Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Craddock saw shorthand as a professional skill that was eminently marketable, a technique of efficiency that was spreading rapidly from the courtroom to “the railway office, the manufactory, and the counting-room.” Accordingly, she offered this instruction to her students as a self-help regimen, one that she had embraced as her own means of individual advancement. “To the ambitious young men and women who are working their way up from the foot of the business ladder,” Craddock wrote in her first textbook on the subject, “the phonographer’s profession holds out a helping hand; for it offers larger salaries than any other profession, for the time and money spent in acquiring it.” These were tame ventures in publishing and education compared to the avenues that Craddock subsequently pursued, but standing on her own as a teacher and author, even if the subject was shorthand and not sex or religion, suggested her determination to find a social and intellectual space beyond daughterly dependence, yet short of wifely domesticity.23

  Teaching phonography at Girard College, a richly endowed charity school in Philadelphia for orphaned boys, was far removed from the life of learning that Craddock had imagined for herself at the University of Pennsylvania. Already having begun her reading in folklore, comparative mythology, and psychical research by the late 1880s, Craddock was hardly going to find an outlet for those interests through instructing her young students in the precise dots and dashes of shorthand. In one way at least, however, her time at Girard College proved a highly fruitful experience for Craddock. During much of her tenure at the school, a vigorous debate about Christian versus secular education roiled the place, turning it into an early proving ground for freethinking arguments against the power and reach of the Protestant establishment.

  Founded through a bequest of Stephen Girard, a maritime trader of immense wealth, the college had been built in the style of a stately Greek temple in the 1830s and 1840s, with an imposing neo-Gothic chapel only added in 1867. While Protestant backers saw the daily religious services required of the boys as being of “an entirely nonsectarian character,” a cadre of freethinkers argued that the growing religious instruction at the college was a violation of Stephen Girard’s secular intentions and the original terms of his will. Girard, who had named ships in his fleet after Montesquieu and Voltaire and who had befriended Tom Paine, stood out to later American freethinkers as an illustrious forebear, a model of the enlightened citizen and philanthropist—and a benefactor who would not appreciate any specific religion being stamped upon his students. These assumptions about Girard’s intentions were not unfounded; he had, for example, explicitly barred ministers and missionaries from holding any office at the college.

  Philadelphia’s liberal standard-bearers, Voltairine de Cleyre included, came to see “the fight to restore Girard College to secularism” as a galvanizing cause. Inspecting the prayers and hymns of the Manual for the Chapel of Girard College, newly issued in 1883, liberal detractors found the services to “reek” of sectarian dogmatism, containing invocations of everything from the Trinity to the Second Coming to the Virgin Birth. Girard, they were sure, had intended to provide destitute boys with “an education free from superstition” and to have moral principles inculcated without resort to divine revelation or Christian doctrine. From the perspective of freethinking secularists, the dead benefactor’s own wishes were clearly being defied: The school was being “turned into a theological seminary for the teaching of the grossest absurdities of the orthodox religion.” Here was a donor-intent case beautifully designed for sustained conflict between secular liberals and Protestant institution-builders.24

  Craddock was soon drawn into a formative alliance with the most vociferous critic of Girard College’s newfangled Protestant errand, Richard Brodhead Westbrook, a clergyman turned lawyer who happily used the power of his new profession to subvert the authority of his old one. A youthful Methodist itinerant in 1840 who had moved on to Presbyterian respectability by 1852, Westbrook ended up an opponent of all sacerdotal pomp and privilege, comfortable in his success in both the legal profession and the coal industry. After 1882, when he retired from business concerns, he entered the public arena on multiple fronts—as an advocate of coeducation, a critic of Christian clout in civic affairs, and a leader of the Wagner Free Institute of Science. His animus against the “religious brigandage” that he saw being perpetrated at Girard College knew no bounds, and his anticlerical hostilities clearly helped sharpen Craddock’s own rebellious edge. Equally significant, Westbrook was the spouse of the physician Henrietta Payne Westbrook, an important elder among the city’s pioneering community of professional women. Together the Westbrooks became two of Craddock’s principal patrons, Henrietta proving an especially dependable friend. As a trustee of the Wagner Free Institute, Richard had a hand in hiring Craddock to help curate that museum’s natural history collection in the autumn of 1885, and he recruited her again in late 1889 to join him in the leadership of the American Secular Union, a national organization dedicated to fighting evangelical designs for a Christian America.25

  Westbrook’s invitation could not have come at a more opportune time for Craddock. Two years earlier in 1887, despairing over her increasingly “unbearable” relationship with her mother, Craddock had left both home and Girard College, scraping together enough money “to go West, out to California” on a fortune-seeking expedition. Initially her shorthand and typewriting skills had kept her in good stead; she reported “living a joyously Materialistic business life in San Francisco,” working as a stenographer and at other jobs. By 1889, though, she found the labor market tighter, and her wages were down. As she looked in vain for meaningful employment, Craddock again felt keenly the want of “a University degree”; she found herself settling for “inferior positions” with “inferior pay” and feared being “foredoomed to a life of drudgery.” She wondered indeed if she would have to become “a houseservant” and thereby accrue a social stigma that would make her “an outcast” among “people of refinement and culture.” The prospect of returning to Philadelphia and admitting failure to her mother made her distraught, but she clearly faced a grim financial situation as she lived with the “wretched uncertainty of where and how I am to get my next month’s victuals and shelter.”26

