One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Chapter 8: A good overview of the relationship of the European Enlightenment to early American varieties of theism, deism, and atheism can be found in James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (1985). Details concerning the Livingston family and Livingston Manor are from The Livingstons of Livingston manor; being the history of that branch of the Scottish house of Callendar which settled in the English province of New York during the reign of Charles the Second; and also including an account of Robert Livingston of Albany, “The nephew,” a settler in the same province and his principal descendants (1910). The work of Livingston and his colleagues was discussed by Philip G. Davidson in “Whig Propagandists of the American Revolution,” The American Historical Review 39, no. 3 (April 1934): 442–53, and their rabble-rousing writings were republished as The Independent Reflector Or, Weekly Essays on Sundry Important Subjects More Particularly Adapted to the Province of New York by Harvard University Press in 1963.

  Chapter 9: The role of religion in the birth of the United States has been a much discussed topic in the last decade, inspiring popular books including Steven Waldman’s Founding Faith (2008), which begins with an entertaining description of the mammoth cheese delivered to Jefferson, Thomas S. Kidd’s God of Liberty (2010), and John Fea’s Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (2011). Mark Noll’s America’s God: From Jonathan Edward to Abraham Lincoln (2002) puts the role of religion in the revolution in the broader context of the “collapse” of Puritanism and the “surge” of new denominations. While each of these recent books considers the varieties of Christianity at large on the eve of Independence, the late scholar and rabbi Jacob Rader Marcus remains the best source for the history of Jews in the colonial period and the early United States. His collection Jews and the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Documentary (1975) provides primary sources related to Jonas Philips, Chaim Solomon, and other Jews who contributed to the cause of liberty. Histories of the Jews of St. Eustatius consulted include Samuel Kurinsky’s article “The Jews of St. Eustatius: Rescuers of the American Revolution”; Barbara Tuchman’s The First Salute (1988); and the original teller of this tale, J. Franklin Jameson, whose short but thorough account, “St. Eustatius in the American Revolution” (American Historical Review 8, no. 4 [July 1903]), set a high bar for all scholarship concerning these events. An overview of the influences of Jewish struggle for rights in the British colonies can be found in Search Out the Land, by Sheldon and Judy Godfrey, and The Settlement of the Jews in North America, by Charles Daly (1893).

  Chapter 10: Both the War of 1812 and the ensuing disagreement over Jefferson’s library played out in the early American press in as close to real time as early nineteenth-century printing technology allowed. My primary sources for this discussion of both conflicts were the headlines of the day. William Dawson Johnston’s 1904 History of the Library of Congress provided context for considering early disagreements over the collection in light of the essential institution it would become.

  Chapter 11: This chapter could not have been completed without the efforts of Yale University’s Ala Alryyes to put Omar ibn Said once again before the public through his A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said (2011) and the pioneering work of Allan Austin’s African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (1997). Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (2006) provides insights into the uses of Islam by the abolitionists in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Except where noted, all quotations from Omar ibn Said are from Alyyres’s recent translation.

  Chapter 12: Mary Moody Emerson’s story is best told through her own writing, particularly her correspondence with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other family members as collected in The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, edited by Nancy Craig Simmons (1993). See also Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History, by Phyllis Cole (1998). Diana Eck’s A New Religious America (2001) provides another view of the literary moment she calls the “ ‘easting’ of old New England’ ” and of the arrival of Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago.

  Chapter 13: This chapter seeks to put into conversation two histories: the decline of the culture that had produced the Six Nations, and the rise of Mormonism. For the former, Anthony Wallace’s Death and Rebirth of the Seneca is essential reading. The recent explosion in scholarship on earlier Mormonism includes John G. Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (2012) and Richard Lyman Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). For connecting these strains of scholarship, I am indebted to Lori Taylor’s doctoral dissertation, “Telling Stories About Mormons and Indians” (State University of New York at Buffalo, 2000), as well as to Richard Brodhead’s article “Prophets in America Circa 1930: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nat Turner, Joseph Smith”—in Joseph Smith Jr.: Reappraisals After Two Centuries, edited by Reid L. Neilson and Terryl L. Givens (2008)—which positions both the founder of Mormonism and the author of the Code of Handsome Lake within a broader spectrum of mid-nineteenth-century religious figures. The section on Quaker activity in Cornplanter’s Village is informed by Jill Kinney’s doctoral dissertation, “Letters, Pen, and Tilling the Field: Quaker Schools Among the Seneca Indians on the Allegany River, 1798–1852” (University of Rochester, 2009), as well as the journal of the Quaker missionary Henry Simmons, as presented by David Swatzler’s A Friend Among the Seneca (2000).

