Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  6 IC to New York Sun, Feb. 21, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  7 IC to Pentecost, Feb. 9, 1902; IC to New York Sun, Feb. 21, 1902.

  8 For a good account of the Columbian Exposition in light of other international fairs, see Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 38-71.

  9 Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson, 3 vols. (Harlow, Essex: Longmans, 1987), 3: 242.

  10 For documentation on these attractions, see J. W. Buel, The Magic City: A Massive Portfolio of Original Photographic Views of the Great World’s Fair and its Treasures of Art, Including a Vivid Representation of the Famous Midway Plaisance (St. Louis: Historical Publishing Co., 1894), and Halsey C. Ives, The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (St. Louis: Thompson, 1893).

  11 IC, The Danse du Ventre (Dance of the Abdomen) as Performed in the Cairo Street Theatre, Midway Plaisance, Chicago: Its Value as an Educator in Marital Duties, 2nd rev. ed. (Philadelphia: n.p., 1897), 8-9; Kate Jordan, “The Danse du Ventre,” Atchison Daily Globe (Atchison, KS), Jan. 1, 1894, 4.

  12 “The Theatre in Cairo,” Current Literature 13 (1893): 489; “Ahead of the Danse du Ventre: A Protest to be Made to Congress against the Indian Dances,” North American (Philadelphia), Aug. 3, 1894, 8; “Gone Dance Crazy,” Chicago Tribune , Aug. 6, 1893, 28. For broader consideration of the fair’s Orientalist fantasies, see Zeynep Çelik, “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” in Holly Edwards, ed., Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 76- 97. On federal policies against Indian dancing in this period, see Clyde Ellis, “‘There is No Doubt . . . the Dances Should Be Curtailed’: Indian Dances and Federal Policy on the Southern Plains, 1880-1930,” Pacific Historical Review 70 (2001): 543-569.

  13 “Lady Managers Shocked,” New York Herald, Aug. 5, 1893, 10; IC, “The Oriental Danse du Ventre of the Midway Plaisance,” 1-2, Incoming Correspondence, Aug. 13, 1893, Bertha H. Palmer/Board of Lady Managers Papers, Chicago History Museum; F. W. Putnam, introduction in Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance (St. Louis: Thompson, 1894), n.p.; “The ‘Danse du Ventre,’” St. Paul Daily News (St. Paul, MN), Aug. 18, 1893, 4. On the mix of Putnam’s own anthropological motives, see Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 55-65.

  14 “The ‘Danse du Ventre,’” St. Paul Daily News (St. Paul, MN), Aug. 18, 1893, 4; The Twentieth Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York: n.p., 1894), 16; “Cairo Dances to Go,” New York World, Aug. 5, 1893, 1.

  15 Sol Bloom, The Autobiography of Sol Bloom (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1948), 135.

  16 “Cairo Dances to Go,” 1. For Comstock’s later orchestration of the arrest and prosecution of three of the Cairo Street dancers, see “Records of the New York Society,” 2: 248.

  17 “Comstock Shocked,” New York Recorder, Aug. 7, 1893, 1, 11. Also see the account of Comstock’s simulation in Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 225-228.

  18 “Opinions on the Danse du Ventre,” New York World, Aug. 13, 1893, 17; IC, “Oriental Danse,” 8-9. Craddock sent her plea to Bertha H. Palmer, head of the Exposition’s Board of Lady Managers, which had shown interest in reforming the Midway entertainments. See IC, “Oriental Danse,” and Ishbel Ross, Silhouette in Diamonds: The Life of Mrs. Potter Palmer (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 95-96.

  19 “Opinions on the Danse du Ventre,” 17; IC, Danse, 4, 17, 35.

  20 “Opinions on the Danse du Ventre,” 17.

  21 For an account of the Midway performances from the perspective of modern dance history, see Donna Carlton, Looking for Little Egypt (Bloomington: IDD, 1994). For the subsequent crosscurrents between religion and choreographic innovation, see Janet Lynn Roseman, Dance Was Her Religion: The Spiritual Choreography of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Martha Graham (Prescott, AZ: Hohm, 2004).

