by Daniel Wolff
The Bradleys were determined to leave that class behind. In 1857, they completed payment on a lot uptown. Then, borrowing the capital, the twenty-seven-year-old Bradley launched his own brush company. He couldn't have picked a worse time. Stock market speculation, enormous monopolies in railroads and other industries, the surge of new immigrants— all combined to produce a nationwide panic. Unemployment skyrocketed; financial institutions closed. In New York City, the only currency anyone would accept consisted of bank bills depreciating at five to twenty-five percent a day. By December of 1857, the city had lost an estimated $120 million, and nearly a thousand businesses had gone under. The panic led to the Third Great Awakening (also known as the Businessmen's Revival), where thousands gathered for prayer meetings and denounced the addiction to moneymaking. Backlash against immigrants revived, too, with editorials to "shoot down any quantity of Irish or German." Meanwhile, the tenements exploded, as starving workers lashed out at the system. Unemployed workers occupied City Hall, and the government eventually had to call in the marines to restore order.
The only thing that kept the Bradleys' business afloat was their bankers' decision not to call in the loans, and that may have been based on the couple's single-minded perseverance. Bradley, a visitor recalled, was "a vigorous and large built man, rather rough in his appearance but full of energy." While his wife kept shop, he was upstairs cutting, shaping, and gluing brushes. Later in life, he'd reminisce how lunch in those days was often a slice of bread coated with molasses. By the end of his second year in business, Bradley had cleared his losses, and soon, he "added considerably to his capital." The main reason was war. When the South seceded from the union, the North passed tariffs to protect its manufacturers. New York's economy took off, creating an enormous demand for, among other things, brushes: to clean cannons, curry horses, groom officers' uniforms. New York City was home to a few dozen millionaires in 1860; by 1864 there were several hundred. When the Civil War ended, Bradley's firm had sales of $400,000 a year.
The war put the Bradleys into a new class of American capitalists— not as incredibly wealthy as John D. Rockefeller or Diamond Jim Brady, but full-fledged participants in what would come to be known as the Gilded Age. The Bradleys moved the factory to larger quarters on Pearl Street in Manhattan and bought a "fine house" on Brooklyn's Bedford Avenue. If James Bradley had taken his Methodism seriously before, he now became a major donor and the superintendent of the new Central Methodist Church in Williamsburg. At that time, the most popular religious figure of his day, the abolitionist Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, was attracting huge "privileged audiences" to his Brooklyn church. While Beecher often called for social reforms, his sermons also amounted to "reassurances," as one historian puts it, ". . . that social inequalities generated by the free market system were divinely sanctioned and morally justifiable." At the same time, the born-again evangelist Reverend Dwight L. Moody was conducting his own mammoth revivals, arguing that the suffering of the city's tenement dwellers was a direct result of their having "drifted away from God."
So, at age forty, Bradley has the comfort both of his success and his religion. Still, he finds himself deeply and strangely exhausted. He buys the building lots on the Jersey shore and resolves, that summer of 1870, to leave the city to become, in his words, "an inhabitant of the wild woods." That empty stretch of undeveloped beach, he decides, is "where my wearied body and brain might rest, lulled to sleep by the murmuring sea at night, and awaked in the morning by the songs of birds in the pine trees surrounding my couch." It's a vision far from his tenement past, from the sorting of hog bristle, from his fine house in Brooklyn. Early on the morning of June 9, he sets off with a pair of horses, a carriage, a tent, and John Baker, whom he describes as "my colored man."
Aboard the steamer Red Bird, Bradley crosses New York harbor, cuts inside Sandy Hook, and steams up the Navesink River to the town of Red Bank. Along the way, he falls into conversation with a man named Shaw. Only later does he discover that it's Henry Ward Shaw, best-selling author (under the pen name Josh Billings) of the Farmer's Almanac. Billing's way with an aphorism has made him even more successful than his contemporary Mark Twain. "What the moral army needs just now," Billings wrote, "is more rank and file and fewer brigadier generals." Maybe even more apropos to the exhausted brush manufacturer in search of a dream: "Building air castles is a harmless business as long as you don't attempt to live in them."