  Chapter 14: This chapter relies largely on contemporary press reports, which displayed a fascination with the exploding Chinese subculture in San Francisco throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. I am grateful to the Chinese in North America Research Committee for confirming that the 1852 temple dedication I discovered during an archival search is among the earliest surviving records of Chinese religious activity in the United States. Missionary literature of the time, particularly Otis Gibson’s The Chinese in America (1877), also provides a view of immigrant life. Such sources are unfortunately biased and must be read critically, but they nonetheless preserve details that might otherwise have been lost. For a good sampling of primary source materials related to the arrival of the Chinese and other Asian immigrants in the United States, see Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (1999), edited by Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero.

  Chapter 15: The Asian American Curriculum and Research Project of Western Washington University’s Woodring College of Education (http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/AACR/) is an excellent source of images and documents related to the mistreatment of Sikhs in Bellingham, and the lives of Indian immigrants in the Pacific Northwest generally. Materials related to Bhagat Singh Thind’s life, career, and legal struggle for citizenship can also be found online, thanks to the foundation established in his name (http://www.bhagatsinghthind.com/). Thind’s autobiography, House of Happiness, which provided the anecdotes about his life and teaching career, was republished in 2006.

  Chapter 16: The primary source for the memorial service sections of this chapter was Reverend Fujimura’s memoir, Though I Be Crushed (1985). He describes the funeral he performed for two Japanese American soldiers of the 442nd Combat Regiment on pages 97–99. While Fujimura’s recollections never venture intentionally from the historical record, it is important to note that he seems to have made a mistake in recalling the names of the two service members killed in action, whom he remembered as “Privates Yamamoto and Shiomitsu.” Records of both the Poston Relocation Center and the 442nd show that there was no Shiomitsu held at Poston or killed in action during the time of the internment. However, these same records show that a Joe Shiomichi (the only name close to Shiomitsu among Poston servicemen killed in action) did die at the time the memorial service suggests. Shiomichi’s daughter, Ryoko Shiomichi Thomas, born after her father died in 1944, published letters he sent home from the front sixty years later in a booklet titled “A Guy Named Joe.” The journalist Vanessa De La Torre wrote a short feature about those letters for the Imp
erial Valley Press in 2004 (“ ‘Relocated’ idealist lived—and died—devoutly ‘pro-American,’ ” July 5, 2004). Information about the other memorialized service member, John Yamamoto, can be found in writings by his sister, Hisaye Yamamoto, including the collection Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, originally published in 1988. Other general sources include Alexander Leighton’s classic 1946 book on the Poston camp, The Governing of Men: General Principles and Recommendations Based on Experience at a Japanese Relocation Center, Robert Asahina’s Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad (2006), James C. McNaughton’s Nisei Linguists: Japanese Americans in the Intelligence Service During World War II (2006), and a number of articles by the scholar Duncan Ryuken Williams, including “From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: Lessons from the Internment of Japanese-American Buddhists,” in A Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in Multireligious America (2006), edited by Stephen Prothero, and “Camp Dharma: Japanese-American Buddhist Identity and the Internment Experience of World War II,” in Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia (2002), edited by Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann.

  Chapter 17: For details related to Michael Bowen’s studio and Haight-Ashbury in 1967, I am indebted to Jane Kramer’s classic New Yorker profile of Allen Ginsberg (“Paterfamilias,” August 24, 1968) as well as to photographs found in Gene Anthony’s The Summer of Love (1980), and in unpublished chapters of Bowen’s memoir, My Odyssey, made available to me by his student Mark Walker. I am grateful to John Starr Cooke’s son Chamba for taking the time to talk with me about his father and his eventful family life, and to other scholars who have explored the elder Cooke’s legacy, including Eliza F. Kent, who discussed the relationship of Bowen and Cooke as part of a presentation given at the American Academy of Religion Conference in 2011 (“California Hinduism: The Shiva Linga of Golden Gate Park, 1989–1994,” November 23, 2011), and Camelia Elias, who has considered Cooke’s relationship to Theosophy (“Gone with the Wind of Tarot: John Starr Cooke and the Esoteric Tradition in the West,” unpublished at the time of this writing). I am also indebted to other writers who have noted William Burroughs’s fascination with Scientology, including John Lardas Modern, who discusses the religion of various Beats in The Bop Apocalypse (2000), and Lee Konstantinou, who wrote of the Burroughs-Hubbard connection for the science fiction website io9.com (“William S. Burroughs’ Wild Ride with Scientology,” May 11, 2011). Quotes related to the attempted levitation of the Pentagon are from Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, originally published in Harper’s and Commentary, and the oral history of the event assembled by Larry “Ratso” Sloman, Michael Simmons, and Jay Babcock, “OUT, DEMONS, OUT!” for Arthur (November 2004).