  22 Ives, Dream City, n.p.

  23 “Sex-Modesty—The True and the False” and “The Danse du Ventre,” in LLB, Dec. 22, 1893, 2; “Ida C. Craddock,” Freethinkers’ Magazine 7 (1890): 53.

  24 IC, Danse, 4-5, 10, 19-20.

  25 “Danse du Ventre in Brooklyn, N.Y.,” National Police Gazette, March 31, 1894, cover, 7; IC, Danse, 13-14, 16; IC, “Oriental Danse,” 1, 8.

  26 “Danse du Ventre,” Yenowine’s Illustrated News, (Milwaukee, WI), Sept. 29, 1894, 2. The Museum of Modern Art has recently produced a four-disc DVD set entitled Edison: The Invention of the Movies in which two examples of the Danse du Ventre from 1895 and 1896 are reproduced. Blackhawk Films has compiled a VHS edition of “Edison primitives” that includes censored and uncensored versions.

  27 DPE, 38.

  28 Ibid., 55, 137, 171-172, 181, 185-186; Havelock Ellis, “Auto-Erotism: A Psychological Study,” Alienist and Neurologist 19 (1898): 260-299. For Ellis’s invention and its implications, see Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone, 2003), esp. 67-68.

  29 DPE, 38.

  30 IC, Danse, 33-34.

  31 IC, The Danse du Ventre (Dance of the Abdomen) as Performed in the Cairo Street Theatre, Midway Plaisance, Chicago: Its Value as an Educator in Marital Duties (Philadelphia: n.p., 1893), 5-6; IC, Danse (1897), 19. Given the fact that the majority of Craddock’s published writings were outlawed, very few copies of her contraband pamphlets survive. Two copies of the 1893 edition of her Danse du Ventre are available in ICP, box 5, f. 8; a copy of the 1897 edition is in RGP, box 2, f. 2.

  32 Kate Field, “Danse du Ventre as Gymnastics,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 8, 1893, 9; “Opinions on the Danse du Ventre,” 17.

  33 IC, Danse (1893), 11; George E. Macdonald, Editorial, Dec. 1893, newspaper clippings, box 20, f. 16, RGP. For Craddock’s account of her subsequent work on the tract and her explanation of why she added that “little paragraph” on her spirit husband, see IC to EBF, Nov. 22, 1893 and IC to E. O. Walker, Dec. 13, 1893, ICP, box 1, f. 1.

  34 IC, Danse (1893), 11.

  35 TS, ed., “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” Alienist and Neurologist 36 (1915): 436-437.

  36 Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young, ed. Robert Bremner (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 240, 243.

  37 IC to Pentecost, Feb. 9, 1902.

  38 IC to EBF, June 6, 1898, box 2, f. 2, RGP; IC to Pentecost, Feb. 9, 1902.

  Chapter 2: Not an Infidel, But a Freethinker and a Scholar

  1 IC, The Danse du Ventre (Dance of the Abdomen) as Performed in the Cairo Street Theatre, Midway Plaisance, Chicago: Its Value as an Educator in Marital Duties (Philadelphia: n.p., 1893), 3-4; IC to EBF, Nov. 22, 1893, Dec. 20, 1893, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  2 Samuel P. Putnam, My Religious Experience (New York: Truth Seeker, 1891), 87-88.

  3 Ibid., 87; IC to EBF, Nov. 22, 1893 and Dec. 20, 1893.

  4 “A Very Shocking Time,” New York World, Feb. 10, 1894, 2.

  5 Ibid.; EBF and T. B. Wakeman, The Manhattan Liberal Club: Its Methods, Objects, and Philosophy (New York: n.p., [1894]), 5, 14-15; Richard B. Westbrook to EBF, Feb. 14, 1894, box 1, f. 1, ICP; “Observations,” Truth Seeker, Feb. 17, 1894, 104. Macdonald based his editorialized estimate of Craddock’s performance on an acquaintance’s account; he regretted that he himself had missed “this chance to be corrupted.”

