The Jemima Wilkinsons and Ann Lees of an earlier day were much more peculiar than the women who became so conspicuously successful in the history of American reforming movements. Most of the latter are much too intelligent to be “typical radicals”; if they do not rise to philosophic intensity they manage, at least, to avoid idiosyncrasy. Catherine E. Beecher was not precisely a radical reformer, but she was an intelligent woman, associated with every reform movement, interested in every improvement in the status of women, in diet reform, and in health; and we find her writing with the utmost common sense, the common sense of her time, this prophecy of the future of women:
“Woman has never waked to her highest destinies and holiest hopes. She has as yet to learn the purifying and blessed influence she may gain and maintain over the intellect and affections of the human heart. Though she may not teach from the portico, nor thunder from the forum, in her secret retirements she may form and send forth the sages that shall govern and renovate the world. Though she may not gird herself for bloody conflict, nor sound the trumpet of war, she may enwrap herself in the panoply of heaven, and send the thrill of benevolence through a thousand youthful hearts. Though she may not enter the list in legal collision, nor sharpen her intellect amid the passions and conflicts of men, she may teach the law of kindness, and hush up the discords and conflicts of life. Though she may not be clothed as the ambassador of heaven nor the minister of the altar of God; as a secret angel of mercy she may teach its will, and cause to ascend the humble but most accepted sacrifices.”
That is the moderation of the theorist; in practice, women were energetic, were devoted, were tireless—but immoderate. Few of them founded colonies and sects; but they effected moral reformations of the first order, they were definitely in the current of American progress; and this is almost equal to saying that they were against the current of American radicalism. It is dangerous to use one key in deciphering the whole of a nation’s history; but it is possible to say that, looked at with a partial eye, the first hundred years of the American Republic are a history of the distribution of political power with its economic consequences. At the beginning, the male white property holder was almost unchallenged in command. There followed, first the emergence of the male white citizen, then of the male citizen and, finally, of the citizen regardless of sex or color. Two great reforms accomplished the last two of these changes in power and both of these were ably supported by women. At the same time, the economic stream led to greater holding of property and never to the abdication of the wage system; yet it was against property and wages that most of the men reformers fought. If it is a proof of intelligence to choose a favorable terrain for a battle, the women reformers of America prove themselves infinitely superior to the men. But if it is a proof of idealism to fail, men reformers are the saints, and women for all their high ideals, remain as realistic, and unsaintly, as business men.
PART TWO
“There is nothing too stupid for intelligent people to believe.”
† Arsenic was the base of many quack medicines. † The popular novelty was rounce, a kind of whist with dominoes. † An editor inquired what the age was characterized for and answered, “dollar magazines—shilling lectures—shilling theaters—shilling concerts—penny papers—beggarly office-seekers—rascally politicians—unprincipled bankers—cutthroat financiers—doubtful saints—miserable Wall Street editors—and fine women.” † At the Park Theatre in New York was offered, “the drollest, the oddest, the funniest, the queerest, the most curious, the most novel, the most unpronounceable amusement” called concerts à la Musarde. An orchestra of eighty played and the thousand young men patrons walked about, beat time to the Zampa Overture, and made eyes at a few dozen gay ladies in the boxes. In Philadelphia Norma was playing simultaneously at two theaters. † The Garland waltz was popular and the Methodists of Ohio petitioned the legislature to “protect them from intemperance at camp-meetings.” † Invoking divine guidance, the Reverend Mr. Taylor and eleven other men at Oberlin whipped with a rawhide the writer of some improper letters. “Sabbath schools and Bible classes have, in a peculiar manner, been filled with that solemnity, which, turning the soul from the hot pursuit of pleasure and sin leads it . . . to unfeigned repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.” † On the third of May, 1840, a lovely Sunday, Fanny Elssler landed in New York and for two weeks cleared $500 a night in spite of the sneers of the Herald. In December, the Petersburgh Intelligencer noted that the dancer was “modestly attired in a short skirt which barely reaches below her hips” and by that time Forrest, Booth, and Welch and his giraffe were all failing in the theaters of New York. † “The republic of Texas . . . is beginning to loom large among the nations of the earth.” † Ventriloquism was a popular art; and the social ideal of the time was to be “a distinguished financial agent in Wall Street . . . wearing elegant mustaches . . . driving a pair of bloods . . . and keeping a beautiful cottage ornée at Bloomingdale where he gives elaborate déjeuner à la fourchette.” † Mr. Niblo was conducting concerts d’hiver with increased gaslight. † The Ladies’ Book, conducted entirely by women, published the best engravings of the time.