  Chapter 18: The notion that presidential inaugural addresses serve as secular sermons to the nation was proposed nearly fifty years ago by the sociologist Robert Bellah, who regarded such public displays of patriotic devotion as bellwethers of the phenomenon he called “American civil religion.” His seminal essay by a similar name, “Civil Religion in America,” first written in 1966, was republished more recently in the collection Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World (1991). Writing in the long shadow of the Kennedy assassination, Bellah focused on the inaugural address of 1961 and found in it expressions of the ways in which religious language can both unite and divide the nation. The same might be said of Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, and many of his other uses of religious language, such as those found in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father and in The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006. The descriptions of El Santuario de Chimayo in the early twentieth century with which the chapter concludes can be found in Le Baron Bradford Prince’s Spanish Mission Churches of New Mexico (1915). I witnessed firsthand—and took part in—the collaboration necessary to fill the sacred hole when I visited the church in the spring of 2002.

  The specific sources for materials quoted throughout the text are as follows:

  Notes to Chapter 1

  “a race of men wearing clothes”: Peter Martyr D’Anghera, De Orbe Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D’Anghera, translated from the Latin with Notes and Introduction by Francis Augustus MacNutt (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), Book 9.

  “to trample the head of their enemies”: Jacques Bouton, Relation de l’establissement des francois depuis l’an 1635 en l’isle de la Martinique (1640), quoted in Bernard Grunberg, “An Ethnohistorical Approach of the Carib through Written Sources,” in Corinne Lisette Hofman et al., Communities in Contact: Essays in Archaeology, Ethnohistory & Ethnography of the Amerindian Circum-Caribbean (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2011), 339.

  “the death apple”: For more on this dangerous tree, see, for example, The Wilderness Medicine Newsletter, “Toxins #1—The Manchineel Tree,” online at http://wildernessmedicinenewsletter.wordpress.com/2006/12/18/toxins-1-the-manchineel-tree/.

  “Moor’s last sigh”: An account of the Muslim evacuation of Alhambra can be found in James Reston Jr., Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors (New York: Random House, 2006), 241–43.

  “the countries of India and of a Prince, called Great Can, which in our language signifies King of Kings”: Personal narrative of the first voyage of Columbus to America: from a manuscript recently discovered in Spain (Boston: Thomas B. Wait and Son, 1827), 9.

  “murmur”: Christopher Columbus, “Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus,” in The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot 985–1503: Original Narratives of Early American History, edited by Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 100.

  “the image of America as a land unseen, unnamed and otherwise without mortal creator”; “transient glimpses of the new world”; “the sublime of humbuggery”: Geraldine Barnes, Viking America (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), 48.

  “There shall ye bury me… and set up crosses at my head and feet”: Saga of the Greenlanders, available in various online editions, including https://notendur.hi.is/haukurth/utgafa/greenlanders.html.

  “The going out of a Curious Man to explore the Regions of the Globe”: A partial English translation of Idrisi’s text can be found in Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 85–101. See also The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe, by John Kirtland Wright, PhD, Librarian (New York: American Geographical Society, 1925); and Stuart Peebles’s unpublished paper “The First Braudel: The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World of al-Idrisi,” May 11, 2013, available online at https://www.academia.edu/3568043/The_First_Braudel_The_Mediterannean_and_Mediterranean_World_of_al-Idrisi.

  “certain intelligent men”: Wright, 80.

  “All grace goes back to Allah”: Khair, 89.

  “Gloomy Sea”; “No one knows what lies beyond it…”: Peebles, 17.

  “people with red skin”; “not much hair”; “extraordinarily beautiful”: Quoted in Abbas Hamdani, “An Islamic Background to the Voyages of Discovery,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Manuela Marín (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 276.

  “the Earth is”: Khair, 86.

  “carried with them their books and sacred images and the ritual”: Edward Payson Vining, An Inglorious Columbus: Or, Evidence that Hwui Shan and a party of Buddhist monks from Afghanistan discovered America in the fifth century, a.d. (New York: Appleton & Co., 1885), 42; see also Charles Leland, Fusang, or The Discovery of America by Chinese Buddhist Priests in the Fifth Century (1875).

  “youthful indiscretions at which modern sinology is accustomed to blush”: Joseph Needham and Gwei-Djen Lu, Science and Civilisation in China: Physics and Physical Technology, Volume 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 540.

  “Fourth Part of the World”: The phrase first appears in Matthias Ringmann’s Cosmographiae Introductio of 1507. For discussion of the religious i
mplications of the medieval notions of the world divided into parts, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “What a Difference Difference Makes,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  “a wax candle rising and falling”; “Come see the men who have come from the heavens!”: Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus, as summarized in Bartolomé de las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies Or, a faithful Narrative of the Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the inhabitants of West-India, TOGETHER With the Devastations of several Kingdoms in America by Fire and Sword, for the space of Forty and Two Years, from the time of its first Discovery by them. Las Casas’s text is available online from Project Gutenberg: https://archive.org/details/abriefaccountoft20321gut.