One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  Garvey urged followers to take a “scientific” approach to religion—by which he meant a mental-science, or New Thought, approach. In a speech delivered in January 1928 in Kingston, Jamaica, Garvey told his listeners that whites “live by science. You do everything by emotion. That makes the vast difference between the two races.… Get a scientific knowledge of religion, of God, of what you are; and you will create a better world for yourselves. Negroes, the world is to your making.”

  Garvey seldom revealed his influences. But he made a rare exception for two New Thought writers: Elbert Hubbard, whose work he recommended to followers, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the inspirational poet who had studied with Emma Curtis Hopkins. Garvey read Wilcox’s poetry aloud at rallies, including these lines:

  Live for something,—Have a purpose

  And that purpose keep in view

  Drifting like an helmless vessel

  Thou cans’t ne’er to self be true.

  Though not widely remembered today, Wilcox is still spoken of in activist circles. The Reverend Al Sharpton told this story in 2011:

  When I was doing 90 days in jail in 2001, former [Atlanta] Mayor Maynard Jackson visited me, and he told me he read Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “Will” every day—that’s how he became the first black mayor of Atlanta. It’s very inspiring. It talks about how, no matter what, if you have strong will you can make it.

  Divine Politics

  Like Garvey, the messianic African-American religious leader Father Divine harnessed the positive-thinking gospel. The influential pre–civil rights era leader wove New Thought themes into speeches, hymns, and aphorisms to imbue his followers with a sense of their innate potentials. New Thought was an unseen source behind Father Divine’s appeal.

  Father Divine forged close ties to the New Thought world in the 1920s and 1930s. He especially liked the work of writer Robert Collier, a nephew of the publishing magnate P. F. Collier. Robert Collier had used mind-cure methods in the early 1920s when nothing else could be done to restore his health following a devastating bout of food poisoning. After recovering, Collier became an energetic advocate of New Thought, writing a highly influential 1926 book, The Secret of the Ages. Like the work of Wallace D. Wattles, it, too, became an inspiration behind the movie and book The Secret.

  In The Secret of the Ages, Collier used engaging and deftly drawn anecdotes to argue that the powers of the mind were well known to the ancients but lost on modern people. Collier saw mind-power as the force that moved man out of the caves to build the ancient empires of Egypt, Greece, and Persia. To Collier, the power of mind formed the inner meaning behind every ancient parable, from genies in lamps to Christ walking on water. Father Divine liked what he read and gave away large numbers of Collier’s books.

  Beginning in the 1920s, Father Divine invited mind-power impresarios—including Collier’s son, Gordon—to the elaborate banquets he hosted for followers at his Long Island home and ministry. Father Divine routinely treated acolytes to sumptuous, multicourse meals in a celebratory, revival-meeting atmosphere. His aim was to instill in them a consciousness of abundance. “This table,” he told banquet-goers, “is but the outer expression … of the condition of the consciousness within. There is no limitation, there is no lack, there is no want.”

  He directed followers to repeat “it is wonderful” and “peace” as mantras of positivity. In addition to the books of Collier, Father Divine gave banquet-goers works by mind-power authors Charles Fillmore and Baird T. Spalding. Spalding was an eccentric gold prospector who, beginning in the mid-1920s, wrote a series of fanciful, and often enchanting, mystical travelogues depicting himself as a student of hidden spiritual masters and mystery schools in the Far East. Spalding borrowed his basic mythos from Madame Blavatsky, but with a novel twist: His hidden masters taught principles that were very much in line with New Thought.

  Around 1930, some white New-Thoughters joined Father Divine’s predominantly black movement. Eugene Del Mar, a prominent New Thought lecturer who had studied with Helen Wilmans, became a dedicated supporter. The Anglo-American New Thought writer Walter C. Lanyon grew deeply attached to Father Divine, dedicating books to him and openly using Father Divine’s language and letters in his books. Lanyon’s 1931 work, It Is Wonderful, was titled after Father Divine’s signature mantra.