XVIII. “The Coming of the Prophets.”
CONCURRENTLY with the rise and fall of social experiments in the nineteenth century, there appeared in the United States a series of prophets. Either as a promise or as a threat, the immediate advent of the Messiah had been preached since the time of Jonathan Edwards and, when the emotional atmosphere became favorable, the Messiahs appeared, in numbers. None of them was acceptable to the evangelists. They seemed to be not Christ, but Anti-Christ. In various ways, they labored to destroy the religion which the revivalist preached. Yet they were specifically in the great messianic current, in the tradition of the Messiah as Healer.
The source of this tradition is, of course, in the story of Christ’s ministry with its climax in raising Lazarus from the dead. From the Middle Ages to our own time, cults and churches, pretending to the purity and power of Early Christianity, have always held that curing the sick is the supreme test of authority. The American prophets went farther. To the astonishment and sometimes to the delight of Europe, they passed beyond the conception of cures as proof of religious purity and made the cures a religion in themselves.
The interrelations of quackery, medicine, mind-cures, and spiritualism are so complicated that sign-posts are advisable. In the following pages, it has been impossible to preserve a strict chronological order. Movements overlapped, drew together, separated. Individuals embraced seemingly incompatible doctrines. A discredited science of the beginning of the century returned to scientific favor at the end. In this chaos, an order of development has seemed more important than an order of time.
The development, roughly, is this: Medical quackery, based on distrust of scientific medicine, leads back to magic and the religions of superstition. It had a period of efflorescence at the beginning of the nineteenth century and presently came into enlivening contact with mesmerism. This was a decisive event, for mesmerism was the first great system treating disease through mental channels which did not claim religious authority. Quacks, hitherto limited to the invention or concoction of physical aids to health, now turned to the soul. At about the same time, phrenology was brought to the United States and added a preoccupation with moral ills to the business of curing the body. Three of the most significant of the new prophets derived their powers from mesmerism and phrenology. All of them were engulfed in the flood of spiritualism which began in apparent independence of any other movement, but was, in actuality, closely connected with every movement from revivalism to bump-reading. Spiritualism, communication with the dead, became the universal solvent of quackery. In it all things found place and out of it rose the two movements in which the spiritual history of the nineteenth century culminates: Christian Science and New Thought. With these movements the circle is completed. They are the result of which Jonathan Edwards was the cause and, as often happens, the end precisely inver
ts the intention of the beginning.
The history of the prophets becomes clearer when they are seen against their proper background. We are to consider them as seekers for perfection and as fellow-workers, in that sense, of the revivalists, the social experimenters, the faddists, and the radicals. The methods were different, but the object was identical. For Edwards there could be but one perfection—in the freedom of the Will— and it could be enjoyed only by God. Human perfection, although unattainable, was foreshadowed in a sort of ecstatic communion with the Holy Ghost. With Finney, perfection becomes something more specific. It was a kind of sanctification in the person of Christ, a barely attainable state of being in which man is so graced by God that he has no more will to sin. In the doctrine of John Humphrey Noyes we come almost upon the mystic utterance of St. Augustine that, if you but love God enough, you may safely follow all your inclinations. At the same time, the perfection of the order of nature is a leading idea in Emerson and the other trancendentalists. We have only to become aware of the workings of this order, to submit ourselves, and we become one with perfection and one with God.