  6 IC to EBF, Nov. 22, 1893; “Lectures and Meetings,” Truth Seeker, Feb. 17, 1894, 105; “Lectures and Meetings,” Truth Seeker, Feb. 3, 1894, 69; “Lectures and Meetings,” Truth Seeker, Feb. 10, 1894, 89. Little at all survives of Craddock’s own impressions of her New York lectures. She notes them in passing in DPE, 43, and in “Record of Cases in Oral Instruction,” box 4, f. 8, ICP.

  7 Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Past and Future of the Ladies’ Liberal League,” Rebel, Oct. 20, 1895, 18; Nov. 20, 1895, 31.

  8 De Cleyre, “Ladies’ Liberal League
,” Nov. 20, 1895, 32; Jan. [20], 1896, 43; IC to James B. Elliott, July 14, 1894, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  9 DPE, 40. All of Craddock’s book manuscripts are considered in detail in this chapter or the ones that follow, except for IC, “Human Traits in Animals,” box, 4, f. 7, ICP. This 137-page typescript, “a plea for love and good fellowship toward animals,” included reflections on everything from animal rights to the metaphysical questions of whether animals have souls and whether they can perceive ghosts (p. v). Its preface is dated July 1, 1899.

  10 The sparse details about the father and the family’s business were gleaned from city directories at the Philadelphia City Archives as well as local newspapers. For sample advertisements, see North American (Philadelphia), Dec. 22, 1857, 3; Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 23, 1864, 8. Theodore Schroeder records the story that the father had the freethinking expectation that his daughter would receive no Christian training, a secular pedagogy that her mother then disregarded, but it is a shadowy claim. See TS, “Puritanism through Erotomania to Nymphomania,” box 5, f. 30; TS, “Miscellaneous Notes,” box 6, f. 7, ICP.

  11 IC, “The Marriage Relation,” 121-122, box 3, f. 3, ICP.

  12 IC to WTS, July 11, 1895, box 1, f. 1, ICP. Lizzie Craddock subsequently remarried and took on the new surname, Decker; her surviving correspondence is all from the period after she became Lizzie Decker. Ida was grown by the time her mother remarried Thomas B. Decker (about 1880), and she makes no mention whatsoever of her stepfather (who predeceased her and her mother in 1896). In other words, the only familial relationship of obvious consequence to Craddock was the one with her mother.

  13 SML, 1; “Ida C. Craddock,” Freethinkers’ Magazine 8 (1890): 52-53; “Ida C. Craddock’s Mother Speaks,” LLB, Nov. 20, 1902, 354; “Mrs. Lizzie Decker Suddenly Stricken: General Temperance Advocate Passed Away after Attending National Convention of W.C.T.U.,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 8, 1904, 4; “Bequests to Charity,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec.15, 1904, 14; DPE, 50.

  14 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 151; IC to Katie Wood, n.d. June 1879; July 11, 1877; June 5, 1879; box 1 f. 1, ICP. The first two letters that survive are from the summer of 1877; there are four from 1879; and three from the late 1880s. Hence the bulk of documentation for Craddock’s life is from the period after she became controversial as a freethinker and then as a spiritualist marriage reformer.

  15 “Ida C. Craddock,” 52; Catherine Wood, “Miss Ida C. Craddock,” March 30, 1903, box 1, f. 2, ICP. In the 1890 profile of Craddock that appeared in the Freethinkers’ Magazine, it was reported that she had attended Friends’ Central School and graduated second in her class. The last detail about her class rank cannot be confirmed from surviving records, but her attendance at Friends’ Central can be traced. Records show Craddock’s enrollment from the February term of 1873 through the February term of 1876. Katie Wood’s memory served on this point at least: Craddock was a rarity in paying extra tuition to study all three offered languages (French, German, and Latin). See Girls’ Department, Roll of Pupils, 1845- 1874, and Girls’ Department, Register, 1874-1889, Friends’ Central School Archives, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. For Craddock’s estimate of how her Quaker education shaped her, see IC, “Ashamed of Being Called ‘Infidel,’” BI, April 22, 1891, 3.

