For example,
Speaker 1: if you look at the transcripts of seances she held
Speaker 1: with many of the people who were involved at the
Speaker 1: at the highest level UM in Congress, UM with matters
Speaker 1: of state, especially regarding the Radical Republicans Reconstruction Plan UH
Speaker 1: and the impeachment hearings, you can see that she was
Speaker 1: UM convincing at least two these people that were running
Speaker 1: the show, the radical Republicans who are running the show UM.
Speaker 1: From an outsider's point of view, it looks like she's UM.
Speaker 1: She's been tasting the zeitgeist of gossip and rumors around
Speaker 1: town and UM, and that's what she was channeling. M. Channeling,
Speaker 1: by the way, is a very modern word. I just
Speaker 1: want to it's a very convenient word. But people back
Speaker 1: until I guess I looked up this a little bit,
Speaker 1: I didn't did a little research on it, but channeling
Speaker 1: to channel, channel or those things that we find so
Speaker 1: easy to describe, this sort of phenomenon didn't really appear
Speaker 1: until maybe the nineteen forties or fifties. That's a great comment,
Speaker 1: thank you. Yeah, that's really helpful. Okay, um B. Before
Speaker 1: we got to that point in the sixties, there was
Speaker 1: um even as her popularity was growing, it was growing
Speaker 1: in coordination with her first husband, Benjamin Hatch. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then they had a divorce proceeding that was very very
Speaker 1: public drawn out. Can you describe her relationship to Benjamin Hatch,
Speaker 1: who he was, and then what happened with their marriage? Yes, Um,
Speaker 1: Benjamin Hatch was alternative physician in that time. That could
Speaker 1: mean almost anything. In his case, it meant that he
Speaker 1: was one who was very intent on using mesmerism as
Speaker 1: part of his tools. So he was a mesmeric physician.
Speaker 1: That often meant that he either hired a clairvoyant to
Speaker 1: work with him to diagnose his patients ailments, or that
Speaker 1: he himself um mesmerized his patients. But he was also
Speaker 1: a demonstrator of mesmeric phenomena magnetic phenomena as he called it,
Speaker 1: and a lot of those folks made a living out
Speaker 1: of it. In fact, that profession became ah what was
Speaker 1: later put on the vaudeville stage, you know, a hundred
Speaker 1: years later as stage hypnosis. Um. And when he saw Cora,
Speaker 1: she was probably third years younger than he was, maybe
Speaker 1: even more, and he romanced her and married her and
Speaker 1: became her I think you'd have to call him road
Speaker 1: manager for touring her around the country. So there was
Speaker 1: some tension right from the beginning because they were so
Speaker 1: much older from uh, you know, he was so much
Speaker 1: older than her. But also, um, you know the kinds
Speaker 1: of thing gonna crop up in a marriage. Well, he's
Speaker 1: keeping all the money, he's not giving me any he's
Speaker 1: stepping out on me and seeing all these other women,
Speaker 1: and um, you know those sorts of things. So when um,
Speaker 1: that became public knowledge when she filed for divorce. By
Speaker 1: the way, she did not file for divorce at first.
Speaker 1: She filed actually for merely separation without a moony. Um.
Speaker 1: It made the papers and a lot of people, especially
Speaker 1: in the spirituous community, were outraged at the charges against
Speaker 1: this brute, and a lot of her spiritual friends rose
Speaker 1: up and basically took her under the wing, and um,
Speaker 1: so the preliminaries were UM taking care of pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: but the legal difficulties there were drawn out years and
Speaker 1: years longer. She did not get finally divorced from him
Speaker 1: until just before the Civil War. UM claims and counterclaims
Speaker 1: back and forth during that time, basically after the just
Speaker 1: after the first separation, Benjamin hatch Um we applied to
Speaker 1: Cora and her protectors with a long book that accused
Speaker 1: spiritualists of um the most immoral and lascivious practices, and
Speaker 1: accusing spiritualists as a whole of of immorality and all
Speaker 1: kinds of things that would dissolve Christian tradition and so on.
