Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Schroeder presented himself as a secular liberator capable of freeing Americans from sexual repression, guilt, and shame. And he could free them too of the misdirected ecstasies of religious experience. “Religion as personal experience,” he assured, “fades out, merges into pure secularism, when our libido is unrepressed through . . . continuous normal and satisfying self-expression.” For Schroeder’s secular reframing of experience, Craddock provided an especially instructive case of atavism, a revealing throwback to the ancestors. She was a latter-day exemplar of the original religious error, the primal confusion of sexual desire with religious feeling. In displaying that elemental mystification in such a vivid form, she offered the scientist a valuable window on “the psycho-sexual childhood of the race.”18

  The very blatancy of Craddock’s regression, in Schroeder’s view, made her the perfect case history for his larger ambition of advancing secular norms for modern sexuality. The practical advice of well-trained physicians would replace the mumbo-jumbo of ministers, Schroeder promised, in directing people’s sex lives. Medical schools, substituting the science of sexology for the air of sacramental mystery, would eclipse churches and temples. And the scientific expertise of the male psychoanalyst would, in this instance, bare the bridal veil of the yoga priestess: To demystify Craddock’s spirituality of the body was to offer a technical blueprint for seeing through religion’s age-old distortion of sexuality. Once religion lost its power to regulate and consecrate sexuality, to gather the sublimated energies of sexual desire to its own ends, secular enlightenment would have its day. Sex and society would finally be free of religion’s specter. Schroeder, like Freud, was intent on designing a future without religious illusion.

  Schroeder’s extensive musings on the psychosexual origins of religion may have been, as his critics often claimed, lifelessly naturalistic and dismally repetitious, but no one could dispute his success as a psychoanalytic provocateur. In 1915, the New York Times Magazine posed, in all seriousness and nonchalance, the question in a headline: “IS SEX THE BASIS OF RELIGION?” Schroeder, along with the psychiatrist James S. Van Teslaar, were the leading authorities for the piece, and it turned out that Van Teslaar had been inspired to take up the sexual psychology of religion primarily through Schroeder’s published studies. Together the two investigators had discovered, the Times reported unblushingly, “the underlying sameness of all religions,” that “at their ‘very core’ Christianity and the other great contemporary religions are what religion was at the beginning—‘sex mysticism.’” By the 1910s and 1920s, the question of religion’s sexual origins had achieved an avant-garde cachet among American intellectuals, and that topic increasingly exercised a middlebrow fascination as well. Schroeder had pressed that psychosexual explanation more insistently and irreverently than any other American writer. And no case history arrested his own attention more than Craddock’s.19

  CRADDOCK’S FANTASIZED LOVE LIFE was consistently more involved than her mundane erotic relationships. As a young woman, she showed little propensity for courtship, let alone marriage. The main youthful infatuation she recalled was a “silly schoolgirl romance” with one of her Quaker teachers, “Miss Annie Shoemaker, whom I adored.” Ida had regularly sent her roses every St. Valentine’s Day “far into young womanhood,” despite the teacher having always “pooh-poohed” her affections. Craddock even dated “the birth of my idealizing of sex” to a botany lesson that Shoemaker gave on plant fertilization. She remembered “Miss Annie” picking up the lesson book and remarking with a quiet dignity: “Girls, whenever I take up this subject, I feel as though I were entering a holy temple.” From the sex life of plants Craddock made the initial leap to “the holiness of sex in human beings,” and the spring for that was her intense affection for Annie: “I was head over ears in love with my teacher,” Ida confessed.20