  16 IC, “Goethe’s Faust Translated by Bayard Taylor,” Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), March 30, 1878, 8.

  17 Catalogue of the Trustees, Officers, and Students of the University of Pennsylvania, 1879-80 (Philadelphia: Collins, 1879), 18-19.

  18 “Ida C. Craddock,” 53. For a very helpful overview of the larger history, see Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), esp. 43-61.

  19 “Minutes of the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, 1882-1892,” 2, 10-13, 26, University Archives, University of Pennsylvania. For the outlines of Craddock’s case within the larger institutional history of Penn, see Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 305-306.

  20 “Minutes,” 12-13, 136; “Miss Anthony,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 20, 1883, 3. Craddock’s case received some brief mention in the newspapers. See Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 12, 1882, 3; Dallas Weekly Herald, Nov. 16, 1882, 5.

  21 IC to Wood, Dec. 8, 1887, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  22 Ibid.; SML, 2.

  23 SML, 2; IC, Primary Phonography: An Introduction to Isaac Pitman’s System of Phonetic Shorthand (Philadelphia: n.p., 1882), iv.

  24 Henry Atlee Ingram, Illustrated Girard College (Philadelphia: n.p., n.d.), 10, 22; “Girard’s Will and Girard College Theology,” Freethought: A Liberal Journal, Jan. 5, 1889, 4; “The Girard College Theft,” Freethought: A Liberal Journal, Jan. 19, 1889, 35-36; Richard B. Westbrook, Girard’s Will and Girard College Theology (Philadelphia: n.p., 1888), 13-20. Voltairine de Cleyre took up the Girard cause in her essay “Secular Education” (1887). See Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell, ed., Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre—Anarchist, Feminist, Genius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 186.

  25 Westbrook, Girard’s Will, 53. On the Westbrooks, see “Richard B. Westbrook,” Freethinkers’ Magazine 7 (1889): 184-188; In Memoriam Richard Brodhead Westbrook (Philadelphia: Wagner Free Institute of Science, 1899); Henrietta Payne Westbrook, The West-Brook Drives (New York: Eckler, 1902). On Craddock’s connection to the Wagner Free Institute, see “Ida C. Craddock,” 53, and “Minutes of the Board of Trustees,” 89-030, 1:34-75, Archives of the Wagner Free Institute of Science, Philadelphia.

  26 SML, 3-4; IC to Katie Wood, Oct. 1, 1889, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  27 IC to Wood, Oct. 1, 1889. On her interest in involvement with Bellamy’s followers, see also IC, “The Advantages of a Badge” and “Nationalism and Christian Socialism,” Nationalist 3 (1891): 407.

  28 IC to Wood, Oct. 1, 1889. On her election, see “The National Secular Congress,” Freethought: A Liberal Journal, Nov. 9, 1889, 707-708.

  29 Equal Rights in Religion: Report of the Centennial Congress of Liberals, and Organization of the National Liberal League, at Philadelphia on the Fourth of July, 1876 (Boston: National Liberal League, 1876), 7-8; George Macdonald, “History of the American Secular Union,” undated clipping, ZAE, p.v. 391, New York Public Library.

  30 Macdonald, “History”; Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young, ed. Robert Bremner (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 158- 167, 185-207; The Third Annual Congress of the National Liberal League (New York: D. M. Bennett, 1879), 89-97.

  31 IC, “How to Make Freethinkers of the Young,” Freethinkers’ Magazine 9 (1891): 392; IC, “Ashamed of Being Called ‘Infidel.’” 3.