Speaker 1: It was clearly he was talking about people finding what
Speaker 1: they called affinities and um linking up with them, leaving
Speaker 1: their wives and husbands and sleeping with other people. And
Speaker 1: while he didn't name Cora as among that group, it
Speaker 1: was obvious that this was his UM. You know, he
Speaker 1: was talking about her, and as in the community. You
Speaker 1: mentioned that Cora develops relationships with a number of other mediums.
Speaker 1: You said some of them take her under their wing. UM.
Speaker 1: Emma Harding is one of those, do you, UM, would
Speaker 1: you be able to describe their relationship not very well,
Speaker 1: not very well. I know they were friends, UM, there
Speaker 1: were co workers, they were co leaders of the movement. UM.
Speaker 1: Emma hardened Um. She UM had, at least in her
Speaker 1: book Modern American Spiritualism, which was a kind of compendium
Speaker 1: of the history of the movement, was very complimentary to
Speaker 1: her reproduce this wonderful picture of her with golden ringlets,
Speaker 1: looking evan ward to the sky and the sun glinting
Speaker 1: off her face, very when she was fifteen years old. UM,
Speaker 1: but also regarded her as a as a prime if
Speaker 1: not the prime um trans medium of the time. Emma's
Speaker 1: Emma may have herself UM have done some mediumship, private mediumship,
Speaker 1: but wasn't one who named names of spirits who controlled
Speaker 1: her when she gave lectures under spirit inspiration. You might
Speaker 1: say she didn't UM direct people's attention to necessarily who
Speaker 1: who it was that was controlling her, which spirit. It
Speaker 1: was rather more vague than that, but certainly Cora did.
Speaker 1: She announced beforehand who was going to take control of
Speaker 1: her and speak to her. UM. It was really also
Speaker 1: interesting to discover that through kind of spiritualist goals, including
Speaker 1: uh Amy post in Rochester, uh Cora got to know
Speaker 1: Sojourner Truth, who's another person whose story we're following over
Speaker 1: the course of spiritualism. Uh. And there was a time
Speaker 1: when when Truth was working in the Freedman's Hospital after
Speaker 1: the war, that Cora actually came in stayed with Truth
Speaker 1: uh and and lived with her for a time. And
Speaker 1: their letters back and forth between her and Amy post
Speaker 1: talking about life for sojourn or the Freedman's Hospital. You know,
Speaker 1: some of these these pieces and storylines that we don't
Speaker 1: always think of as connected. Uh. Following certain spiritualists like
Speaker 1: Cora can take us through so many of them, from
Speaker 1: Mesmerism and Benjamin to reconstruction and so journal Truth and
Speaker 1: the radicalism of Emmy post Um. So I find Cora
Speaker 1: fascinating for that reason. She also in later Um there's
Speaker 1: another connection there. Um. Clara Barton was the voted spiritualized.
Speaker 1: I think if visit Clara Barton's house outside d c
Speaker 1: Um that information is sort of available if you broad
Speaker 1: the curators in the National Park Service a little bit,
Speaker 1: but it's not something they necessarily want to proclaim about Clara.
Speaker 1: But she was a very devoted spiritualist. She attended Cora's
Speaker 1: seances in Washington. UM. And that's obviously in some kind
Speaker 1: of connection with the Freedman's Hospital. Uh. And the Freedman's
Speaker 1: Bureau itself was one of the centers of the post
Speaker 1: war government that had a lot of spiritualist assigned to it,
Speaker 1: not surprisingly because most spiritualists, especially those in Washington, were
Speaker 1: former abolitionists and were uh working you know, to free
Speaker 1: the slaves and so on. In fact, the UM, the
Speaker 1: head of the the first head of the Colored Schools
Speaker 1: of Washington, which were set up in conjunction with the
Speaker 1: Freedman's Bureau, was a very long time spiritualist named Alonso Newton,
Speaker 1: who was connected of course with John Murray Spears New
Speaker 1: Motive Project, but he was also the editor of the
Speaker 1: New England Spiritualist and a co editor of several other
Speaker 1: spiritualist newspapers. UM. So there's a lot of connections in
Speaker 1: Washington if you go down just below the surface. And
Speaker 1: Cora continues to be involved. Uh. Well, she she has
Speaker 1: a couple of different husbands. She marries Nathan Daniels travels
Speaker 1: with him to New Orleans, where he had been stationed
Speaker 1: during the Civil War and been in command of the
Speaker 1: Native Guards, including some New Orleans spiritualists. Um, then he
Speaker 1: dies there, she returns back north, and really, it seems
Speaker 1: to me, uh embraces and just dives into her spiritualist
Speaker 1: connections and continues to be a significant presence in the
Speaker 1: kind of building a lasting institutional base for spiritualism in
Speaker 1: the in the later decades. Um, can you talk at
Speaker 1: all about her involvement in trying to create something stable
Speaker 1: that would last for spiritualism going forward into the future.