  Father Divine’s movement was not explicitly political. But in matters of civil rights he encouraged followers in picketing, petition drives, and letter-writing campaigns. In the 1930s his followers petitioned for an antilynching bill, gathering some 250,000 signatures. Father Divine led followers in hymns and prayers that combined a motivational tone with calls for political progress. When Mississippi senator and Ku Klux Klan member Theodore Bilbo filibustered antilynching legislation in 1938, Father Divine’s followers sang:

  D-O-W-N, down with Bilboism! Down! Down! Down!

  Up with Democracy! Let it flood city, village, and town;

  Let it sweep through the country

  And give its subjects the very Same Rights!

  Let every woman, man, boy, and girl,

  Help Democracy’s banner to be unfurled,

  And clean out the Senate

  Of all lynch-mob violent leaders;

  And when they start to filibuster, don’t allow them to talk;

  Just snatch them off the floor and send them for a walk!

  For Democracy shall flourish in the land of the free,

  And its subjects shall have Life, Happiness, and Liberty!

  Some scholars came to see Father Divine’s organization as one of the precursors of the civil rights movement. Yet Father Divine often confounded journalists and critics with his claims to be God on earth and his encouraging of followers to “channel” his spirit for worldly success. Where outsiders saw audaciousness and megalomania, however, they missed the New Thought currents to which he belonged. Since the 1880s, Warren Felt Evans and Emma Curtis Hopkins had been telling of a “God-Self,” or a divine power within. Robert Collier wrote: “Mind is God. And the subconscious in us is our part of Divinity.” Father Divine saw positive thinking and, by extension, his own deific claims as a means of awakening followers to their holy inner-selves.

  His methods could provide a startling uplift in an atmosphere of racial oppression. Scholar of religion Ronald Moran White noted that Father Divine’s practices “undeniably” resulted in “a certain restructuring of his followers’ attitudes toward themselves and the world.”

  Law of Attraction

  Even as New Thought’s most eloquent pioneers laid their hopes in a marriage of social reform and positive thinking, the link between mind-power and political protest showed signs of strain as the twentieth century progressed.

  Concurrent with the rise of the prosperity gospel, an alluring new phrase began circulating in New Thought circles: Law of Attraction. The phrase grew familiar to millions of people who otherwise had little direct knowledge of the mind-power movement. In future generations, Law of Attraction got repeated throughout The Secret, ultimately becoming a better-known term than New Thought.

  The theory behind the Law of Attraction is that the mind is constantly attracting circumstances to itself, and that through proper control of one’s thoughts, this ever-operative principle of attraction could be used to attain one’s desires—usually in the form of money, goods, or career advancement. As this concept caught on in the growing economy of the early twentieth century, many New Thought leaders began to place ever-greater emphasis on wealth building and individual advancement, while social concerns faded to a whisper. By the 1930s, the movement edged closer to what Charles Fillmore had once bemoaned: a spiritual school that viewed God largely as “a force of attraction.”

  It wasn’t exactly that New Thought shed its liberal qualities. Sociologists Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch made a broad survey of the inspirational and success books of the first half of the twentieth century and noted: “Racism and group-superiority themes are absent from the literature.”
Indeed, New Thought organizations, much like Unitarian-Universalist congregations, represented a popular alternative for seekers who rejected, or felt pushed from, mainline faiths. Artists, actors, gay and lesbian seekers, and a wide range of freethinkers were all heavily represented in the New Thought culture, and remain so.

  But the movement began to emphasize a more self-involved vision. Increasingly, New Thought framed the problems of life—especially financial problems—in the same manner as it once had framed health: Every thing depends on a person’s intimate arrangements with the Divine Power within. The only reality that matters is that which the individual creates for himself.