  32 Otto Wettstein, “‘The Torch of Reason,’ vs. the Pansy,” BI, March 25, 1891, 3; “Miss Craddock Answers Mr. Wettstein,” BI, April 1, 1891, 3; SML, 4; Abraham Schell, “R. B. Westbrook and the American Secular Union,” BI, Feb. 11, 1891, 3. Craddock’s pansy has been recently revisited as a symbol of freethought, again within a gender-inflected context. See Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women without Superstition (Madison, WI: Freedom from Religion Foundation, 1997), xii.

  33 “A Book of Ethics for Use in the Public and Private Schools,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 12, 1891, 5; Richard B. Westbrook and IC, “The Prize Awarded,” BI, March 11, 1891, 3.

  34 IC, “Church Taxation,” BI, April 30, 1890, 3; IC, “Our ‘Church Taxation’ Pamphlet,” BI, June 11, 1890, 3; IC, The Army of the American Secular Union (Philadelphia: n.p., 1890), 5-6. The only surviving copy of this last-named pamphlet is at the New York Public Library, ZEY p.v. 8 #5, but it also appeared as a piece in the BI, Aug. 20, 1890, 3. Her other promotional pamphlet was simply entitled American Secular Union; she referred to it as “The Flag and Pansy Leaflet” in BI, March 18, 1891, 3. It offered a reiteration of the Nine Demands of Liberalism, a history of the organization, a call for new members, and a defense of her “pansy badg
e.” Copies survive at the Wisconsin Historical Society and in “Religion—Anti-Religion—American Secular Union,” Vertical Subject File, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.

  35 IC, “How to Make Freethinkers,” 386-395. The same essay was reprinted two months later in BI, Sept. 9, 1891. For a positive response that suggested the difficulties of carrying Craddock’s plan out, see “Liberal Sunday Schools,” BI, Feb. 4, 1891, 4. For wider efforts to raise young freethinkers, see Joanne E. Passet, “Freethought Children’s Literature and the Construction of Religious Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century America,” Book History 8 (2005): 107-129.

  36 “A Few Words from Miss Craddock,” Truth Seeker, Feb. 14, 1891, 100; “Is It Unsectarian?” American Sentinel, Nov. 20, 1890, 361-362; “Fourteenth Annual Congress,” BI, Sept. 10, 1890, 3; IC, “Call to Liberal Societies,” BI, Jan. 7, 1891, 3. This moderating role was most fully displayed in The Fifteenth Annual Congress of the American Secular Union, Held in Philadelphia October 31, 1891 (Philadelphia: Loag, [1891]), 12-20, 24-28, and Robert C. Adams, “The American Secularists,” Secular Thought, Nov. 21, 1891, 247-248.

  37 SML, 4; Fifteenth Annual Congress, 17-19, 24-25.

  38 SML, 4. For one of Wakeman’s call to arms, see T.B. Wakeman, The Comstock Postal Law Unconstitutional (New York: Truth Seeker, [1878]).

  39 Woman’s National Liberal Union Convention for Organization Held February 24-25, 1890 (Washington, D.C., n.p., [1890]), 3; IC, “The Coming Convention of Liberal Women,” Truth Seeker, Feb. 1, 1890, 69. The latter also appeared in Freethought: A Liberal Journal, Feb. 15, 1890, 102-103. Craddock’s endorsement contrasted sharply with Westbrook’s hostile response to Gage after she refused him welcome at the convention: “You are the President of another society,” she reportedly told him, “and I don’t mean to be the bob-tail of anybody’s kite.” See Richard B. Westbrook, “The Gage Gathering,” BI, March 19, 1890, 3. Craddock would have been a better emissary for the American Secular Union, but she apparently was unable to attend; she is nowhere mentioned in the minutes of the meeting itself. See Matilda Joslyn Gage, ed., Woman’s National Liberal Union: Report of the Convention for Organization (Syracuse: Masters and Stone, 1890).