One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  Mulford set the parameters of New Thought philosophy. In his work, physical healing was downplayed; and prosperity, business success, and power were pushed to the front.

  Mulford’s gifts for wrestling spiritual philosophies into glib practicalities may have irritated some, but his skills did not escape literary notice. Mulford was one of a handful of New Thought authors whom William James mentioned by name. James, in a March 29, 1888, letter to his wife, Alice—with whom the philosopher explored mind-cure methods—wrote: “I will send you a mind-cure theosophist book by one Mulford.… Pray read it if you can and tell me what is in it when we meet.” The report must have been reasonably positive, for Mulford remained on James’s mind more than a decade later when he was noted in the philosopher’s 1899 essay on mind-power therapeutics, “The Gospel of Relaxation.” James mentioned Mulford, Horatio Dresser, and Ralph Waldo Trine as New Thought figures that moved him to conclude that “it really looks as if a good start might be made in the direction of changing our American mental habit into something more indifferent and strong.” (By indifferent James meant serviceable and utilitarian.)

  At a time when Mulford was enjoying his largest readership, his life slipped away. He died not only relatively young, having just passed his fifty-seventh birthday, but also mysteriously. In late May 1891, Mulford set out from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, on his small sailboat, White Cross. He told friends that he planned to make a leisurely trek to his childhood home of Sag Harbor, Long Island. It was a seaborne version of his hermitage in the New Jersey woods. His boat was well stocked with food, an oil stove, pens, ink, writing paper, art supplies, blankets, and a banjo. Ever the inventive explorer, Mulford had fitted the boat with an awning that could enclose, tent-style, the vessel’s 16-foot frame, providing shelter from the weather and snug sleeping quarters. But when onlookers from the shore of Sheepshead Bay noticed that the covered boat had been unattended for a few days, they went to explore. On May 30 they found Mulford’s body aboard. He had been dead for three days. There was no sign of illness, injury, or foul play.

  “How or why Mulford should have died on an open boat within easy reach of assistance and where the sound of his voice could have been heard ashore is the only mysterious feature that remains of this remarkable case,” the New York Times reported on June 1, 1891.

  Suicide could not be ruled out. Mulford had once again been writing of his old depression, and struggling to apply his mind-power ideas to himself, in search of a way forward. On May 11, he wrote in his journal: “The depression you feel is the old self of six years ago.… You will soon throw it off and enjoy more than ever before. Exercise very gently and when your old condition comes out, complain in words, for you then materialize it—which helps to get rid of it much faster.”

  And on May 25, two days before his death: “Now you see your mind seizes immediately on trifles and makes mountains of them. I brought you under these conditions that I might more clearly show you this. It is the fear of these things, so bred in the mind, that does the injury; and your mind, in these periods of isolation, will be more readily cleared of these tendencies than in any other way.”

  In his struggle, Mulford seemed to think, finally, of the audience who took succor in his work and what he owed them: “You are now fighting for thousands, as well as for yourself and me.… Remember the chief end and object of the boat is to help you get into an element of thought. It is not going so far with the boat—it is going into that new element.… Your material part does not like to get out of the world—your spiritual part does. (The body and the soul did not fit each other.) Recognize the first feeling of gloom that comes as an evil thought. Push it off directly and it is not so apt to find lodgment.”

  Toward the end, the physical and spiritual worlds seemed to converge for Mulford. Friends had already expressed concerns over his renewed interest in Spiritualism, automatic writing, and reincarnation. Two old friends swore on the day of his death that they encountered Mulford’s apparition vainly trying to speak to them.

  Mulford’s interest in the spirit world wasn’t morbid so much as it was part of an inner struggle. In his personal tradition of self-sufficiency—from his whaling days through gold prospecting, from newspaper reporting to his sojourn in the woods—Mulford strove to use the agencies of his mind, coupled with the metaphysical possibilities he perceived in a spiritualized thought-world, to push back the darkness. It may not have been enough. He was buried in his hometown of Sag Harbor; his gravestone bore the sole epitaph “Thoughts Are Things.”

  Other writers quickly picked over Mulford’s legacy. In the years following his death, his essays were, if not pilfered, liberally borrowed from. In 1910, inspirational writer Christian D. Larson used Mulford’s iconic title, Your Forces, And How to Use Them for a book of his own. In 1928, a young Napoleon Hill called his first series of books The Law of Success, echoing Mulford. Mulford’s insistence that “the mind is a magnet” found new expression in 1928 in a series of pamphlets called The Life Magnet by motivational writer Robert Collier. Mulford’s ever-ready slogan “thoughts are things” became a mantra of inspirational literature, appearing in countless books and articles and eventually in Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking. And Mulford made one of the first, fateful uses of a phrase that took flight across the nation, and which will soon be looked at more closely: “Law of Attraction.”

  The Conquest of Poverty

  In considering the rise of Prentice Mulford, it is tempting to conclude that the mind-as-money-magnet approach took fire in an instant. Motivational thought and mental manifestation laid the basis for many popular books and articles at the turn of the twentieth century. Still, money was only occasionally emphasized.