Radicalism found other ways to perfection. In the spirit of the true fanatic, like Mary Walker, something close to perfection is promised to women if they adopt men’s clothes. In the deranged mind of a Matthias there is the promise of universal salvation if men give up liquor. Perfection is attained in the ascetic colonies of the Shakers and of Rapp by abstention from the great sin of procreation. It is arrived at in the Phalanstery by mutual love and the abolition of property. It triumphs even over death in the ingenious combinations of the Oneidists. Further without touching upon sex, or property, or salvation, the advanced faddist of diet promises health and longevity which make man almost perfect because he is almost immortal. The single idea that man can and must be perfect runs, therefore, through the activities of a century, and only toward the end degenerates into the less vaulting ambition to make man healthy, cultured, and terribly rich. The fundamental idea of perfection through improvement characterized equally Finney and Emerson and Orison Swett Marden, the physical culturist and the developers of memory and self-confidence. This idea is not a firm binder, not powerful enough a magnet to attract all these doctrines and vagaries so that we can say that they are essentially one; but it does give them a center, and a line drawn from any one of them through this center is certain to touch another. The differences between them are great and the most marked is that the early perfectionists are essentially Christian; the later ones, either unorthodox or oriental. The early ones intended the perfection of the spirit; the later ones, the perfection of the body and of the mind. The emphasis of some is on God and, in others, on nature. But in all of them, there is the idea of man rising to perfection by uniting himself with a higher power or submitting to a higher order.
It was only after mesmerism had come to America that quackery rose from mean streets and country byways to become part of the intellectual movement of the time. Presently, quackery was to come to the crossroads between science and religion. One division chose science and, never forsaking quackery, created patent medicines, electric belts, and manipulative systems. The other chose religion and created peculiar cults with miracle-working Messiahs. Transcending quackery, passing into the realm of established religions, come no less than three great systems of mental healing: the Emmanuel movement, Christian Science, and New Thought.
† Divorces by private statutes in state legislatures existed and, in Rhode Island, mutual consent was admitted if man and wife lived apart for two years with propriety after declaring their intention. † In 1846, the liberals in America hailed the advanced ideas of the new Pope and Greeley and the transcendental Harbinger welcomed him. In the latter publication appeared the work of Lowell, Dana, William Wetmore Story, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Parke Goodwin, George W. Curtis, Albert Brisbane. † In 1848 the democratic revolutions broke out in Europe and German liberals made their way to the Middle West. A year later the gold rush began. † In magazines of the early ’40’s, we find stories in which girls who study science nevertheless make good wives, and women urging their daughters to marry fools who would let them have their own way. † In 1843, the extension table was patented and a few years later aluminum was invented.
† The foulness of the factory system was one of the things which the Millerites managed to adduce as proof of the end of the world in 1843. † The 1840’s brought in anesthetics, hydropathy, daguerreotypes and cheap postage. † The works of Eugene Sue were widely read. † Owing to an accident in France, 10,000,000 feet of tricolor silk were sent to America and nearly all gentlemen’s sleeve linings were in those colors for a year. † The Mexican War was fought. † In 1843, William Cullen Bryant heard some negroes in a tobacco factory singing spirituals and this reminded him of one of Dr. Johnson’s favorite stanzas:
“Verse sweetens toil however rude the sound,
All at her work the village maiden sings,
Nor, while she turns the giddy wheel around,
Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things.”
The spiritual, however, he did not record.
XIX. The Forerunners.
TO the skeptic all unorthodox ways of treating disease complete the circle by which medicine, beginning in magic, returns to magic, ironically sneering at the centuries of science which have intervened. To the orthodox physician, there is little difference between the savage putting ointment on a spear in order to cure the wound which the spear has made and the mental healer curing tuberculosis or cancer by “absent treatment.” A less partial observer, with no tendency to believe, finds himself confronted at the very beginning of his investigation by the actuality of cures—cures proclaimed by the healers and not rejected, only explained away, by their enemies. From Mark Twain to Hugo Münsterberg, critics of Christian Science have been compelled to admit that the Scientists have cured. Their only reservation is that the maladies have been curable by suggestion. To this the Scientist usually replies that they have not been curable by any other means. In this case, to say that a cure is only a fancied cure is to beg the question, for an imagined illness is often as disastrous as a real one and the distinction between them, we may take it from psychoanalysis, has to be finely drawn.
