One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  Stanton saw a reformulated Scripture as the ignition point of feminine awakening. Yet her closest confidant and collaborator, Susan B. Anthony, was, by the 1880s, uninterested in spiritual matters, of either the occult or traditional variety. To Anthony religion belonged to a dead past. “Barbarism does not grow out of ancient Jewish Bibles,” she wrote Stanton, “but out of our own sordid meanness!!”

  If Stanton was going to complete her feminist retelling of Scripture, she required new helpers. “It was perhaps this search for soul mates,” wrote historian Kathi Kern, “that drew a hesitant Stanton toward the practice of Mind Cure and New Thought in the decade of the 1880s. Several new friendships beckoned her into the circles of these popular ‘new religions.’ ”

  In Stanton’s eyes, Frances Lord had shown impeccable metaphysical, literary, and reformist instincts. In 1886 Stanton and Harriot appealed to Lord to travel to America and help them begin their project. Accepting the invitation, Lord reached Stanton’s home in Tenafly, New Jersey, on August 4, 1886. Things started out well enough. “Miss Lord and I worked several weeks together,” Stanton recalled. The younger woman “ran through the Bible in a few days, marking each chapter that in any way referred to women. We found that the work would not be so great as we imagined, as all the facts in teachings in regard to women occupied less than one-tenth of the whole Scriptures.”

  But Lord’s interest soon wandered. She began hearing word of the mind-cure scene, and especially the classes being taught in Chicago by Emma Curtis Hopkins. Lord had complained of discomforts of the ear, eye, and leg, and she resolved to journey west to seek out mind-cure lessons. She experienced some early, encouraging improvements. Her experience in Chicago gave her the faith that mind-cure represented “a Great Social Reform” that would allow individuals—and women particularly—to assert control over their health.

  Throughout 1887 and 1888, Lord was in and out of Chicago, where she took classes from Hopkins, purchased a New Thought–oriented newspaper called The Woman’s World, and—in the mold of Hopkins’s earliest student-practitioners—began teaching mind-cure methods herself.

  Stanton had lost Lord’s assistance, but that didn’t deter her from enlisting other women in the New Thought world—including ex–Christian Scientist Ursula Gestefeld and suffragist Louisa Southworth, a speaker from the Hopkins graduation. Stanton wistfully wrote off Lord. “Miss Lord became deeply interested in psychical research,” she concluded, “and I could get no more work out of her.” This disappointment, however, did not mean the end of their friendship. By early 1887, Lord had persuaded Stanton and her daughter to enroll in a mind-cure class when they made a return trip to England. In the spirit of intellectual inquiry that marked Stanton’s career, she agreed to take the metaphysical course, she told a friend, because “we are not fanatical on the question but searchers after truth.”

  Within the American New Thought scene, meanwhile, Lord had discovered her natural element. In the space of several months she became an independent teacher, a newspaper publisher, and, in fall of 1888, the author of a substantial and rigorous manual, Christian Science Healing: Its Principles and Practice with Full Explanations for Home Students. It was here that Lord struck the opening note of the prosperity gospel.

  Lord’s massive book focused chiefly on physical healing and emotional well-being, mostly by means of affirmations, prayers, and denial of the “false” conditions of illness or bodily pain. But Lord’s most significant departure, toward the close of the book, was a “treatment” for overcoming poverty.

  Lord provided a six-day program of affirmations and exercises to break down the mental bonds of poverty. On the first day, readers were to disabuse themselves of the idea that they were “unlucky,” disadvantaged, or in any way lacking in the ability to become good earners, and declare:

  God is my life; there is no other.

  God is not poor; I cannot be poor.

  God is my intelligence; I can see aright; I can see what is really there.

  God is my wisdom; I can judge rightly; I know what I ought to do.

  God is my will; I have no desire but to do what is right.

  God is my love; my path is pleasant.

