The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  “It was in the early days of spiritualism, when the Rochester rappings had excited much wonder throughout the country. Horace Greeley was known to have taken a good deal of interest in the subject; to have given time to its investigation and to have entertained its first propagandists, the Fox sisters, for days at his house. During the evening of our visit that subject came up and Mr. Greeley warmly espoused the side of the spiritualists. He said many things in confirmation of his belief in the new doctrine of spirit visitation. Standing midway of the two parlors and pointing to a table that stood against the wall and the front windows, he said: ‘I have seen that table leave its place where it now stands and go back to its place without anyone touching it or being near it.’”

  Greeley himself was the type of believer who has not lost all sense of criticism. The first séance he attended rather disappointed him, but he and his wife had recently lost their child “Pickie,” to whom they were passionately attached, and Mrs. Greeley went to see the Fox sisters several times at their hotel and finally invited them to spend a week or two at the Greeley house in 19th Street. The sisters gave them “sittings,” and Greeley got some significant responses, “evincing knowledge of occurrences of which no one, not an inmate of our family in former years could well have been cognizant,” along with much that seemed trivial and “unlike what might naturally be expected from the land of souls.” In his recollections, Greeley makes a further record and an interesting comment:

  “Not long after this, I had called on Mademoiselle Jenny Lind, then a newcomer among us, and was conversing about the current marvel with the late N. P. Willis, while Mademoiselle Lind was devoting herself more especially to some other callers. Our conversation caught Mademoiselle Lind’s ear, and arrested her attention; so, after making some inquiries, she asked if she could witness the so-called ‘Manifestations.’

  “I answered that she could do so by coming to my house in the heart of the city, as Katie Fox was then staying with us. She assented, and a time was fixed for her call; at which time she appeared, with a considerable retinue of total strangers. All. were soon seated around a table, and the ‘rappings’ were soon audible and abundant. ‘Take your hands from under the table!’ Mademoiselle Jenny called across to me in the tone and manner of an indifferently bold archduchess. ‘What?’ I asked, not distinctly comprehending her. ‘Take your hands from under the table!’ she imperiously repeated; and I now understood that she suspected me of causing, by some legerdemain, the puzzling concussions. I instantly clasped my hands over my head, and there kept them until the sitting closed, as it did very soon. I need hardly add that this made not the smallest difference with the ‘rappings’; but I was thoroughly and finally cured of any desire to exhibit or commend them to strangers. . . . But, while the sterile ‘sittings’ contributed quite as much as the other sort to convince me that the ‘rappings’ were not all imposture and fraud, they served decidedly to disincline me to devote my time to what is called ‘investigation.’ To sit for two dreary, mortal hours in a darkened room, in a mixed company, waiting for someone's disembodied grandfather or aunt to tip a table or rap on a door, is dull music at best; but so to sit in vain is disgusting. . . . I find my ‘spiritual’ friends nowise less bigoted, less intolerant, than the devotees at other shrines. They do not allow me to see through my own eyes, but insist that I shall see through theirs. If my conclusion from certain data differs from theirs, they will not allow my stupidity to account for our difference, but insist on attributing it to hypocrisy, or some other form of rascality. I cannot reconcile this harsh judgment with their professions of liberality, their talk of philosophy. But, if I speak at all, I must report what I see and hear.”