Speaker 1: I think Cora, this is my impression, okay. I think
Speaker 1: Cora always had an eye too getting of the stable
Speaker 1: position and an eye towards getting a formal leadership in
Speaker 1: the movement. The movement itself was fairly fragmented. I mean,
Speaker 1: essentially it was made up of independent minded and from
Speaker 1: the outside anyway eccentric individuals who UH followed their own
Speaker 1: ideas and paths. So they spiritual were notorious for being
Speaker 1: unable to form lasting institution or association. They'd had several
Speaker 1: tries at it, extending all the way back to early
Speaker 1: eighteen fifties, and I think Corus saw her own career
Speaker 1: as one of taking leadership and as he said, a
Speaker 1: stable organization and planting something that would last beyond her.
Speaker 1: Of course, you might say with her as as he had.
Speaker 1: But anyway, I think that was definitely on her mind
Speaker 1: UM towards later in life. UM. She tried several times
Speaker 1: to establish Spiritualist churches, important Spiritualist churches, with herself as head.
Speaker 1: And the very fact that I'm calling it a church,
Speaker 1: you might say, is a something that's came late to
Speaker 1: the movement, relatively speaking, because it hints that what she's
Speaker 1: looking at is a sort of denomination UM with definite beliefs.
Speaker 1: And of course the early Spiritualists we're all antidenominational, and
Speaker 1: they didn't really see themselves as just another denomination with
Speaker 1: preachers and ministers and so on. She did have a
Speaker 1: big church, a very popular church in Chicago, UH, for
Speaker 1: a long time before the National Spiritual Association was formed,
Speaker 1: but around eighteen two, in conjunction with a very large
Speaker 1: and in retrospect very influential meeting event that occurred in Chicago,
Speaker 1: in conjunction with a UM Colombian exhibishop exposition there in
Speaker 1: eighteen m there was what was called the World's Parliament
Speaker 1: of Religions, a big ecmnical movement, and there were many
Speaker 1: people from different faiths who were invited to participate in
Speaker 1: this and give speeches and so on. And I think
Speaker 1: she saw this as a prime time for setting up another,
Speaker 1: giving another try to forming a lasting organization among spiritualists.
Speaker 1: I think it was a way you might say, of
Speaker 1: getting validation for spiritualism as such as a quote real
Speaker 1: religion able to step out and walk among the other religions. So,
Speaker 1: in fact, you know that event happened across town from
Speaker 1: Cora's spiritual church, and um it is alleged that she
Speaker 1: gave a translator to the World Parliament of Religion about spiritualism.
Speaker 1: I myself have been unable to find such evidence as
Speaker 1: to leave me that she didn't in fact directly address
Speaker 1: that World Parliament. But she did also organize the first convention,
Speaker 1: annual informative Convention of the National Spiritual Association, which happened
Speaker 1: the next week, the days following the World Problement of Religion.
Speaker 1: So she was elected vice president and she stayed connected
Speaker 1: with the organization for many many years. She often gave
Speaker 1: a keynote address in their annual meetings and so on.
Speaker 1: You mentioned earlier a little bit about some of the
Speaker 1: investigations of spiritualism that we're going on, and we are
Speaker 1: going to address the Society's for Psychical Research. Uh, some
Speaker 1: would you be would you be comfortable describing them a
Speaker 1: little bit and what their approach to spiritualism was. Okay,
Speaker 1: I can contribute a little bit. It's not exactly the area,
Speaker 1: I mean, the era that I'm most familiar with, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I mean it's obvious. I think it's obvious that
Speaker 1: such societies were formed, Um, with a view two take
Speaker 1: the investigation of psychic meaning, including spiritualist phenomena, and put
Speaker 1: it under scientific scrutiny, which meant controlled conditions, repeated tests,
Speaker 1: and so on by scientists who are who were trained
Speaker 1: to observe and test and eliminate possibilities and so on. Um.
