One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  I am indebted to Charles Braden’s Christian Science Today: Power, Policy, Practice (Southern Methodist University Press, 1958) for directing me to Eddy’s rule-tightening after Hopkins’s departure. Eddy is quoted from there and from the April 1888 Christian Science Journal.

  The testimonial of Hopkins’s student (“her instruction not only gives understanding”) appears in Braden (1963, 1987), who is quoting an unsigned 1889 article in the Fillmores’ first journal, Modern Thought; the writer may be Charles Fillmore. The other student tribute (“her brilliance of mind and spirit”) appeared in Unity in 1925 and is quoted from the foreword to a reissue of Hopkins’s Scientific Christian Mental Practice (1888), as published in 1958 by the High Watch Fellowship, an organization founded by Hopkins’s sister, Estelle Carpenter. In 1940 High Watch Farm became an addiction-recovery retreat center based on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, which it remains today.

  Margery Fox is quoted from Materra (1997). Chapel is quoted from “Christian Science and the Nineteenth Century Women’s Movement” (JSSMR, Spring 2000). Also very helpful on nineteenth-century medicine and women is Ann Braude’s groundbreaking study, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Indiana University Press, 1989, 2001), from which Braude is quoted. The quotations from Hopkins’s seminary graduation appeared in Melton’s article “New Thought’s Hidden History” (1995). Melton is quoted on the numbers of Hopkins’s female students from Perspectives on the New Age edited by James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton (State University of New York Press, 1992).

  Emerson published his essay “Success” in 1870 in his collection Society and Solitude. The essay actually had its earliest roots in an address called “The Spirit of the Times,” which Emerson began delivering in the late 1840s. He revised it in the early 1850s into a talk called “The Law of Success”; by the end of the decade, Emerson settled on the simple title “Success.”

  I am grateful to historian Keith McNeil for providing me with a very rare copy of William Henry Holcombe’s pamphlet, Condensed Thoughts About Christian Science (Purdy Publishing, 1887).

  The Hartford New Thought Convention is referenced in Judah (1967) and Braden (1963, 1987) and is covered in the April 1899 issue of Mind magazine. The Boston convention is noted in the aforementioned books and in Dresser (1919). The 1899 Boston proceedings were published by the International Metaphysical League, with the asterisk and note next to Charles Fillmore’s name. The relationship between Fillmore and the International New Thought Alliance, and Fillmore’s writing on the matter, are noted in The Household of Faith: The Story of Unity by James Dillet Freeman (Unity School of Christianity, 1951) and The Unity Movement: Its Evolution and Spiritual Teachings by Neal Vahle (Templeton Foundation Press, 2002).

  Hopkins’s 1919 correspondence of September 16 and November 20 was addressed to New York socialite and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan; it is quoted from Harley (2002). Ella Wheeler Wilcox is quoted from her book The Heart of the New Thought (Psychic Research Company, 1902).

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  FROM POVERTY TO POWER

  Court trials involving Christian Science treatments began to uptick in 1888. A judicious consideration of this period is found in Charles Braden’s Christian Science Today (1958).

  William James’s quote about “fanatics and one-sided geniuses” is from William James: In the Maelstrom of the American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). James’s statement about an “impediment in the minds of people” is from Genuine Reality: A Life of William James by Linda Simon (University of Chicago Press, 1998). His letter about “fondness or non-fondness for mind-curers” is from The Works of William James: Essays, Comments, and Reviews edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Harvard University Press, 1987). James’s letters to the Boston Evening Transcript of 1894 and his legislative address of 1898 appear in The Works of William James (1987). The passage deriding James’s support for “quackery” originally ran in the Philadelphia Medical Journal and was reprinted in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of March 17, 1898. On the events before the committee, I benefited from the following: William James: His Life and Thought by Gerald E. Myers (Yale University Press, 1987); “ ‘The Facts Are Patent and Startling’: WJ and Mental Healing,” parts 1 and 2, by John T. Matteson, Streams of William James, Spring and Summer 2002; Pox: An American History by Michael Willrich (Penguin Press, 2011); and coverage in the Boston Globe of March 3, 1898, which includes an illustration of crowds gathered outside the packed committee room.

  On the proliferation of licensing laws in the 1890s, I benefited from American Medicine in Transition, 1840–1910 by John S. Haller Jr. (University of Illinois Press, 1981). Sources on the improvement of medical care include “Richard Cabot: Medical Reformer During the Progressive Era” by T. Andrew Dodds, Annals of Internal Medicine, September 1, 1993; The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr (Basic Books, 1984); and Medical Licensing in America, 1650–1965 by Richard Harrison Shryock (Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), from which I drew upon the survey of Tennessee doctors.

  Charles Thomas Hallinan is quoted from “My ‘New-Thought’ Boyhood,” The Living Age, March 5, 1921.