  In its original form, the Law of Attraction possessed a vastly different meaning from the one later attached to it by mind-power acolytes. The phrase first arose in the mid-nineteenth-century work of upstate New York medium Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Poughkeepsie Seer.” Davis entered into medium trances from which he would dictate vast metaphysical lectures. Never being one to shy from loquaciousness, Davis in 1855 produced a six-volume treatise on metaphysical laws, The Great Harmonia. In volume 4, he described the Law of Attraction not as a principle of cause-and-effect thinking or as a method for using the mind to attract wealth, but, rather, as a cosmic law governing where a person’s soul would dwell in the afterlife based on the affinities he had displayed on earth. In Davis’s view, the Law of Attraction also governed the types of spirits that would be drawn to séances based on the character and intention of the people seated around the table.

  In the vision of positive-thinking impresarios, the Law of Attraction took on different more distinctly material possibilities. The popular remaking of Davis’s law began in 1892 in the final volume of Prentice Mulford’s Your Forces, And How to Use Them. Mulford, who died the previous year, had written: “Such a friend will come to you through the inevitable law of attraction if you desire him or her …” In 1897, Ralph Waldo Trine used the term in his popular In Tune with the Infinite, and in 1899, Helen Wilmans invoked the Law of Attraction in her Conquest of Poverty. In June of that year, the New Thought leader Charles Brodie Patterson showcased the phrase in his influential article “The Law of Attraction,” published in his journal, Mind. Patterson celebrated the Law of Attraction as a metaphysical super-law that dictated that everything around us is an out-picturing of what we dwell on most of the time in our thoughts. “Upon the recognition of this law depend health and happiness,” Patterson wrote, “because neither can ensue unless in our thought we give out both.”

  No one on the early New Thought scene was more dramatic in illustrating the power of metaphysical laws than Chicago lawyer William Walker Atkinson. A student of Emma Curtis Hopkins and Helen Wilmans, Atkinson wrote dozens of books, which he published under his Yogi Publication Society. His 1902 book, The Law of the New Thought, devoted a chapter to the Law of Attraction. Atkinson often brought an exotic allure to his books by writing them under mysterious-sounding pseudonyms, such as Theron Q. Dumont and Yogi Ramacharaka. Writing in 1908 under the alias Three Initiates, Atkinson launched his most successful book, The Kybalion. The Kybalion, which seemed to be a Hellenic re-sounding of the term Kabbalah, presented itself as a modern commentary on an ancient work of lost Egypto-Greek esotericism by the mythical sage Hermes Trismegistus. The Kybalion framed the Law of Attraction as a tenet of ancient esoteric wisdom.

  Though written in faux-arcane language, this work of Pseudo-Hermeticism did contain passages of surprising depth and substance. Atkinson located legitimate correspondences between New Thought and certain Hermetic ideas. These two philosophies, Hermeticism and New Thought, shared no actual lineage; but each believed in a universal over-mind, and Atkinson deftly traced those areas where they intersected. With its Hermetic reframing of the Law of Attraction, The Kybalion became a sensation among New-Thoughters, occultists, and even some black nationalists and Afrocentrists, who considered it an authentic retention of ancient Egyptian wisdom.

  While it was an underground work, never registering in mainstream culture, The Kybalion became probably the bestselling occult book of the twentieth century. In later years, its influence showed up in surprising places. In 1982, TV Guide presented a rare profile of television star Sherman Hemsley, famous as TV’s George Jefferson. Hemsley, who died in 2012, was intensely private and seldom gave interviews. TV Guide ran its piece under the headline “Don’t Ask How He Lives or What He Believes In: A Rare View of The Jeffersons Star Who Works Hard to Hide an Unorthodox Lifestyle.” The man who immortalized the cantankerous George obliquely credited a mysterious book and teacher with turning his life around as a young man. “Somewhere along the line,” went the profile, “he met ‘the man with the book’—although Sherman won’t say which one. ‘Don’t want to advertise any book,’ he grumbles. He is also very mysterious about exactly who the man was.”