Speaker 1: And I don't think it's ah, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: so much that scientists decided to take spiritualism and put
Speaker 1: it under the microscope, so much as science itself had
Speaker 1: tracked alongside the way spiritualists themselves thought about these phenomena.
Speaker 1: As we've already described spiritualist work. Fellow travelers, if you will,
Speaker 1: with mesmerists and so on, back and back in the
Speaker 1: early days, and it became more and more common for
Speaker 1: spiritualist to think about the phenomenon that was going on
Speaker 1: as a kind of psychological phenomenon one kind or another.
Speaker 1: In other words, too except the possibility that what we're
Speaker 1: exploring was the mind and the powers of the mind
Speaker 1: for other than some real you might say, objectively, externally,
Speaker 1: substantially real afterlife. I think that became an acceptable alternative
Speaker 1: narrative within spiritualism, and it was because of that. I
Speaker 1: think that you could think of the Psychical Research Society
Speaker 1: and so on as an evolution of that tendency within
Speaker 1: spiritualism itself. Um. Spiritualist I think by that time often
Speaker 1: resorted to a sort of unspoken acceptance of the idea
Speaker 1: that I don't know where these things are coming from,
Speaker 1: and I don't know what's going on exactly, Um, but
Speaker 1: they're really interesting, aren't they. And they're uncanny, and they're weird,
Speaker 1: and somehow the conditions of the mind of the medium
Speaker 1: and the minds of the spectators are involved in this,
Speaker 1: and so UM. I think that was an opportunity for
Speaker 1: scientists who were also interested in the science of the
Speaker 1: mind and psychology, like William James, for example, to set
Speaker 1: out UM to see what they could find out about it.
Speaker 1: Did this kind of thinking about abnormal psychology and and
Speaker 1: kind of what started being published from Freud and new
Speaker 1: ways of thinking about the human mind? Did it sap
Speaker 1: interest in spiritualism from the outside? What was that kind
Speaker 1: of what was the influence on maybe like general interest
Speaker 1: in spiritualism? Just as an intuitive answer, I would say, yes,
Speaker 1: it did it. It drew people. It certainly drew people
Speaker 1: away from UM. The simple explanation of what was going
Speaker 1: on here was that the spirits of George Washington or
Speaker 1: your uncle Charlie were speaking directly to you, and that
Speaker 1: you had nothing to do with it, and that you
Speaker 1: were just a mirror radio receiver who had been turned
Speaker 1: and on in your own mind had been turned off,
Speaker 1: and you were just an automaton if you are a medium.
Speaker 1: I think that sort of explanation became less and less
Speaker 1: appealing to people, and as an alternative, they became more
Speaker 1: and more attracted to this other alternative explanation, that it
Speaker 1: was an explanation and mysteries of the mind and how
Speaker 1: the mind in turn affected external reality. Maybe we could
Speaker 1: not only read people's minds transferred thoughts, but we could
Speaker 1: create UM create a world that we could treat anyway
Speaker 1: as as well as we treated the objective world, or
Speaker 1: maybe the objective world itself didn't really exist, and we
Speaker 1: were all a creation of mind. That was certainly an
Speaker 1: early position within Spiritualism, and it was something that was
Speaker 1: emphasized by Mary Baker Eddie informing Christian science, and that
Speaker 1: continued with UM investigators who call themselves mental scientists, and
Speaker 1: was a big factor in the creation of a movement
Speaker 1: that I regard as the successor to Spiritualism, which was
Speaker 1: called New Thought. Mind over matter. You can bring success, health, wealth, money,
Speaker 1: dollars dollars want you, Carl, if you could only create
Speaker 1: the conditions in your mind that would allow them to form.
Speaker 1: These were all questions that were you might call UM
Speaker 1: alternative psychological explanations for psychic phenomenon. So yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of people got drawn off into that. There was also
Speaker 1: in the in the seventies and eighties increasing interest in UH.