  A notable element of the Lord affirmations was her emphasis on ethics. By the time the six-day program is ended, Lord reminded the reader: “As Spiritual life intensifies, the desire for mere possession of wealth always lessens.” She assured that “Money will come to serve you when you are fit to rule it.” She warned against the desire to “ ‘keep up appearances’ ” and to “extend the Ego artificially by having a share in all that is going on around, whether it concerns us or not.”

  For Lord, the extension of mind-cure methods into prosperity was entirely natural. Her aim was not self-inflation but liberation. Just as mental therapeutics could free the body from the former abuses of the medical profession, so, she believed, could the prosperity mind-set contribute to the liberation of women or working people from the strains of the Industrial Age, a goal that steadily gravitated to the center of New Thought.

  Thoughts Are Things

  The writer who most decisively advocated the wealth-building power of the mind is a journalist almost no one remembers: Prentice Mulford. In a sense, Mulford’s work is the “missing link” in the positive-thinking movement’s transition into a contemporary philosophy of personal success. Mulford’s writing of the late 1880s reflects the crucial moment when the abstruse, nineteenth-century language of the movement fell away; in Mulford’s work there emerged a remarkably modern and appealing vernacular, which won a vastly expanded audience for mind-power metaphysics.

  In some ways, Mulford was the most important of all the early self-improvement writers. His personal life was itself an exercise in repeat transformations—and, toward its end, he struggled to live by the principles he pioneered.

  Mulford was born to a wealthy Long Island family in 1834. His father’s early death cut short his fortunes. At age fifteen, he was forced to leave school to support his mother and three sisters by running the family’s sole remaining property: a four-story hotel in Sag Harbor, Long Island. After about four years the hotel failed. Day labor was too dull and dead-end a prospect for Mulford. The ambitious and curious young man instead went to the sea, joining the last leg of Sag Harbor’s whaling industry.

  By the late 1850s, with whaling in decline, Mulford found himself stranded in San Francisco. With the Gold Rush booming, he took up life as a prospector, working in mining camps among other displaced men. It was a punishing daily routine spent bending over, digging and panning. Readers were hungry for news about prospecting, which was heavily romanticized at the time. Although Mulford hadn’t set his mind on becoming a writer, in late 1861 he began producing wry newspaper portraits of mining life, under the pen name “Dogberry.” Unlike other writers, who made the Gold Rush seem like a great adventure, Mulford depicted its losses, hit-and-miss luck, and physical hardship. Miners saw him as a voice of their own.

  By 1866, with his mining ventures stagnating and his freelance articles paying meagerly, Mulford finally got a break. He was offered an editing position at The Golden Era, a San Francisco literary journal whose contributors included Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. A friend recalled Mulford showing up in the city looking like “a weatherbeaten young man, as shy as a country boy, and with many traits that must have resembled Thoreau in his youth.” Mulford recalled arriving with “an old gun, a saddle, a pair of blankets, an enfeebled suit of clothes and a trunk with abundant room for many things not in it.”

  Mulford’s writing at The Golden Era contributed to a post–Gold Rush literary boom in San Francisco. Historian Franklin Walker considered Mulford one of a handful of writers whose muckraking, realistic portraiture helped birth that renaissance. Yet the former gold digger soon fell back on old business instincts (which, in actuality, were never very sharply honed). In 1872, Mulford raised five hundred dollars from local businessmen to send himself on a lecture tour of England to promote
business opportunities in California, still a little-known place. Some biographers have viewed the English tour as an example of Mulford’s guile, but it was a period as difficult as his gold-prospecting days. The writer-lecturer was forced to live on ten shillings a week, the equivalent of less than two dollars. The tour was more hardship than triumph.

  Returning to America the next year, Mulford become a newspaper reporter in New York City. But in time he “grew thoroughly tired and sick of chronicling in short meter day after day the eternal round of murders, scandals, burglaries, fires, accidents and other events which people deem it indispensable to know and swallow after breakfast.”