  Hemsley’s housemate, André Pavon, told TV Guide that the book was, in fact, The Kybalion. “He gave me that and others,” Pavon said, adding, “It changed my life. He told me, ‘You got to read it, man.’ ” Though sometimes depicted as a recluse, Hemsley simply lived by a different scale of values—those he derived from The Kybalion, as well as his interests in meditation and Kabbalah. Asked why he didn’t frequent Hollywood parties and restaurants, he replied: “Nothing goes on there. The most exciting things happen in the mind.” Although The Kybalion remained just off mainstream radar, Hemsley’s comments exemplified the depth of dedication the occult work inspired among its fans.

  In the years following The Kybalion, the Law of Attraction, whether seen as an ancient Hermetic idea or as a modern success formula, was embraced, extolled, and repeated as the keynote of mind-power spirituality. Its popularity brought the New Thought movement to a moral turning point: According to the logic of this super-law, the mind itself was an omnipotent force of attraction. A man’s thoughts could assemble, disassemble, build up, or destroy. In essence, man was the Godhead. God may have existed both within and beyond man, but God the Creator, in this new formulation, was synonymous with the human imagination. Subtly, New Thought redirected its focus away from opening man to the blessings of God (a remnant of Mary Baker Eddy’s theology), and toward making man aware of this awesome, ever-operative inner power that awaited his directions to bestow beauty, health, and plenty. Or to cause harm if one’s mind unconsciously drifted to thoughts of illness, hatred, or despair.

  In generations ahead, this radical metaphysic simultaneously popularized and burdened the positive-thinking movement. The Law of Attraction, however appealingly it promised material gain, dictated that man alone, through his thoughts, bore ultimate responsibility for everything that happened to him, whether good or bad. This was an ethical claim that future generations of positive thinkers weren’t fully prepared to shoulder or defend.

  * * *

  * Some newer ministries continued to emphasize healing. The early twentieth century saw the rise of the Pentecostal movement, which by the 1920s hosted its own thriving scene of tent revival meetings. These revivalist meetings often featured fervent faith-healings and medical prayers. While the healing dynamic never fully faded from Pentecostal and later Charismatic movements, two developments pushed healing to the backseat in that world, too. The first was a series of fraud allegations against faith-healers in the 1950s, and the second was a shift instigated in the late 1960s by the movement’s most influential voice, Oral Roberts. In his publications and public statements, the Oklahoma-based minister and university founder began emphasizing prosperity over healing, a development that will be explored in Chapter 7. Hence, Pentecostalism traveled the same trajectory as New Thought, shifting its focus from healing to prosperity.

  chapter five

  happy warriors

  But to have done instead of not doing

  This is not vanity

  —Ezra Pound, Canto 81

  The rising tremors of the Great Depression did nothing to stem the progress of the positive-thinking movement. In times of economic calamity, mind-
power philosophy not only continued to function as a source of innovation on the American scene but effectively issued a challenge to mainline religion that is still being felt today. The challenge was for churches to provide practical inspiration, usable advice, and psychological insights for dealing with the difficulties of daily life—or to risk irrelevance.

  While most American churchgoers retained their ties to mainline congregations, worshippers from across the religious spectrum were increasingly familiar with New Thought’s messages of spiritual self-help. They knew about books such as As a Man Thinketh and In Tune with the Infinite. Many people had taken the kinds of mail-order courses offered by Helen Wilmans or Elizabeth Towne, or knew someone who had. Christian Science churches sprouted up in some of the more affluent neighborhoods of New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. And mental healing was written about, sometimes critically but just as often approvingly, in national magazines. The message emerging from all these sources was that religion could be useful. Congregants from mainline churches increasingly demanded that problems with money, alcohol, marital relations, and self-image be addressed from the pulpit and in church programs. Otherwise, attendance would dwindle, as it did in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

  The formula that revitalized the Protestant churches grew from the precedent laid down by New Thought—namely, that faith ought to serve as a source of self-improvement. This principle inspired mainstream spiritual programs in addiction recovery (such as Alcoholics Anonymous), physical healing (such as the Episcopal-based Emmanuel Movement), youth development (such as the Presbyterian Church’s Camps Farthest Out), and an array of church-based support groups in marriage, grief, and career counseling.