The success of most unorthodox cures is due to distrust of the science of medicine. When medicine was all priesthood and magic, the death of a patient was easily explained as due to the intervention of a hostile God or the anger of an omnipotent one. In the age of reason, however, the doctor was compelled to confess his own fallibility. He wrapped himself in the obscurity of a learned tongue, gave himself the solemn air of a master and, when he failed, looked deplorably like a mountebank. Keeping step with science at every point, there seems to be a superstition or a mystic science. We find Galileo and Keppler turning from astronomy to draw up horoscopes on pure astrological principles, not believing in them, but practicing that science which the world still believed. We find Berkeley concocting a tar water which, according to him, cured gout and fevers, pleurisy and erysipelas, asthma, indigestion and hysterics, hypochondria, liver disease and dropsy and, in addition to this, was an excellent preservative for the teeth and gums; in fact, to this idealist philosopher who denied the reality of matter, “tar water was everything and the material universe was nothing.” This was a remedy not in the pharmacopoeia, but the “theriac” which, for two hundred years, was sold by every pharmacist in Europe, was considered equally effective for at least as many maladies and its composition was as little inspiring. It was, in fact, the druggist’s slop-jar into which he tossed medicines for which he had no future use, compounded prescriptions which had somehow spoiled in making and whatever odds and ends remained in bottles on his shelves. Yet the pharmacist was trusted, presumably because he knew less than the physician. In the time of Cromwell, when there was no king to touch the scrofulous, one Valentine Greatrakes flourished as a stroker and cured not only the king’s evil and nearly everything later listed by Berkeley, b
ut lameness, palsy, consumption, and at least a dozen minor ailments as well.
The quack, when he does not invoke the sanctity of religion, has a habit of basing his cures on science—that is, every science but that of medicine. The simplest and possibly the most successful fraud in American history was the invention of a physician, a graduate of Yale named Elisha Perkins. In Walsh’s Cures it is noted that Perkins used suggestion on himself. He was over six feet tall and had tremendous strength and, when he was tired, “five minutes of rest made him a new man, a minute more did away with the good effect and he felt the worse for it.” The science which diverted Perkins from his ordinary profession was his own interpretation of the discoveries of Galvani and of Franklin. The existence of positive and negative forces, the fact that an electrical discharge, through the medium of two different metals, would set a frog’s legs twitching, suggested to Perkins a brilliant idea. He prepared two metallic rods in each of which a number of metals, including a little gold, were fused and, placing these two together in order to call out their electrical virtues, he would draw them over the skin of a patient suffering from any malady, and effect a cure. These rods, which were called tractors, were sold for fifty dollars—in the 1790’s an enormous sum of money—and thousands of invalids gave testimony to their miraculous powers. The sick were made whole and the bent walked upright. It was essential that the tractors should be drawn downward and all the benefit of days of “tractation” might be lost if a nervous person were stroked upward. The tractors made Perkins rich and took his fame abroad. In London, a Perkinian institute, under the auspices of members of the nobility, was founded with Perkins’ son as chief. By public subscription it instantly surpassed in endowment all of the hospitals then existing in London. As in Copenhagen and in Berlin, favorable reports on the Perkins treatment were drawn up in London by doctors both of divinity and medicine, and testimonials came from at least eight professors in four different universities, twenty-one regular physicians, nineteen surgeons, and thirty clergymen. A sardonic British physician named Haygarth put an end to this patronage by preparing two ordinary pieces of wood painted to resemble tractors, persuading his patients that they were tractors and had electro-galvanic-magnetic powers, and effecting thousands of cures as promptly as the tractors did. This did not put an end to the tractors; for that nothing short of an epidemic was necessary. In 1799, yellow fever descended on New York to make the ultimate test of Perkins’ invention. He had the courage to go into hospitals and apply his tractors in person, but was himself smitten with the fever and, in spite of his tractors, died of it. The tractors were a type of cure which, in the form of electric belts (to restore virility) and various compositions of metal and rubber, still exist.
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