Speaker 1: What we've talked about the private sciences and the wrappings
Speaker 1: and the trans lectures, but we also have materialization mediums
Speaker 1: and UH. And then ectoplasm becomes one of the phenomena
Speaker 1: that people are coming for UM you know, coming to
Speaker 1: a science to witness and observed. Can you talk about
Speaker 1: how some of those changes and what was going on
Speaker 1: at a sciance changed the meaning of spiritual and the the
Speaker 1: social meaning or the religious meaning for some people. I
Speaker 1: think about that as part of this notion that it
Speaker 1: the process that was going on in this new era
Speaker 1: was the elevation of Earth to heaven and the drawing
Speaker 1: down of Heaven to earth, and the resulting communion of
Speaker 1: saints where those on earth would be walking with those
Speaker 1: in heaven. Now, if you think about it, that means
Speaker 1: that there were some real desire from the very beginning
Speaker 1: to make material or bring to earth. Not just the
Speaker 1: voices were the ideas of those in heaven, but more
Speaker 1: maybe the endpoint of all this was to materialize Heaven
Speaker 1: on Earth, to join it together. And you can read
Speaker 1: in the spiritualist newspapers at the time this sense that
Speaker 1: there was a progression towards that in which maybe one
Speaker 1: medium would be able to um produce a materialized filmy
Speaker 1: fluid um, something that will float around the room, or
Speaker 1: would be able to push your guitar or a stramat
Speaker 1: even though you couldn't see it. But then there was
Speaker 1: some desire maybe to materialize and make visible a hand
Speaker 1: hands that would um, stroke a person's head or push
Speaker 1: your button or something like that. And then there was
Speaker 1: an arm, and then there was a news article. It
Speaker 1: was like a rumor mill in a wave. As I said,
Speaker 1: you know, these newspapers were social were functioning as a
Speaker 1: sort of social media in which um news reports would
Speaker 1: come in and breathlessly report that has been able to
Speaker 1: not only materialize an arm, but also you know, maybe
Speaker 1: the full form of a person. UM. So it towards
Speaker 1: the end of this process you could say that the
Speaker 1: process was one of making more, more and more material
Speaker 1: the things of the spirit. And I actually have joked
Speaker 1: with one of my magicians associates who I'm working on
Speaker 1: a project with now that during the same time basically
Speaker 1: in our if you follow the spiritualists and the professional magicians,
Speaker 1: what you find is that the spiritualists are trying to
Speaker 1: make visible bigger and bigger things, more more of the
Speaker 1: human body, for example, while magicians were trying to make
Speaker 1: too de materialized per and bigger things, ending up with
Speaker 1: the Hoodini on the on the platform of the New
Speaker 1: York Hypotrome making an elephant disappear UM, you know, starting
Speaker 1: out with making a rabbit disappeared down down your sleeve
Speaker 1: and winding up with an elephant. So there there was
Speaker 1: this question about the relationship between the spiritual and material.
Speaker 1: But at the same time this obviously was a temptation
Speaker 1: to produce phenomenon UM that were not real, that could
Speaker 1: be reproduced or were being reproduced by UM tricks. So
Speaker 1: that was that was a part of UM the spiritualist
Speaker 1: history as well more and more war UH temptations and
Speaker 1: obvious temptations to expose the mechanical means of producing materialized
Speaker 1: bodies and actoplasm and so on, and the exposures that
Speaker 1: came out of that UM definitely affected the reputation of
Speaker 1: the movement, and UM set people off. And I think
Speaker 1: that's in some sense you can see that that was
Speaker 1: very clearly at work in the UM around By by
Speaker 1: about eighteen eighty eighteen five, UM spiritualism wasn't the force
Speaker 1: that it was, And of course Death Blow to Spiritualism
Speaker 1: is published in which the author recounts Maggie Fox's recantation
Speaker 1: of her life as a medium. Right, how what what
Speaker 1: kind of influence did that particular publication with Maggie Fox
Speaker 1: being who she was, what influence did that have on spiritualism. Well,
Speaker 1: it was a big shock. It's being shocked to spiritualists.
Speaker 1: But I have to say that there were ways to
Speaker 1: protect yourself from her if you were a spiritual From
Speaker 1: her recantation, Um, they included the fact that she would
Speaker 1: become a alcoholic by that time, Mum, they were and undependable.