  The leading inspirational works of the period were Ralph Waldo Trine’s In Tune with the Infinite from 1897, and Elbert Hubbard’s A Message to Garcia from 1899. A committed New-Thoughter and self-identified socialist, Trine believed that happiness could be attained through generosity, good wishes for others, and determined optimism. Hubbard, a horseback-riding man of nature and the founder of the American wing of the arts and crafts movement, maintained that life rewarded the man who threw himself into challenging tasks, either great or small, without a whimper or a “but.” Both men were advocates of New Thought, but neither made more than a passing reference to money.

  Even the tantalizingly titled self-help manifesto Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell, which the minister and Temple University founder delivered thousands of times as a lecture before it was published in 1890, defined worldly success as the product of character and inventiveness, but with scant reference to the mind as a wealth-building tool. Likewise, the success writer Orison Swett Marden, who rose to popularity in the 1890s, extolled the development of iron character but said relatively little about the power of prosperous thoughts. In his 1894 Pushing to the Front, Marden wrote, “He who would grasp the key to power must be greater than his calling, and resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades toward barbarism…character is success, and there is no other.”

  The first major work after Prentice Mulford to devise a mental approach to wealth came from a woman who was deeply rooted in the reformist instincts of the Progressive Era. She was a suffragist and labor activist named Helen Wilmans. And in 1899 she produced her manifesto, The Conquest of Poverty. The book was dedicated “to working men and women everywhere.” Wilmans, once a farmer’s wife, recounted her life story as a New Thought parable of personal liberation.

  As a struggling, unhappy housewife living on a farm in Northern California in the 1870s, Wilmans was not unlike Ibsen’s Nora, though with the grit of farm dirt under her fingernails. She broke from her domestic role—but with careful planning and forethought. Wilmans placed her two daughters in San Francisco schools. By 1877, after an on-and-off reconciliation, she finally left her hard-edged husband, and farm life, for good. Wilmans traveled to San Francisco with just enough money for a day’s lunch and the cheapest lodging. T
here she began walking to the offices of every newspaper in town and finally landed a job as a journalist at a small, four-page weekly. Wilmans soon became known for her coverage of the local labor scene and as a women’s rights advocate.

  New journalistic offers took her to Chicago. In the early 1880s, however, Wilmans grew critical of the labor movement that she had once devotedly covered. In a Chicago Express article called “Willing Slaves of the Nineteenth Century,” Wilmans complained that most working men lacked any sense of personal aim, self-betterment, or higher aspiration. Given the chance, they didn’t want to build a new world for themselves and others, so much as to trade places with their bosses, shake down their neighbors, and keep women one rung beneath them.

  The problem, she argued, stemmed less from social forces than from the mental habits of workers themselves:

  The moment one of you begins to think he ceases to belong to that class to whom this article is addressed. Are you willing to come up to the dignity of manhood by an effort to comprehend the true situation and to arouse within your brain the thought that will meet it?… The world calls on all men now for brain. It asks you for thought, that through thought it may develop the finer and as yet unexplored forces of nature.

  Whatever the abuses of the bosses, the real problem, she told the working man, is: “You will not think.”

  Wilmans had not yet developed a New Thought outlook. But she was certain that human liberation could be summoned only by fresh thought patterns and personal action. People needed to realize a “sense of power in themselves.”

  By June of 1886, Wilmans’s convictions drew her into a new circle: the Chicago mental-healing classes of Emma Curtis Hopkins. A few months after meeting Hopkins, Wilmans experienced a simultaneous social and spiritual awakening. It hit her with the force of a religious conversion.

  The change occurred one day after an argument with her boss at the Chicago Express. Wilmans told her employer that she wanted to start her own paper and hoped to get his support. He ridiculed the idea. Dejected and disappointed, Wilmans left her desk and wandered through the Chicago streets on a darkening November afternoon. After years of planning and hard work, she realized that she was entirely alone in the world—there was no one on whom she could lean. But this realization, instead of bringing her to despair, suddenly filled her with a sense of freedom and inner strength. “I walked those icy streets like a school boy just released from restraint. My years fell from me as completely as if death turned my spirit loose in Paradise.”

  She felt determination well up within her. She wanted no one else’s help. Wilmans charged back to her boarding house and began writing the maiden article that would eventually launch her own newspaper, The Woman’s World (this was the paper later bought by Frances Lord). Wilmans received help from unexpected places, including her dour landlord, who became so excited over her venture that he put up money and floated her rent.

  Wilmans insisted that her passage into peak productivity could be summoned by anyone—through the right mental state. “What!” she wrote in The Conquest of Poverty. “Can a person by holding certain thoughts create wealth? Yes, he can. A man by holding certain thoughts—if he knows the Law that relates effect and cause on the mental plane—can actually create wealth by the character of thoughts he entertains.” But, she added, such thought “must be supplemented by courageous action.”

  Wilmans developed a more achievement-oriented outlook than her teacher Emma Curtis Hopkins. Wilmans never mentioned Hopkins by name, and she actually believed that Hopkins’s version of “Christian Science” was amorphous and incomplete. Wilmans rejected the implication that “the individual is to get rid of his individuality and lose himself in nothingness.” Rather, “Individuality … became my great theme.”