  The experience of economic vulnerability primed her for greater social radicalism and for association with Westbrook’s league of secular reformers. She read with enthusiasm socialist Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), started voicing critiques of capitalist competition and looked for “deliverance” of the “toiling masses” through state-led reforms. “Now that I have stood down in the ranks of the miserable workers whom I once despised, as a race beneath me, I know how they feel when they have to daily face the prospect of starvation and misery,” Craddock sympathized, hardly trying to disguise the peculiar contortions involved in her expression of cross-class solidarity.27

  When Westbrook approached her at this very moment of desperation and informed her of a chance to help him run the American Secular Union back in Philadelphia, Craddock was elated. Westbrook, the group’s incoming president, soon put her up for election as secretary of the organization, and, as his handpicked choice, she safely outpolled the three men running for the office. With a new public role as corresponding secretary of the American Secular Union, she thought her learned aspirations would finally have their appropriate outlet: “I mean to make my room a centre for the bright intellects and liberal and cultured minds of the city,” she wrote Katie Wood in October 1889. “I shall have my salon yet before I die.” 28

  FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS, from November 1889 to October 1891, Craddock threw herself into her job as secretary of the American Secular Union. The society was one of the most visible, long-lasting, and controversial groups spawned by liberal organizing in the 1870s and 1880s. Dubbed the National Liberal League at its founding in 1876 and headed by the radical Unitarian Francis E. Abbot, the organization had rallied around a platform containing the “Nine Demands of Liberalism,” all of which c
entered on protecting the state from the influence of the church. These principles included calls for the repeal of Sunday blue laws, the discontinuance of all devotional activity in the public schools, the elimination of public-funded chaplaincies, the end of state-sanctioned days of religious thanksgiving and fasting, and the taxation of church property in order to end the government’s indirect subsidy of ecclesial institutions.

  The American Secular Union, and the National Liberal League before it, spearheaded resistance to evangelical efforts to Christianize American public life in the late nineteenth century. Considering America’s founding freedoms to be endangered by Christian groups seeking formal government endorsement of their religion, liberals mobilized under the banner of “Free Religion.” Their initial foil was the National Reform Association, a Presbyterian-led group that wanted to amend the Constitution to recognize both God’s sovereignty over civil government and the Lord Jesus Christ’s supreme authority as ruler of all nations. The campaign to keep God and Jesus out of the Constitution launched the National Liberal League into prominence and announced its ultimate ambition: namely, the “entire secularization” of local, state, and federal governments.29

  A photograph similar to this one appeared with the biographical sketch of Craddock that ran in the Freethinkers’ Magazine in 1890 and that highlighted her leadership role in the American Secular Union. Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

  Committed to thwarting the National Reform Association’s plans for a Christian nation-state, many Liberal Leaguers also wanted to take on Anthony Comstock in an effort to bring down his signature anti-obscenity laws. Comstock’s legal proscriptions were already being used to suppress radical writers and publishers, including D. M. Bennett, the freethinking editor of the Truth Seeker, and Ezra Heywood, labor reformer and sex radical who, taken together, personified to Comstock the depraved “alliance of the free-lust and liberal elements” against “old-fashioned religion.” The move to attack the Comstock laws soon divided the National Liberal League. Its more circumspect members, including founder Francis Abbot himself, hardly wanted to give the impression that liberals had gone soft on “dirty books and pictures,” while its more combative associates thought that Comstock’s crusade was a prime illustration of the political overreaching of Protestant Christianity. That deep divide made liberal mobilization difficult at best and dysfunctional at worst; indeed, disagreement over how to deal with Comstock threatened to destroy the National Liberal League entirely.30

  The American Secular Union, the successor to the National Liberal League, served as the leading proponent of the Nine Demands of Liberalism, all of which were premised on total church-state separation. In this particular pronouncement Craddock is one of three signatories. Richard Brodhead Westbrook, A Few Plain Words Regarding Church Taxation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1891), n.p.

  By 1885, the more ardent free-speech wing of the movement had reconstituted itself as the American Secular Union. That version of the National Liberal League still primarily promoted the original Nine Demands, but with an edge that had been expressly sharpened to clip the talons of Comstock and his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Given her plight in San Francisco, Craddock had taken on her new job as much out of economic necessity as rousing secularism, but that hardly softened the implications of her move. Becoming a champion of the American Secular Union, successor to the National Liberal League, was enough to mark her as an enemy of Comstock’s society, its political power and religious mission. To perform that new role well, tossed-off lines bashing the stock figure of the “sanctified Comstockian bigot” were de rigueur. She was no infidel, she claimed, but she was “at all times a Liberal and a Freethinker,” primed to do battle with Christian theocrats. Indeed, she seemed to relish the feisty anticlericalism that the new role invited: “When I fight for Free Thought, I fight to win.”31

  From 1889 to 1891 Craddock, as much as Richard B. Westbrook, was the public voice of the American Secular Union. To be sure, many of the duties of the corresponding secretary involved bureaucratic minutiae: keeping membership lists, preparing an annual report, maintaining connections with local auxiliaries, and recurrent fundraising. The work often proved thankless. When, for example, Craddock suggested the pansy (a play on pensée) as an emblem of the group’s commitment to freedom of thought, an Illinois jeweler named Otto Wettstein complained loudly that he had already produced a handsome gold pin featuring the torch of reason as the union’s official insignia. What gall for the corresponding secretary to suggest a womanish flower when he already had for sale a manlier badge, an erect torch blazing science’s triumph over superstition.