  On the life of Frances Lord, I benefited from Kathi Kern’s study Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Cornell University Press, 2001), which fills in several historical gaps and thoughtfully analyzes the intermingling of the suffragist and New Thought movements. I also benefited from an article on Lord in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866–1928 by Elizabeth Crawford (University College of London Press, 1999). Also helpful were Satter (1999) and Gail M. Harley’s article on Emma Curtis Hopkins in Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Indiana University Press, 2001). Stanton is quoted from Kern (2001) and from Stanton’s biography, Eighty Years and More, 1815–1897: Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (European Publishing Company, 1898). On the life of Lord, I also benefited from Deirdre Mitchell’s paper, “New Thinking, New Thought, New Age: The Theology and Influence of Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925),” Counterpoints: The Flinders University Online Journal of Interdisciplinary Conference Papers (July 2002).

  Prentice Mulford originally published his series of essays as “The White Cross Library”; he wrote them from 1886 until his death in 1891. Publisher F. J. Needham collected the essays as Your Forces, And How to Use Them, issued in six volumes from 1890 to 1892 (the last volume appeared posthumously). Your Forces, And How to Use Them comprises 74 essays; in later editions the publisher removed from volume 3 a verse work, “Voice of the Mountain,” and added to each of the volumes a short prefatory work, “God” (which appears to have been written by Mulford but it is unclear). Mulford’s initial use of the phrase “thoughts are things” is from his 1886 essay “You Travel When You Sleep,” which opens volume 1 of Your Forces.

  On the life of Prentice Mulford, I benefited from the essay “About Prentice Mulford,” which appeared in the last volume of Your Forces; it combined Mulford’s autobiographical reflections with the biographical notes of others. Of further help was “Passing of Prentice Mulford” by Charles Warren Stoddard, National Magazine, September 1906, from which Mulford’s journal passages are quoted. Also helpful was the same author’s article “Prentice Mulford, the New Gospeler,” from the National Magazine of April 1905, which is quoted regarding Mulford’s Thoreau-like traits. For Mulford’s own recollection of the period I quote from his autobiographical essay in Your Forces. On Mulford’s New Jersey experiences, I quote from his memoir The Swamp Angel (F. J. Needham, 1888), which Mulford wrote as his equivalent of Walden. Mulford’s quotes on Spiritualism are from “The Invisible in Our Midst,” a series of sketches for The Golden Era, written from December 1869 to March 1870; they are reprinted in the rare Prentice Mulford’s California Sketches, edited and with an introduction by Franklin Walker (Book Club of California, 1935). On Mulford’s interest
in Spiritualism I greatly benefited from Walker’s San Francisco’s Literary Frontier (Alfred A. Knopf, 1939). I am grateful for Enoch Anderson’s foreword to a reissue of Mulford’s 1889 Life by Land and Sea (Santa Ana River Press, 2004), a memoir of his whaling and mining years; Anderson provides an excellent overview of Mulford’s San Francisco days and early life. Also helpful is a section on Mulford in The American Idea of Success by Richard M. Huber (Pushcart Press, 1971, 1987). William James’s letter on Mulford is from Myers (1987). The New York Times reported Mulford’s death in “It Was Prentice Mulford: Sheepshead Bay’s Mystery Was Solved Yesterday,” June 1, 1891.

  Helen Wilmans recounted her personal story in her books, A Search for Freedom (Freedom Publishing Company, 1898) and The Conquest of Poverty (International Scientific Association, 1899); she is quoted from these sources. On Wilmans’s life I benefited from the work of Satter (1999) and Materra (1997); I quote Wilmans’s letter of August 31, 1907, from the latter’s work. Other sources include coverage of the Wilmans court cases in Dresser (1919); in the articles “A Blow to Mental Science: Post Office Will Hold All Mail of a Florida Healer, Under the Fraud Order,” New York Times, October 6, 1901, and “Helen Wilmans, the Conqueror,” by Frederic W. Burry, The Balance, January 1908; and in Wilmans’s personal statement of defense, “My Soul’s Belief,” The Balance, May 1907.