  Wilmans believed in muscular self-directedness and personal action. She called her outlook “realistic idealism.”

  After the launch of her newspaper, Wilmans quickly expanded into book and magazine publishing, lectures and classes, and a distance-prayer mail-order service (in which she would “affirm” a result for a client). She got remarried and in the early 1890s moved to Florida near the town of Seabreeze in Daytona Beach. There she began building a real-estate empire and laying plans for a New Thought–oriented “University of Psychical Research.” The school was intended to teach the traditional arts and sciences while also tutoring students in the methods of applied thought and “Mental Science.” Wilmans intended this well-rounded program to give people the tools for self-liberation. Her aims were announced in the title of the magazine she launched in 1893: Freedom.

  By 1901, however, the postmaster general called Wilmans’s distance-prayer treatments a scam and began an aggressive campaign against her, including a ban on her receiving mail. The following year a federal judge cleared her of fraud charges. But in 1904 Wilmans was targeted in a new mail-fraud case, which was very likely instigated by Florida real-estate magnates who disliked the encroachment of a newcomer—and a woman, no less—into their territory. A circuit-court judge threw out the case on appeal in February 1905 and scolded the government for attempting to drag Wilmans’s metaphysical beliefs before the federal bench. “The court is a not a society for psychical research,” he said.

  Wilmans’s vindication arrived too late. The mail ban, as well as the time and money consumed by the court trials, had decimated her businesses and left her despondent. In 1906, she attempted to launch a new magazine, Men and Gods, but once more the postmaster general—completely disregarding the circuit court’s ruling of the prior year—barred her from using the mails. A further blow came in June 1907 with the death of her second husband and business partner, Charles Post, whom she had met in her early years of freedom in Chicago. The strains were too much.

  “I am so tired, tired beyond description,” she wrote to a friend on August 31, 1907, “… I am not sick, but I am tired of everything on earth. I would give anything just to lie down and go to sleep and never to awake again. I will stop. I am only hurting your gentle heart.” Wilmans died five days later at age seventy-six.

  Although Wilmans had reached hundreds of thousands of readers, her writings and plans for a university quickly faded after her death. Yet another social reformer and mind-power advocate arose in her wake. He was an Englishman who had once seemed destined to live out his life as a factory worker. Against all odds, however, he brought news of the powers of the mind to millions of everyday Americans. His work not only survived his death but became some of the most widely read inspirational literature of all time.

  Working-Class Hero

  With the exception of Mary Baker Eddy, few figures from the metaphysical culture were known by name to Americans. For all their influence, impresarios such as Emma Curtis Hopkins, Prentice Mulford, and Helen Wilmans were more often copied or co-opted by more popular writers than directly read themselves.

  One of the few mind-power pioneers who did attain broad recognition was an English author who, during his brief career, introduced creative-mind principles to vast reaches of people. A social reformer and animal-rights activist, his name was James Allen. His short, meditative book, As a Man Thinketh, is found today in dozens of editions—and in many households where there is otherwise no direct interest in New Thought, Christian Science, or any of the metaphysical movements that shaped his worldview.

  James Allen was born in 1864 in Leicester, an industrial town in central England. His father, William, was a successful knitting manufacturer who cultivated James’s taste in books and philosophy. A downturn in the textile trade drove William out of business, and in 1879 he traveled to New York City to look for new work. His plan was to get settled and pay for the rest of the family to join him. But the unthinkable occurred. On the brink of the Christmas season, just after James had turned fifteen, word came back to the Allen household that its patriarch was dead. William had been found robbed and murdered two days after reaching New York. His battered body, with pockets emptied, lay in a city hospital.


  James’s mother, Martha, a woman who could not read or write, found herself in charge of James and his two younger brothers, with no means of support. “Young Jim” would have to leave school and find work as a factory knitter. The teenager had been his father’s favorite. An avid reader, James had spent hours questioning him about life, death, religion, politics, and Shakespeare. “My boy,” William told him, “I’ll make a scholar of you.” Those hopes were gone.

  James took up employment locally as a framework knitter, a job that occupied his energies for the next nine years. He sometimes worked fifteen-hour days. But even amid the strains of factory life, he retained the refined, studious bearing that his father had cultivated. When his workmates went out drinking, or caught up on sleep, Allen studied and read two to three hours a day. Coworkers called him “the Saint” and “the Parson.”

  Allen read through his father’s collected works of Shakespeare, as well as books of ethics and religion. He grew determined to discover the “central purpose” of life. At age twenty-four he found the book that finally seemed to reveal it to him: The Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold. The epic poem introduced Allen, along with a generation of Victorians, to the ideas of Buddhism. Under its influence, Allen came to believe that the true aim of all religion was self-development and inner refinement.

  Shortly after discovering The Light of Asia, Allen experienced a turning point in his outer life, as well. Around 1889 he found new employment in London as a private secretary and stationer—markedly friendlier vocations to the bookish man than factory work. In London he met his wife and intellectual partner, Lily.