Speaker 1: And there was another way to protect yourself that was
Speaker 1: taken by the editor of the Religio Philosophical Journal, whose
Speaker 1: name is John Bundy. Um. After her recantation, he said,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter that she recanted uh, and talked about
Speaker 1: her tricks, because we're standing with a collection of experiences
Speaker 1: by millions of people over decades that we have confidence in.
Speaker 1: So in effect, you could write her off as he did.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of talk around that time by
Speaker 1: spiritualists that she'd been suborned, that her testimony had been
Speaker 1: suborned because she decided to convert to Catholicism, and that
Speaker 1: her new friends had convinced her that this was part
Speaker 1: of her penance essentially, So there were ways to deal
Speaker 1: with it. If you're a believer, you can, you know,
Speaker 1: think of ways to to reconcile it with what you
Speaker 1: believe without giving up your belief. But it definitely was
Speaker 1: a big hit, no question. And of course her sister
Speaker 1: Leah at this point no longer. I mean, she had
Speaker 1: main lely a fox for a long time, she's been
Speaker 1: lea fish, and then at this point she's Leah underhill.
Speaker 1: She publishes the Missing Lincoln spiritualism and directly addresses uh,
Speaker 1: Maggie's recantation. And so you even have one of the
Speaker 1: other Fox sisters who is pushing back against it and
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing. Uh. And then not much later,
Speaker 1: Maggie recancer recantation, right, and she says, well, no, that
Speaker 1: was a lie. How does that feed into this kind
Speaker 1: of public discussion? It makes it a big mesk. Nobody
Speaker 1: knows what's going on at that point. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: from the very beginning, it seemed to many people that Leah,
Speaker 1: the older sister, had pushed the younger sisters into a career, uh,
Speaker 1: and had ginned up a sort of act and was,
Speaker 1: you know, the controlling spirit here behind everybody else. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's all kinds of ways to look at this.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know, but uh, it made it
Speaker 1: a big mess in the spiritualist community for sure. UM.
Speaker 1: So how when we come kind of towards the end
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, you mentioned there was a decline
Speaker 1: in spiritualism by the eighties. How strong was spiritualism by
Speaker 1: the time we're stepping into the twentieth century. I don't
Speaker 1: think it was. Um, it was a big factor in
Speaker 1: American thought by There were plenty of spiritual still, But
Speaker 1: when I say plenty, I don't mean that they dominated
Speaker 1: intellectual life, or were the attraction or that they that
Speaker 1: they had been, or the challenge that they had been before.
Speaker 1: But um, it wasn't all downhill after that. There was
Speaker 1: a big revival of spiritualism in the post World War
Speaker 1: One period, and in some sense it's still a part
Speaker 1: of UM. You know, what lay at the heart of
Speaker 1: spiritualism is still in continuity with what we see around
Speaker 1: us all the time in our own culture. UM. Belief
Speaker 1: in psychic powers, belief in channeled texts that give some
Speaker 1: higher revelation. UM. A lot of that interest is now
Speaker 1: labeled new age UM, which is a term that was,
Speaker 1: as far as I know, was invented in its original
Speaker 1: sense or in the sense that we know it now, Um,
Speaker 1: in the spiritualist community. M Um, you know a lot
Speaker 1: of that still with us today. M You've mentioned that
Speaker 1: some of your recent work, uh really really engages the
Speaker 1: early days of radio and when they were you know,
Speaker 1: Vodeville stage mentalists and mind readers and hypnotists who are
Speaker 1: on the airwaves. Um, how do you relate those two?
Speaker 1: I mean earlier you were comparing magicians to spiritualists. How
Speaker 1: do these kind of radio performers and mind readers and
Speaker 1: mentalists relate to spiritualist practice? Well, mind readers performing mind
Speaker 1: readers who call themselves mentalists most often went on the
Speaker 1: radio big time as soon as it became commercially available,
Speaker 1: meaning just after World War One, and they saw themselves
Speaker 1: as part of the professional magic world, but they could
Speaker 1: not present themselves as doing a trick. Basically, nobody wants
Speaker 1: to see a fake psychic. Nobody wants to see a
Speaker 1: fake medium, a mentalist, or a fake medium for that matter.