  Until well into her twenties Craddock appeared far more comfortable with the intimacies of same-sex relationships—passionate bonds that were nourished and blessed in Victorian culture, particularly among women—than she did with potential male suitors. Her mother had offered her only stern advice in matters of courtship: namely, “that I must never, never allow a man to kiss me or put his arm about me, or even hold my hand—until the right man of all should come.” Between her love for Shoemaker and her mother’s exacting instructions, Ida claimed that until she was twenty-seven “all men were to me like shadows.” Even then, she only took an interest in “a cut-and-dried old bachelor” whose very absence of ardor made him seem safe for flirtation. “I often asked myself if it were really love that I felt in attraction to this man,” Craddock remarked, noting that she seemed mostly drawn to their contentious debates on “every question of the day” rather than to his straitlaced physical bearing. The two had kissed “on one or two rare occasions,” Craddock admitted, but the gentlemanly bachelor was “too prim and careful to do much of it.” Having grown up without a father or a brother and with all the cautions that hemmed in female respectability, Ida had been habituated to see men as shadowy (if not spectral) figures, and certainly her first courtship at age twenty-seven with this “dried mackerel,” as one of his own friends described him, did not dramatically change that perception.

  However incorporeal her relationship with this dyed-in-the-wool bachelor had been, Craddock nonetheless gained from it a new ease around men, even a fondness for them—what she described as a greater capacity to “esteem and honor manliness.” Thereafter her love of Annie receded from view, and a number of men began to emerge as vital presences in her life. “I had learned, from my bachelor friend, enough of the pleasure of social relations with a person of the opposite sex to be aware that this is what I now needed,” she reported. New male companions came into her life through church circles, book groups, and liberal clubs. During her stay in San Francisco in the late 1880s she took a particular interest in a young man named Euclid Frick. Casting her affection as a sisterly desire to shelter Frick from the city’s corrupting influences, she emphasized that “there was never the slightest interchange of caresses between us.” The warm feelings she expressed toward Frick were hardly those of a serious romance or even a simmering infatuation; they had instead the tone of a protective, older sibling—a woman nearing thirty looking out for a youth a decade her junior. The young man soon went off to medical school, became an army surgeon, and married someone else. Craddock for her part showed no regret over Frick’s marriage to another, and he would not play an explicit role in her subsequent sexual fantasies.21

  After her California sojourn in the late 1880s Craddock developed a strong working relationship with Richard B. Westbrook in leading the American Secular Union. That professional tie created a substantial partnership over the next couple of years, but there was no indication of any strong emotional connection between the two of them. Indeed, their collaboration quickly frayed once Craddock took up spiritualism and sexology; by 1894, Westbrook claimed to be opposing “tooth and nail her silly delusions” and was actively trying to prevent her from public discussion of “all sex questions.” Needless to say, Craddock cooled on the relationship with Westbrook and instead kept up her close connections to his wife, Henrietta, who steadfastly refused to follow her husband in classing Ida among the deluded. “I have never considered you insane,” she wrote her friend, “I have never considered any one insane simply because they knew more about something than I do.”22

  Other relationships with men offered more enduring sustenance than did Westbrook’s curtailed sponsorship of Craddock’s work. The old radical Moses Harman was a consistent sympathizer as was the physician Edward Bond Foote. The relationships with living men that Craddock most prized were intellectual companionships—at least, those were the only partnerships she cared to lift up:Some few men of my acquaintance there are (Heaven bless them!) who are like brothers to me. Chivalrous and protective toward me, they gladly let me either stand alone when I want to, or offer a helping hand when I am struggling to higher levels of wisdom. I
nstead of repressing my search for knowledge, they cheerfully offer to show the way to still wider fields than I had dreamed of. . . . I rest secure in the blissful consciousness that, however startling my questions and inferences, they will never sneer at them, never extract a double meaning from them, never rebuke my thirst for knowledge, never attempt a flirtation on the strength of the confidence I repose in them. . . . And again I say, heaven bless those men. If they did but know half the comfort they are to me in the temptations and trials of life.