Bradley disembarked in Red Bank, leaving Baker to take care of the horses, and walked over to the Globe Hotel for a meal. It's there that his revelation began. He no sooner sat down at the table than "a feeling of freedom and satisfaction swept over him." As the feeling grew, he recognized it as an awakening, a heaven-sent miracle. Speaking of himself in the third person, he would tell his biographers, "tears rolled unrestrainedly down his face."
The epiphany, if startling, wasn't totally unexpected. This kind of moment had, after all, launched the religion Bradley believed in, Methodism. A hundred and thirty years earlier, in London, John Wesley had felt his heart "strangely warmed," and rediscovering the Christ that had been hidden to him by the rituals and conventions of the Church of England, he'd cried out— much as James Bradley would cry out upon reaching his promised land— "I believe!"
This born-again moment was at the core of the young Methodist Church. Shucking questions of doctrine like baptism and confession, John Wesley had seen his mission as "carrying religion and morality to the submerged classes." He advocated open-air preaching, going directly to the new working class of the industrial revolution, and leaving the details of how they wanted to practice their faith up to them. "One condition, and one only, is required," Wesley wrote: "a real desire to save the soul."
Not surprisingly, a religion that rebelled at the Church of England and championed a fresh, democratic approach had immense and widespread appeal in the American colonies. In the years before the Revolutionary War, the 250 original subscribers to New York City's first Methodist congregation ran the gamut from "Negro servants to the Livingstons, Delanceys, and Stuyvesants." During those years, American Methodism was a passionate, evangelical sect driven by a band of circuit-riding preachers. The colonies' best-known and most successful, Francis Asbury, left England for Philadelphia in the fall of 1771. As a young man of twenty-six, he asked himself some of the same questions that Bradley must have during his much shorter crossing on the Red Bird — and ended with a similar determination. Aboard ship, Asbury wrote in his journal: "Whither am I going? To the New World. What to do? To gain honor? No, if I know my own heart. To get money? No. I am going to live with God and to bring others to do so."
Asbury went on to organize the first American Methodist Conference. He spoke not only in churches but in pioneer cabins, in prisons, town halls, and anywhere else people would listen. It worked. There were less than five thousand Methodists in the colonies at the time of the Revolutionary War. By 1790, the new nation had more than forty-five thousand white members and nearly twelve thousand "colored." While New York City was a British stronghold, mostly Church of England, New Jersey was far more open to the new sect and its emotional revivals. Asbury, ordained a bishop by John Wesley, presided over what were called Love Feasts. One report, from around 1776, described the whole congregation as being "bathed in tears," with the cries so loud you couldn't hear the preacher. "Some would be seized with trembling, and in a few moments drop on the floor as if they were dead; while others were embracing each other with streaming eyes, and all were lost in wonder, love, and praise."
Bradley's moment of revelation was part of his religious tradition. And, as he began his long, bumpy ride down the Jersey shore, the ex-Catholic envisioned himself as carrying that revelation with him: a kind of modern pilgrim on a quest into "the wild woods."
Except the shore, even then, wasn't exactly wilderness. From Red Bank to Long Branch, Bradley rode a train line that had been established six years earlier. Granted, the railroad ran so close to the beach that, as one
observer noted, "the surf blends with the rattle of the cars and the shriek of the locomotive whistle; and at times in high tide, the waves have washed over the tracks." Still, the train link had already created a real estate boom and promised a much greater one. The population of the New Jersey shore, some fifty-six thousand in 1850, doubled over the next thirty-five years.
And according to a New York Times correspondent, Long Branch in 1870 was "the favorite watering place of the United States," always presenting "a gay and animated spectacle." The robber barons of the day— Diamond Jim Fisk and Jay Gould— were staying there that summer. The West End Hotel boasted six hundred rooms, and there were vast summer "cottages" on two-hundred-acre plots. "The Branch" was where Josh Billings was headed and where President Grant would vacation later in the summer.