Speaker 1: So unlike a magician who could define his performance space
Speaker 1: in a way that the audience and he accepted, culturally accepted,
Speaker 1: and was an implacent part of the act. As an act,
Speaker 1: it may look wonderful, and you may not be able
Speaker 1: to figure it out audience. But we all know that
Speaker 1: this is a trick. A mentalist can't do that. They
Speaker 1: have to become that persona. They have to their their
Speaker 1: act is based on developing a relationship and projecting it
Speaker 1: with the audience itself. They have to get into the
Speaker 1: audience's mind. And it seemed to me that that's pretty
Speaker 1: well known. But it struck me that what they were
Speaker 1: doing was particularly attuned to the radio because in the radio,
Speaker 1: unlike TV or visual medium, Unlike in those mediums, you're
Speaker 1: not provided any visual element. What happens is somebody on
Speaker 1: the other end of the line is speaking to you,
Speaker 1: and they're telling a narrative, and you're participating. In order
Speaker 1: for this to work, you provide the images, you're already
Speaker 1: a partner in creating the story and and basically that
Speaker 1: is the quid pro quo of doing radio work. But
Speaker 1: at least you know, if you're not doing advertising, you
Speaker 1: assume that you're getting into people's heads and that they're
Speaker 1: participating with you and they're helping to create the story
Speaker 1: as they're listening, which is quite different from TV. In TV,
Speaker 1: you're just sitting there letting it wash over. You, and
Speaker 1: not only is the image being fed to you, but
Speaker 1: the narrative is quite controlled, so you're more much more
Speaker 1: of a passive participant. But radio itself is a sort
Speaker 1: of mentalists paradise. I thought it's much more appropriate and
Speaker 1: in tune with what mentalists we're doing, which was rejecting
Speaker 1: persona of relating to one person's mind directly reading it
Speaker 1: in communication with it. UM. So I thought I would
Speaker 1: write a book about that special relationship between performing mentalists.
Speaker 1: We're on vaudeville and off Vaudeville um and the kinds
Speaker 1: of things they were doing, and the way they flocked
Speaker 1: onto the radio between the war. Between World War One
Speaker 1: and World War Two. One of the observations that a
Speaker 1: number of historians who have written about spiritualism have have
Speaker 1: made is the interest in spiritualism in the wake of
Speaker 1: the Civil War in the United States, UM, with the
Speaker 1: scale of of loss and grief and uh the scale
Speaker 1: of national mourning, and then also looked at the aftermath
Speaker 1: of World War One as a driving factor for renewed
Speaker 1: interests in spiritualism. Do you see that same kind of connection.
Speaker 1: I think there was renewed in just because simply there
Speaker 1: was a lot of people dying, and particularly dying early,
Speaker 1: So there was a sharp sense of injustice there and
Speaker 1: how it could it be reconciled with divine justice. But
Speaker 1: I'm not so much one who connects it with a
Speaker 1: way to deal with national grief, individual or countrywide grief.
Speaker 1: I think it was there, and you can see it
Speaker 1: intertwined with with the movement, but I don't I think
Speaker 1: he would be in error if you just assigned it
Speaker 1: all to either individual or national tragedy. There was a
Speaker 1: much wider movement than that, as I you know, as
Speaker 1: I tried to say, it wasn't just that people were
Speaker 1: looking for to make contact to make sure that there
Speaker 1: dead husband or son, we're still in a happy place
Speaker 1: after life. But it was an entire revisioning of the
Speaker 1: relationship between heaven and Earth and the possibilities of human
Speaker 1: evolution and progression and what people needed to do here
Speaker 1: on this earth in order to turn this earth more
Speaker 1: into a heaven. That's a big that's a big thing.