  After her limited experiment with physical intimacy with the old bachelor, Craddock never came close to finding “the husband whom soul and body cried out for”—at least, not in the mundane social world. Instead, she developed mutually respectful and rather cerebral companionships with a handful of men. If she was ever drawn to physical intimacies with any of them, she never let on.23

  The most important man in Craddock’s life was the editor and fellow spiritualist William T. Stead. He offered financial backing, intellectual enthusiasm, and religious rapport; indeed, he was the one confidante with whom she shared her spiritual diary about her intimacies with a heavenly bridegroom. He remained Craddock’s stalwart defender to the very end, even writing a long letter to the U.S. Attorney General Philander Knox in an attempt to procure his office’s intervention in her final showdown with Comstock. Years after her death, Stead was still maintaining his undying “loyalty to my dear friend,” but that does not seem to have been a lover’s fidelity. After her year-plus stay in London ended in mid-1895, the relationship between the two of them was carried on almost entirely through letters. Their strongest bond seems to have been their mutual sense of otherworldly communication—Craddock with Soph and Stead with his durable spirit contact Julia. Again if the two shared any other intimacies, even a furtive touch or flirtatious glance, neither was saying anything.

  Stead’s long-term faithfulness to Craddock was evident in the way he tried to protect her legacy from Theodore Schroeder’s prying inquiries. When Schroeder started to collect materials on Craddock in 1906, Stead kept a wary distance and refused to hand over her manuscripts to him. He rightfully suspected that Schroeder intended to use “Miss C’s experiences for the purpose of maintaining a theory which of all others would have been most abhorrent to her.” Schroeder countered that his interest in her “spiritual sexuality” was strictly above board and that he very much shared Craddock’s anti-censorship sentiments. Stead did not bite, and, when Schroeder supplied him with a copy of one of his early articles on “The Erotogenesis of Religion,” Stead replied tartly that he had read the piece “with the greatest interest, but with profound disagreement with your conclusions.” If Stead had not died prematurely—as a passenger onboard the Titanic in 1912—Schroeder might never have gotten his hands on the bulk of Craddock’s papers. But, after Stead’s death, the documents had ended up in the possession of his daughter Estelle, who shared her father’s spiritualism, but not his protectiveness of Craddock. Shortly after the close of World War I, Estelle finally let Schroeder have what he had been seeking for more than a decade—her father’s cache of Ida’s manuscripts.24

  Once Schroeder got hold of Craddock’s manuscripts—especially her “Diary of Psychical Experiences”—he set about rereading her sex life in psychoanalytic terms. Although Ida had always insisted that what she knew about sex she had learned through a combination of religious experience and medical study and not from sexual liaisons, Schroeder was unconvinced. However devoted he was to archiving Craddock’s papers, he never felt particularly bound by the textual evidence they presented, and that liberty was particularly true of the stormy sex life he imagined for her. The pious biology lessons of Annie Shoemaker, Schroeder argued, had initially sparked her “erotomania,” unleashing “the homosexual drive in all its intensity” and with “disastrous consequences” for her mental hygiene. Her mother’s “intense puritanism,” in turn, had prevented Ida from experiencing “a normal heterosexual interest” as a young woman and had also produced an “exaggerated guilt over masturbation,” developmental problems that tilled the ground for her eventual insanity and suicide. Shoemaker had hallowed sex; her mother had tabooed it; and that ambivalence—the swinging between shame and awe—had left Craddock a neurotic wreck. “If only she had been taught to think of sex in a matter of fact, common sense, relatively objective fashion, with the holiness and sacredness thrown to the dogs,” Schroeder concluded of Craddock’s upbringing, “she might have become a very useful woman.” Secularized sex, in other words, would have spared her the destabilizing emotional conflicts that arose from a religious culture that both mystified and demonized human sexuality.25

  On her relationship with the desiccated bachelor, Schroeder took Craddock at her word: namely, that the liaison had belatedly awakened her heterosexual desires, but had failed to provide an adequate outlet for physical expression of those feelings. Craddock’s self-confession about the frustrations of that relationship was perhaps the last moment of transparency Schroeder granted her. “An unbearable conflict between sexual desire and its fearful suppression,” he suggested, was now turning her into a full-blown psychoneurotic. He speculated that at this point Craddock left Philadelphia for California, not out of a desire to escape her mother as she alleged, but in search of a resolution to her sexual tensions—as Schroeder put it, she was on a “quest for sexual experience.” (The immediate impetus that Ida had specified for leaving home was a last-straw thumping she had received from Lizzie who had “in outbursts of passion, whipped me, many a time, for real or fancied offences.”) Schroeder ran with the thin evidence of Ida’s sisterly affection for Euclid Frick, the young man who had briefly boarded in the same house with her in San Francisco, and suggested that her newfound joy over her Golden State independence was actually a “honeymoon ecstasy.”26