  Key sources on James Allen are “James Allen: A Memoir” by Lily L. Allen, The Epoch, February–March 1912 (this was the magazine that the Allens originally published as The Light of Reason); and James Allen & Lily L. Allen: An Illustrated Biography, by John Woodcock (Sun Publishing, 2007), a valuable codex to Allen’s life. William Allen (“I’ll make a scholar out of you”) is quoted from The Epoch (1912). Allen’s quote “The man who says, ‘My religion is true’ ” is from his posthumous 1912 work Light on Life’s Difficulties. Lily Allen’s statement “He never wrote theories” is from her introduction to Allen’s posthumous 1913 work, Foundation Stones to Happiness and Success. Allen’s statement “thoroughness is genius” is from his 1904 Byways of Blessedness. The quote from the Ilfracombe Chronicle obituary is from Woodcock (2007). Dale Carnegie is quoted from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Simon & Schuster, 1944). Bob Smith’s interest in As a Man Thinketh is noted in Dr. Bob and His Library by Dick B. (Paradise Research Publications, 1992, 1994, 1998). For Marcus Garvey’s interest in New Thought see my Occult America (2009). Michael Jackson’s comment is from “Radnor Family Had Inside Look at Michael Jackson” by Patti Mengers, Delaware County Daily Times (PA), June 28, 2009. Curtis Martin’s reference to Allen appeared in “Hobbled Martin Practices and Is Probable for Patriots,” by Gerald Eskenazi, New York Times, September 14, 2002. Stedman Graham is quoted from “Stedman Graham Tells How to Achieve Personal Freedom” by Shannon Barbour, New Pittsburgh Courier, June 12, 1999.

  A work as famous as As a Man Thinketh would seem to have an easily verifiable date of first publication, but sources conflict. Various records use the years 1902 or 1904. I have cited 1903, which represents the earliest verifiable year of publication based on records from the James Allen Archive at the Ilfracombe Library in Devon, England. Savoy Publishing Company of London issued it that year. Another historical complexity in Allen’s life is the precise date when his father, William, reached New York. Lily Allen pegged William’s arrival, and subsequent murder, to when James was age fifteen, which he turned on November 28, 1879. Passenger ship records show two men named William Allen reaching New York from the United Kingdom in that year: one, age forty, arrived from Liverpool on April 28, and another, age forty-seven, arrived from ports in Scotland and Ireland on November 1. The latter arrival better fits the time frame that Lily provided. The matter of exactly when William arrived requires further historical research.

  Wallace D. Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich appeared at number one on the BusinessWeek paperback bestseller list on September 10, 2007. Sources on Wallace D. Wattles include these articles from the Fort Wayne Sentinel: “Leaves the Methodists,” June 27, 1900; “News Paragraphs,” June 13, 1908; “Totals on District Vote,” November 15, 1908; “Trouble at Elwood,” July 12, 1909; and “Indiana Socialist Dies,” February 8, 2011. “Hoosier Writer Is Dead” appeared in the Indianapolis Star, February 9, 1911. His daughter, Florence Wattles, appears in “Says Even Dead Voted in Recent Elwood Election,” January 29, 1911, Indianapolis Star (from which she is quoted), and “Woman Socialist Speaks to Kendallville Audience,” July 12, 1911, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. Eugene V. Debs is quoted from The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington by Maurice Isserman (Public Affairs, 2000).

  Sources on Elizabeth Towne include “The Literature of ‘New Thoughters,’ ” by Frances Maule Björkman, The World’s Work, January 1910, from which I quote Towne’s reply to “A Weakling”; also “Elizabeth Towne: Pioneering Woman in Publishing and Politics” by Tzivia Gover, Historical Journal of Massachusetts, vol. 37, Spring 2009; Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of the State of Massachusetts, vol. 3, edited by William Richard Cutter and William Frederick Adams (Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1910); “Elizabeth Towne, Author, Leader in Religion, Dies” by the Associated Press, North Adams Transcript, June 1, 1960; Experiences in Self-Healing by Elizabeth Towne (Elizabeth Towne Publishing Company, 1905); and Materra (1997); Satter (1999); and Parker (1973).

  On the topic of New Thought and Marcus Garvey I am indebted to the work of UCLA historian Robert A. Hill. Hill has painstakingly assembled and annotated the invaluable Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers for the University of California Press. Volumes 1 (1983) and 7 (1990), in particular, trace Garvey’s connections to New Thought. Hill’s volume with Barbara Bair, Marcus Garvey Life and Lessons (University of California Press, 1987), is also of great value. As noted above, I further consider Garvey and New Thought in Occult America (2009).

  Rev. Al Sharpton is quoted from the New York Times feature column Sunday Routine: “Al Sharpton: The Wake-Up Is a Victory” by David M. Halbfinger, March 6, 2011.

  The most complete study of Father Divine’s connection to New Thought is Ronald Moran White’s master’s thesis, “New Thought Influences on Father Divine” (Department of Religion, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 1980). Jill Watts’s biography, God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (University of California Press, 1992) is invaluable as a measured and reliable overview of Father Divine’s life. Also helpful are accounts of Father Divine in These Also Believe: A Study of Modern American Cults and Minority Religious Movements by Charles Braden (Macmillan, 1949), and They Have Found a Faith by Marcus Bach (Bobbs-Merrill, 1946). Braden and Bach, two of the twentieth century’s most thoughtful observers of nontraditional religions, were among the very few journalists who grasped Father Divine’s ties to New Thought. Father Divine is quoted (“this table is but the outer expression”) from White (1980). For further information on Baird T. Spalding see my Occult America (2009). Of Walter C. Lanyon’s many books, those most directly influenced by Father Divine are It Is Wonderful (E. K. Reader, 1931), The Eyes of the Blind (L. N. Fowler, 1932; Inspiration House, 1959), and Behold the Man (L. N. Fowler, 1933). Union Life Ministries reissued several of Lanyon’s books in 1977, including The Eyes of the Blind. A “publisher’s preface” replaces Lanyon’s original forewords to the 1931 and 1959 editions, in which Lanyon acknowledged the influence of Father Divine and attributed italicized portions of the book to him. The elimination of those forewords obfuscates a critical link in New Thought history. The anti-Bilbo hymn appears in Braden (1949). Robert Collier’s statement “Mind is God” is from his The Secret of Gold (1927).

  Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch are quoted from their book, Popular Religion: Inspirational Books in America (University of Chicago Press, 1958). Actor Sherman Hemsley is profiled in “Don’t Ask How He Lives or What He Believes In” by Dwight Whitney, TV Guide, February 6, 1982. For additional background on The Kybalion see my Occult America (2009) and The Kybalion: Th
e Definitive Edition by William Walker Atkinson writing as Three Initiates, edited and introduced by Philip Deslippe (Tarcher/Penguin, 2008).

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  HAPPY WARRIORS

  Horatio Dresser is quoted from his A History of the New Thought Movement (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1919). William James is quoted from his lecture and essay “The Gospel of Relaxation,” first published in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (Henry Holt and Co., 1899). Emma Curtis Hopkins is quoted from her Class Lessons 1888 (1977). Quimby is quoted from The Quimby Manuscripts (1921). Wilcox is quoted from her The Heart of the New Thought (1902). For Protestant attitudes toward spiritual healing see “Medicine and Christianity in the Modern World” by Ronald L. Numbers and Ronald C. Sawyer from Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions edited by Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux (Fortress Press, 1982).

  On the career of Richard C. Cabot, I benefited from Ian S. Evison’s doctoral dissertation, Pragmatism and Idealism in the Professions: The Case of Richard Clarke Cabot (University of Chicago Divinity School, 1995). In an age when academic specialization has sequestered too much scholarship behind inscrutable terminology and ever-narrowing topic areas (trends that Cabot himself foresaw), Evison’s study is a marvel of clarity across a wide breadth of subjects. Also of significant help were “The Conceptual Underpinnings of Social Work in Health Care” by Sarah Gehlert from Handbook of Health Social Work edited by Sarah Gehlert and Teri Arthur Browne (John Wiley & Sons, 2006); “The Emmanuel Movement, 1906–1929,” by John Gardner Greene, New England Quarterly, September 1934; “ ‘A Bold Plunge into the Sea of Values’; The Career of Dr. Richard Cabot” by Laurie O’Brien, New England Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 4, December 1985; “Richard Cabot: Medical Reformer During the Progressive Era” by T. Andrew Dodds, M.D., M.P.H., Annals of Internal Medicine, September 1, 1993; and “Clinical Pastoral Education” by Rodney J. R. Stokoe, Nova Scotia Medical Bulletin, vol. 53, 1974. William James’s statement on the “cash-value” of an idea is from his “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” University Chronicle, vol. 1, no. 4, September 1898. James’s article is the text of a talk he delivered on August 28, 1898, at the Philosophical Union of UC Berkeley, where he outlined his philosophy of pragmatism; the event is worthy of a book in itself. Cabot’s statement on “a thousand pities” is from Evison (1995). Cabot’s statements on “moral or spiritual” diseases, and his passage on “functional” versus “organic” disease, are from his Psychotherapy and Its Relation to Religion (Moffat, Yard & Company, 1908). Cabot’s book was one of a series of titles on medicine and religion published as a project of the Emmanuel Movement. Ted Kaptchuk is quoted from “Why Placebos Work Wonders” by Shirley S. Wang, Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2012. Charles Dean Young is quoted from his article “The Emmanuel Movement,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, February 18, 1909. Both Freud and William James are quoted from Nathan G. Hale’s Freud and the Americans (Oxford University Press, 1971). Peter D. Kramer is quoted from his Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind (HarperCollins, 2006). On Cabot’s advocacy of pastoral clinical training I benefited from Stokoe (1974) and from the outstanding dissertation From Jewish Science to Rabbinical Counseling: The Evaluation of the Relationship Between Religion and Health by the American Reform Rabbinate, 1916–1954, by Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert (Department of Philosophy, Temple University, 1978). Carl J. Scherzer is quoted from his article, “The Emmanuel Movement,” Pastoral Psychology, vol. 2, no. 11, February 1951. The survey of healing practices among Protestant ministers is detailed in Charles S. Braden’s “Study of Spiritual Healing in the Churches,” Pastoral Psychology, May 1954.