Speaker 1: So there was some relationship between the wars and grief,
Speaker 1: but it was a much bigger project than that. M
Speaker 1: hm hm um. Maybe to wrap up our conversation, if
Speaker 1: you're thinking about what you would hope that we would
Speaker 1: communicate to our listeners about spiritualism. M And you know,
Speaker 1: our goal is to go back to the middle of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century and uh, to let the dead speak
Speaker 1: as best we can. And Brodie's phrase, the historians work
Speaker 1: is the spiritualists work. You know, we're trying to let
Speaker 1: the dead speak. Um. What is it that you would
Speaker 1: hope that listeners to our documentary that's going to be
Speaker 1: a narrative history of spiritualism. What do you hope they
Speaker 1: will hear? I hope they will hear that the history
Speaker 1: of our country during that time was influenced deeply by
Speaker 1: a set of ideas that were expressed very well by spiritualism.
Speaker 1: And what they need to know, this is my special
Speaker 1: message to the listeners. What they need to know is
Speaker 1: that that profound influence that they exerted on the national
Speaker 1: life was deliberately written out of histories of reform movements
Speaker 1: like the women's movement, the labor movement, the politics, history
Speaker 1: of the politics of the period, the intellectual history, history
Speaker 1: of of the novel and poetry, and on and on,
Speaker 1: that those things were modified so that you hardly see
Speaker 1: it any reference to it. Anymore. And I have found
Speaker 1: that particularly in the movement, the labor movement, for example,
Speaker 1: and the Women's Movement UM, that the writing out happened deliberately.
Speaker 1: The labor movement, it's easy to see marks in the
Speaker 1: international kicked out a bunch of spiritistum in and everybody
Speaker 1: that was had previously gotten along splendidly under that umbrella
Speaker 1: suddenly had to be a materialist and therefore spiritualists was
Speaker 1: spiritualist or on the out, and that hardly has been
Speaker 1: that story has hardly been told. Very recently. It started
Speaker 1: to the same thing happened with the Women's Movement UM
Speaker 1: and the five volume history of the Women's Suffrage Movement
Speaker 1: that was written by Matilda, Jocelyn Engage, Elizabeth Katie Stan
Speaker 1: and so on, that also was worked on, and it
Speaker 1: was there was some strategy to this. Basically, they didn't
Speaker 1: want to ally themselves with a lot of people and
Speaker 1: ideas that mainstream America thought were crazy and they were
Speaker 1: out of bounds. They had specific political aims, aims that
Speaker 1: included legislation that had to be passed and so on.
Speaker 1: So they were claiming the largest possible platform and brought
Speaker 1: us view that they could but if I think a
Speaker 1: few historians have of late been trying to resurrect the
Speaker 1: influence of spiritualism during this time, And if you want
Speaker 1: a good view, you know on and Browd's words, Yes,
Speaker 1: you need to resurrect these people and what was going
Speaker 1: on with them and how they influenced society in order
Speaker 1: to really understand the nuts and bolts of nine century America. Hey, folks,
Speaker 1: it's Aaron here. I hope today's interview helped you deepen
Speaker 1: your understanding of every thing involved in the world of spiritualism.
Speaker 1: But we're not done yet. We have more interviews to
Speaker 1: share with you, so stick around after this brief sponsor
Speaker 1: break to hear a preview of next week's interview. Next
Speaker 1: time on Obscured. Edmonds was a judge in the New
Speaker 1: York State Supreme Court, and he was in charge for
Speaker 1: many years of the condition of prisoners in New York prisons,
Speaker 1: which was miserable, utterly miserable. So he had a vocational
Speaker 1: interest in what happens to bad people in the afterlife.
Speaker 1: So if everybody's going to heaven, then you're going to
Speaker 1: end up with criminals. And what do you do with
Speaker 1: your criminals in the afterlife what happens to them? So
Speaker 1: he led many years science circle in which they routinely
Speaker 1: talked to dead criminals, and he brought back some reports
Speaker 1: from these folks, mostly men, but not always crime. In Edmunds,
Speaker 1: heaven is very very gendered, So men are murderers and
Speaker 1: brutes and rapists and drunkards, and women are sexually permissive
Speaker 1: and murder children. Lot Obscured was created by me Aaron
Speaker 1: Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh
Speaker 1: Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research in writing
Speaker 1: for this season is all the work of my right
Speaker 1: hand man Carl Ellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed
Speaker 1: the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians,
Speaker 1: source material and links to our other shows over at
Speaker 1: history unobscured dot com And until next time, thanks for
Speaker 1: listening Unobscured as a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Aaron Minkey. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.