Bradley's wild woods were eight miles south of Long Branch. In between was a barren stretch of seafront where only one family managed to eke out a living. So although he was only a long carriage ride away from a thriving resort town, it felt awfully remote. When he and Baker arrived at dusk, it was too dark to cut tent poles. They threw a piece of canvas over the beams of one of the first buildings going up, made their "couch" of horse blankets and carriage cushions, and after a supper of dry crackers, fell asleep in the construction site. The next morning, they woke and looked out over nothing but sand and sea. "Mr. B," sighed the unhappy Baker, "this is a wilderness place."
Bradley, on the other hand, was energized by the sight. After breakfast, they rode down to look over his new property, which sat at the edge of a small natural lake. The land, according to one historian, was "a wild, wave-lashed solitude of sand, overgrown with pines and oaks and cedars." There, they pitched their tent and, in Bradley's words, "began our Crusoe life."
The worn-out brush manufacturer so loved that image that he later named an uninhabited bit of land on nearby Sunset Lake "Robinson Crusoe Island." Daniel Defoe had described his 1719 novel as a story of the "religious application of events . . . to justify and honor the wisdom of Providence." Bradley saw himself on a similar mission. He was a noble pilgrim (deliberately) shipwrecked on the New Jersey shore, creating out of wilderness a brand-new life based on born-again Christian principles. Which left Baker, his "faithful old colored servant," in the role of Friday.
There's no record of how Friday felt about this job description. John Baker had been a slave in Virginia at the start of the Civil War. When federal troops launched an attack near his owner's plantation, he managed to escape to Washington and, from there, made his way north to New York. Among the city's thousands of escaped slaves, he'd somehow "drifted into the employ" of the Bradleys. The devout couple had taken on Baker as a special project. Mrs. Bradley set about teaching him how to read and, placing a Bible in his hands, began the work of conversion. It's not clear whether the colored man, then in his mid-forties, was a Baptist or a nonbeliever, but the proselytizing made him uneasy.
"You are trying to do right," James Bradley would exhort him.
"You want God to be your friend and to live to be good and do good."
"Ah yes," Baker would answer and, then, touching his heart, add, "but I don't feel right just here."
This fit perfectly with Bradley's seashore adventure. Not only would he start a new life in the wilderness, but Robinson Crusoe would bring Friday to Christ. That's what this real estate development was all about, after all. A small group of Methodist families had pitched their tents on this beach the summer before. "The great world we did not seek," explained one of the founders, "but rather shunned, following the Savior's invitation, 'Come apart into a desert [or quiet] place and rest awhile.'" The savagery of the shorefront had scared them, at first. Then, as the story goes, two of the founders were walking along the beach and found an old Spanish silver dollar washed up in the sand. The ministers took this as a divine omen. Thirteen Methodist clergymen and thirteen laymen founded the Methodist Camp Meeting Association, committing an initial fifty dollars to buy eleven barren, inhospitable, and virtually inaccessible acres. According to the preamble of their charter, they'd made the investment "with a single eye to the Divine glory [and] to provide for the holding of camp meetings, for the promotion of Christian holiness, rigidly excluding all forms of speculation." They eventually bought 266 acres, including a small grove set back from the beach, and decided to call the holy city Ocean Grove.
In a way, it's only apt that the sign God gave these pilgrims was a piece of money. As an early guidebook put it, Ocean Grove was "essentially a faith undertaking, aided, however, by business shrewdness." Despite their moral position against speculation, simple math shows that the church did all right. As the first to sign up, Bradley got a deal, paying eighty-five dollars for each of his lots. That was certainly a bargain, but, after all, the Camp Meeting Association had only spent fifty dollars on the first eleven acres. Plus, the Association didn't actually grant Bradley— or anyone else— ownership. To assure that the town stayed devout, its bylaws stipulated that lots would be leased rather than sold. That way, if the town fathers suspected drinking, dancing, or any other deviation from the Methodist discipline, the transgressor could be asked to leave. Ocean Grove became a tent city, the real estate staying in the Association's hands.