  Schroeder based his conjecture of a San Francisco honeymoon mostly on a tiny Freudian slip he detected in one of Craddock’s letters. In corresponding with her school friend Katie Wood, Ida had reported that she appreciated having a male boarder for the added sense of security it gave her after a burglar had broken into the house. Schroeder noticed that Craddock had changed the wording to specify that she did not like sleeping “in the house” alone by scratching out her original wording in which she said she did not like to sleep “there” alone. Schroeder took that correction to be a slip of the mask—an inadvertent admission that Craddock was actually sleeping “there” in the same bedroom with Euclid, her youthful boarder. For a woman who prided herself on frank talk about sex, it seems implausible that the evidence for her ecstatic sexual awakening in California would come down to that kind of grammatical clarification. Self-deception may have been intrinsic to her fantasized love life, but concealment was not. She was always more in danger of revealing too much, not too little.27

  Schroeder’s revelation of a Freudian slip in Craddock’s letter turned out to have been his slip, not hers. He overlooked an obvious reference in the same letter to Euclid and Ida actually sleeping in separate rooms: Euclid comes trotting down the hall to her room when he hears her scream out in fright. Overeager in his psychoanalysis, Schroeder also omitted key details in presenting the burglary as something that happened in the neighborhood rather than in Craddock’s own abode. The break-in had actually left the household feeling so vulnerable that Ida subsequently armed herself with a hatchet, Euclid with a revolver, and the housekeeper with a bat. The security Craddock was craving in this letter was not a lover’s snuggle.

  The honeymoon with Euclid Frick was just the beginning; thereafter, Schroeder’s imagining of Craddock’s sexual experience only got more vivid. In analyzing her role as corresponding secretary of the American Secular Union, Schroeder speculated that she had actually become the lover of the group’s president, Richard Westbrook, whom he presented as a mystical ex-clergyman with a penchant for Tantric-inspired sex. As Schroeder commented, “This man was her constant support when later she got into much trouble with the police and
the post office censorship. It seems highly probable, therefore, that he was also her instructor in a new sexual technique, over which she became so morbidly obsessed.” There were many problems with this theory, not least that it was riddled with mistaken notions: Westbrook, a secular-minded skeptic, showed no interest in “unorthodox mysticism, especially that of the Far East ”; he was an inconstant backer in Craddock’s struggles with the censors, especially in comparison to his wife, who was one of her most consistent friends and who never showed the least worry about an affair of this sort; and he mostly kept his distance from the sex-radical wing among liberals and freethinkers. That Craddock and Westbrook were mystical companions and secret Free-Lovers, an amorous pair of co-conspirators sitting atop the secularist movement, was at best a long-shot proposition.28

  The improbability of this relationship did not stop Schroeder from turning it into an imagined actuality: Westbrook was Craddock’s love guru. He had introduced her to occult sexual techniques, which intensely pleasured her, and then he had deserted her, leaving her bereft: “What is then more natural than that in these circumstances she should be driven to seek for relief, and the solution of her sex problem through some idealized fantasmal substitute, to replace the physical love of the mystical ex-clergyman?” Schroeder asked, already knowing the answer. “It seems probable that [Westbrook] had already prepared the way out, by teaching her the sexual technique and theology of the Tantras.” The psychoanalyst’s imagination of the “probable” was now running to its own phantasmal conjectures: Schroeder had no evidence for anything but a professional relationship between the two; he also had no evidence that Craddock had shown any awareness of Tantric materials at this point in her career, let alone that Westbrook had such curiosities and special talents. Westbrook was not the Omnipotent Oom.