  Bored and depressed—familiar themes in his life—and coming off a marital split, Mulford quit newspaper work and in 1883 spent fifty dollars building a cabin in the swampy woods of northern New Jersey, seventeen miles from New York City. He entered the woods to live like Thoreau, but the forest idyll became another disappointment. Lonely rainy days were difficult for him to bear. At such times, he recalled, “I raked up certain old griefs out of the ashes of the past, borrowed some new troubles out of the future and put them all under the powerful microscope of a morbid imagination, which magnifies the awful about a thousand times, and diminishes the cheerful.”

  Mulford experimented with using his mind to control his moods. “But I couldn’t,” he found. “I failed.” Yet he clung to the belief that an assertive mind could bring light into the dark corners of life. “I do retain a faith in its curative properties for the blues, if long enough persisted in,” he wrote in his diaries.

  Mulford’s struggles with depression gave him an idea for a new type of work. In 1884 he left the cabin to resume his writing, but in a fresh way that would allow him to pursue the topics of his choosing, without facing newspaper deadlines or a police blotter. That year he conceived of creating his own line of advice-oriented pamphlets. Although his mental therapeutics had failed in the woods, Mulford believed that the mind, while perhaps too weak on its own, could summon spiritual laws to its aid.

  He had gotten his first inkling of this notion back in San Francisco, where he covered séances and the local Spiritualist scene for The Golden Era. Mulford first participated as a bemused skeptic and later as a believer, though always with a touch of sardonic remove, writing in The Golden Era in tones that could have been ascribed to H. L. Mencken if the famous skeptic had awakened one morning, to his dismay, to find himself a believer in talking to the dead:

  I am not particular that my readers should imagine that I am a sort of spiritual Barnum keeping a keen look-out for curiosities of this sort. Nearly all I have seen of this science has come into my path. I have been forced to see it. I have no inclination for [séance] circles. As a general rule I detest them. I rank them with wakes and revival prayer meetings. I am perfectly willing to grant that what we term wonderful things can be done through invisible agencies.… I am already being sought after as a sort of inspector general and ghost detective for haunted houses. I waive the honor. Catch your own ghosts and convince yourselves that it is a reality or a humbug. True, the subject is very interesting to me. But it has slums and I desire not to wade through them.

  Mulford’s forays into Spiritualism nonetheless convinced him of the existence of “invisible agencies” and higher laws. His hunch that these hidden forces could aid man in daily life seemed to crystallize when he visited Boston in 1884. There he came under the influence of the mind-cure culture, or as it was sometimes called, the “Boston Craze.” The city was developing a reputation, parallel to Chicago’s, as the northeastern capital of the mind-power scene. Mulford acknowledged this influence obliquely: “It was for some mysterious reason necessary to go to Boston to start any new idea or movement.”

  In May 1886, Mulford raised enough money to finance his first run of advice pamphlets, which he published under the name “The White Cross Library.” He produced them steadily, seventy-four in all, until his death in 1891. First sold by mail subscription, Mulford’s pamphlets were later repackaged into a six-volume book, Your Forces, And How to Use Them, issued by a New York publisher beginning in 1890. This body of work arguably became Mulford’s steadiest and most influential literary achievement—it was certainly his most commercially successful.

  Mulford was never wholly upfront about his sources, but he seems to have drawn upon the work of Warren Felt Evans and Swedenborg. He repeatedly used the phrase thoughts are things. It became one of the mottos of the mind-power movement and today is a keynote of business motivation. The expression was actually tucked into the folds of Warren Felt Evans’s 1876 book, Soul and Body. Evans had used the term in a Swedenborgian manner to describe the spiritual world in which our inner-selves dwell: “In that world thoughts are things, and ideas are the most real entities of the universe.” What transpires in the spirit world, Evans believed, is mirrored in our own. Mulford had a knack for detaching such ideas and phrases from their mystical moorings. In his hands “thoughts are things” became a formula for profitable thinking.