  Craddock, not used to being associated with an excess of feminine delicacy, wondered what Wettstein was thinking when he laid into her over such an apparently trivial matter. For God’s sake, Wettstein said, any “priest, parson, or school-girl” would be happy wearing a pansy badge, a cheap adornment available at “every 5-cent counter in every millinery and jewelry establishment.” Wettstein even insinuated that he had already purchased Craddock’s loyalty by giving her one of his engraved gold pins to wear and that she had now double-crossed him. That charge left her fuming that “my conscience and my personal independence” were worth more than a shiny trinket. Such were the routine snags of organizational infighting, and yet Craddock never let that silliness prevent her from taking her managerial responsibilities seriously. As she rightly observed of the demanding role she had assumed, “I supposed my duties would be those of a mere amanuensis; but I found that the secretary of a national society has practically to run the whole thing.” One admirer—obviously not Wettstein—crowed that she was proving herself “worth her weight in gold to the organization.”32

  Running the whole operation also meant that Craddock was responsible for orchestrating the circulation of the society’s publications—a job that put her in touch with some big names in the intellectual community. One of the major efforts of the American Secular Union in these years was staging a contest, with a $1,000 prize, for the best treatise on the principles of moral conduct that made no recourse to theological claims or revealed religion. The resulting volume, published under the title Conduct as a Fine Art, was presented as a way of teaching moral character in the public schools without indulging “sectarian preferences”: Children did not need to be taught about God in order to be good citizens. That contest committee drew Craddock into league with Professors Felix Adler and Daniel Brinton, both of whom were prominent figures in the emergent science of religions and leading lights in wider intellectual circles. (Adler had been at Cornell before moving on to found the Ethical Culture Society; Brinton was at Penn.) Much as she had hoped, helping to lead the American Secular Union was allowing her to rub elbows with the learned and cultured.33

  Otto Wettstein, a self-advertised liberal jeweler, patented the most recognized emblem of nineteenth-century secularism, the torch of reason, and marketed it as a gold badge. He flared when Craddock proposed the pansy symbol as a competitor. In the clubby male world of American freethinkers, the flaming torch held off the floral substitute. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.

  Beyond managing the American Secular Union’s publications, Craddock also contributed other literary aid to the society. She served as the conduit for the distribution of Westbrook’s official essays—one that endorsed church taxation and another that urged a ban on Bible reading in the public schools—but she also took her own turn, authoring a pair of pamphlets to promote membership in the society. “The army of the American Secular Union” was, by Craddock’s estimate, a beleaguered force of freethinkers very much in need of new recruits to carry on the battle for “the total separation of Church and State.” The language she used for recruitment was self-consciously combative—as if the fight over cultural politics in the era of Comstock and company had become its own kind of guerilla warfare. “We are shot at on all occasions,” Craddock grumbled, “from
behind fences of pietism, rocks of prejudice, and barriers of conventional propriety.” She took it as her mission to organize the scattered ranks of liberals into a stronger, more unified body, but she soon discovered that it was nearly impossible to focus the individualistic impulses of liberalism, to keep a range of Unitarians, anarchists, agnostics, spiritualists, among others, on the same page. The American Secular Union, much like National Liberal League before it, proved an undisciplined army.34

  Recognizing the difficulties of forging alliances across the various liberal “isms,” Craddock pursued the possibility of building the movement from the ground up. With lectures in Portsmouth, Ohio, and in Newark, New Jersey, and with pieces in the Boston Investigator and Freethinkers’ Magazine, she speculated with some insistence on “How to Make Freethinkers of the Young.” To Craddock, then in her early thirties, it was imperative to bring some “youthful enthusiasm” to a cause peopled mostly by those “on the far side of forty” and led by those “usually on the far side of sixty.” At this point, she saw her fellow secularists as being able to agree on only one cause: namely, “the protest against religious superstition, and especially against the union of Church and State.” That issue, she thought, could be systematized into a curriculum for “Freethought Sunday-schools,” classrooms that she imagined as open debating societies, not religious institutions. Children would be introduced to a range of philosophical views—theist versus atheist, spiritualist versus materialist—and then encouraged to enter the discussion on their own terms. “What is Liberalism worth,” Craddock asked, “if it does not train our children to think for themselves, and to seize upon the truth wherever found?” The actual organization of freethought Sunday schools proved an unrealistic goal, and so Craddock spent her time working with cantankerous elders, not eager children. As corresponding secretary, she found there was no escaping the “war-dances in the Liberal papers.”35