But there was no city in 1870. Bradley and Baker were mostly alone, occasionally seeing workmen or taking part in tent services on the Sabbath. Periodically, Bradley would ride to Long Branch and, from there, make the two-and-a-half-hour commute into New York City, where he'd check on his business and see his wife. During one of those trips away, the summer's second revelation occurred. As usual, Baker met Bradley at the Long Branch railroad station, but this time before Bradley could climb up into his carriage, Baker raised his hand and testified:
"Bless de Lord! Mr. Bradley, de light has come into my soul!"
That's how Bradley reported it. It seems Baker had heard a preacher at Ocean Grove over the weekend and been converted. The atmosphere of this wilderness place had succeeded, had "let the light in." The brush manufacturer must have been even more convinced that this stretch of shore was, if not sacred, special.
The question became how to keep it that way. From the beginning, John Wesley had cautioned against "worldly delights." In Bradley's day, the convention of the Methodist Church reiterated their founder's warning against "a tendency to worldliness— to vain and demoralizing amusements." Young people were particularly susceptible, especially when dancing. On the dance floor, one Methodist paper pointed out, "many a fair maiden and noble youth have betrayed the Savior." The trouble wasn't so much the music, as where it led: to "emotional action, the expression of emotion by rhythmic, choric movement."
The charter of the new city of Ocean Grove was filled with prohibitions not only against music and dance, but liquor, tobacco, Sunday bathing, card playing, bicycle riding, peddlers, theater, cursing, and "the practice of the sexes in assuming attitudes on the sand that would be immoral at their city homes." By the turn of the century, Ocean Grove's government would be called "autocratic [and] the most rigid on the continent."
All the rules were to protect the church not only from the world, but from its own success. By 1871, there were a million and a half Methodists. The membership base had long since shifted from Wesley's "submerged classes" to small-business owners and even the robber barons of the day. Daniel Drew, for example, had made millions through railroad monopolies, insider trading, and other stock manipulations. "He holds the honest people of the world to be a pack of fools," wrote one of Drew's contemporaries, "[because] when he has been unusually lucky in his trade of fleecing other men, he settles accounts with his conscience by subscribing toward a new chapel or attending a prayer meeting." Two years before Ocean Grove was founded, Drew had given his note for a quarter of a million dollars to start the Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, New Jersey.
Not only had the nature of its membership changed, but the church itself had become big business. By the turn of the century, its book-publishi
ng concern alone would have a budget of $6 million. The chance to make money produced "glaring frauds": family members granting each other exclusive contracts to sell the church its ink, binding leather, paper. Eventually, the Methodist hierarchy had to bring in lay members to monitor the finances. All around him, Bradley saw men "whose nerves were shattered by too close application to their profession, studies, or their chase of the 'almighty dollar.'" As he knew too well, even the church couldn't protect them.
Which is why the founders designed Ocean Grove to grow in isolation. And why, in the summer of 1870 when the city was little more than a few construction sites, they were already worried about their Eden. They had Fletcher Lake to the south and the ocean to the east, both acting as natural barriers. And inland, on the west, Ocean Grove's founding fathers would build a high fence to make sure that only believers entered. The entrance would be locked from Saturday evening till Monday (the only exception being made for the undertaker). But to the north, up the coast, there was no buffer between their unfinished paradise and the town of Long Branch except the stretch of undeveloped beach front. And that was hardly enough protection, given the kind of intoxicating corruption that thrived in The Branch.
Satan's amusements had existed in Long Branch for decades now. Back in the fall of 1809, Bishop Asbury himself had preached there, taking as his subject Acts 3: "Repent ye therefore, and be converted that your sins may be blotted out." In his log, Asbury noted that it was "given to me to speak in strong words, words of God and from God." The bishop had helped Long Branch establish one of the earliest Methodist gatherings in America. Still, sin not only took hold but prospered.