  Mulford’s writing in Your Forces, And How to Use Them could be seen as the most successful popularization of Swedenborg. Echoing the Swedish mystic, Mulford described the world of spirit and the world of thought as extensions of the same reality. While only once naming Swedenborg, Mulford argued that every individual routinely experiences the same out-of-body journeys as the seer:

  You travel when your body is in the state called sleep. The real “you” is not your body; it is an unseen organization, your spirit. It has senses like those of the body, but far superior. It can see forms and hear voices miles away from the body. Your spirit is not in your body. It never was wholly in it; it acts on it and uses it as an instrument. It is a power which can make itself felt miles from your body.

  In a tantalizing passage for mind-cure acolytes, Mulford explained his perspective on the mind’s divine power: “Thought is a substance as much as air or any other unseen element of which chemistry makes us aware. It is of many and varying degrees in strength. Strong thought or mind is the same as strong will.” And elsewhere: “In the chemistry of the future, thought will be recognized as substance as much as the acids, oxides, and all other chemicals of to-day.” This seemed to complete the promise that “thoughts are things.”

  To sympathetic readers, Mulford’s explanation of the powers of the mind sounded at once metaphysical and scientific. In particular, his approach combined New Thought philosophy with news of experiments that were emerging from the British Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in 1882 to test claims of after-death communication and nonlocalized mental phenomena, or ESP. In essence, Mulford’s ideas conjoined the emergent field of psychical research to a contemporary-sounding iteration of Swedenborgian philosophy. Whereas the published case studies of the British psychical researchers were clinical and demanding, and Swedenborg’s translations were dense, verbose, and difficult to follow, Mulford’s writing was delightfully simple, exuding pithiness, practicality, and adventurousness.

  Unlike Emma Curtis Hopkins and Frances Lord, for whom prosperity was one factor among many in the march of the happy warrior, Mulford addressed the wealth question head-on. One of the first chapters in Your Forces, And How to Use Them was an essay called “The Law of Success.” The title probably came from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lecture of the same name, which Emerson adapted into his 1870 essay “Success.” Emerson’s essay celebrated the powers of enthusiasm, but with a tough world-weariness that denied man the ability to seize his every wish. Mulford was nowhere as discriminating as Emerson, but neither was he without accomplishment by his own lights. Mulford’s 1886 “Law of Success” pretty thoroughly laid down the template for spiritual self-help. He wrote in terms that the genre has never really deviated from, or surpassed:

  Your prevailing mood, or frame of mind, has more to do than anything else with your success or failure in any undertaking.… The mind is a magnet. It has the power, first of attracting thought, and next of sending that though
t out again.… What kind of thought you most charge that magnet (your mind) with, or set it open to receive, it will attract most of that kind to you. If, then, you think, or keep most in mind, the mere thought of determination, hope, cheerfulness, strength, force, power, justice, gentleness, order, and precision, you will attract and receive more and more of such thought elements. These are among the elements of success.

  In his 1888 essay “The Necessity of Riches,” Mulford was blunter on material matters, sounding much like a twenty-first-century prosperity guru: “It is right and necessary that you should have the very best of all this world’s goods—of clothing, food, house, surroundings, amusements, and all of which you are appreciative; and you should aspire to these things.” He disputed the old-fashioned ethic of self-sacrifice: “Does ‘Early to bed and early to rise make men wealthy?’ Who get up the earliest, work the most hours, and go to bed earliest? Thousands on thousands of the poor …” Rather, Mulford saw a spiritual solution: “All material wealth is gained through following a certain spiritual law.” What is this law? Only the simple dictum of Christ: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” Once more, Mulford was bringing in his version of Swedenborg. The “kingdom of God,” he argued, is a “kingdom of spiritual law” in which men’s thoughts are actual creative forces. And “if you put those thoughts or forces in one direction, they will bring you health and the good of this world to use and enjoy.… Your every thought is a force, as real as a current of electricity is a force.”