  Both the Fox girls being very pretty and very young, each soon found a patron. Greeley undertook the education of Katie and Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, the ill-starred Arctic explorer, reformed the character of Maggie and eventually married her. Among the other disciples or friends of the Fox sisters, were Bancroft, James Fenimore Cooper, Bryant, N. P. Willis, John Bigelow, Dr. Griswold, the enemy of Poe, Bayard Taylor, Theodore Parker, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1857, an entire column of the Practical Christian listed sixty-seven books and magazines devoted to spiritualism. From the list, one gathers that Andrew Jackson Davis was not slow in linking himself with the new movement. At least a dozen of these works are from his pen, many of them including his favorite word “harmonial” in the title, as The Penetralia; being harmonial answers to important questions. The Lily Wreath of Spiritual Communication, through Mrs. J. S. Adams and others, and the Bouquet of Spiritual Flowers, received through the same mediumship, were to be had at 85 cents. For the pictorially inclined, there was Mr. Wolcott’s amusing picture representing the attack of the allies on the Sebastopol of Spiritualism. Hudson Tuttle contributed Sins in the Spiritual World. Mrs. Adams’ husband wrote a Rivulet from the Ocean of Truth, being an interesting narrative of the Advancement of a Spirit from Darkness in to Light. For the odd price of 38 cents, one could buy Alfred Cridge’s Epitome of Spiritual Intercourse. The editor of the Practical Christian, Adin Ballou, wrote an exposition of Views Respecting the Principal Facts, Causes and Peculiarities Involved in Spirit Manifestations. Again for 38 cents, one could buy a work by the great infidel Thomas Paine, not usually listed under his name, The Philosophy of Creation credited to him “through the hand of Horace G. Wood, medium.” The phreno-magnetist, La Roy Sunderland, contributed some sympathetic works on nutrition, and healing without medicine, and The Book of Health, and The Birth of the Universe are advertised as being “by and through R. P. Ambler.” A skeptical work by E. W. Capron (who captivated Providence with animal magnetism) is also advertised. And there are books on the dynamics of magnetism, on Pneumatology, and on the celestial telegraph. An inharmonious note occurs in the title, Spirit’s Work Real but not Miraculous, by Allan Putnam who, thirty years later, wrote a curious book in which he tried to explain the witchcraft of New England in the terms of modern spiritualism. He defines a witch as a “medium or a human being whose body becomes at times the tool of some finite disembodied intelligent being, or whose mind senses knowledge in spirit land.” A few sentences from his argument are worth preserving as a curiosity of logic, the explanation of a delusion in the terms of the unproved:

  “The chief non-intelligent instrumentality employed in producing miraculous, spiritualistic, necromantic, and other kindred marvels, is now generally called psychological force—force resident in and put forth from and by the soul. . . .

  “The usurping capabilities of this force were strikingly set forth by the illustrious Agassiz in his carefully written account of his own sensations and condition while in a mesmeric trance induced upon him by Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend. The great naturalist—the strong man both mentally and physically—says that he lost all power to use his own limbs—all power to even will to move them, and that his body was forced against his own strongest possible opposition to pace the room in obedience to the mesmerizer’s will. Since such force overcame the strongest possible resistance of the gigantic Agassiz, it is surely credible that less robust ones, in any and every age, may have been subdued and actuated by it.

  “Those who were accused of bewitching others were fountains from which invisible intelligences sometimes drew forth properties which aided them in gaining and keeping control of those whom they entranced or otherwise used. Also from such there probably sometimes went forth unwilled emanations that were naturally attracted to other sensitives, who perceived their source, and pronounced it diabolical, because the influx thence was annoying. Impersonal natural forces to some extent, and at times, probably designated the victims who were immolated on witchcraft’s altar.”

  In the very year that this was published the great spiritualist hoax was exposed. The Fox sisters confessed that everything they had done, without exception, had been humbug! On the 24th of September, 1888, the New York Herald published an article under the startling headlines:

  GOD HAS NOT ORDERED IT


  ———————————

  A Celebrated Medium Says the Spirits Never Return.

  CAPTAIN KANE’S WIDOW

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  One of the Fox Sisters Promises an Interesting Exposure of Fraud

  A fraud with the peculiar name of Madame Diss De Barr had recently been exposed, and the reporter who went to interview Mrs. Kane, ready to expose another, was not prepared for the sensation which she gave him. He found in a little house on West 44th Street, “a small magnetic woman of middle age,” who was negligently dressed and not in the calmest mood. She told him the fantastic story of her life and intimated that she wished to balance her account, “which the world of humbug-loving mortals held against her, by making a clean breast of all her former miracles and wonders.” The reporter was impressed by the fact that, when in London, Mrs. Kane had been entertained by some of the best-to-do of the great and comprehensive middle class. He therefore listened attentively while Mrs. Kane poured out her story, in the intervals of which she would break into sobs or go to the piano and “pour forth fitful floods of wild, incoherent melody, which coincided strangely with that reminiscent weirdness which, despite its cynical reality, still characterized the scene.”

  Mrs. Kane was prepared to deliver one lecture in which she would expose the humbuggery she had practiced. In the midst of her conversation she paused for a moment and the reporter heard a rapping on the floor beneath his feet and, as he walked around the room, the rappings followed him, under tables, across the threshold and, when Mrs. Kane sat on the piano stool, the legs of the instrument reverberated and the taps “resounded throughout its hollow structure.”

  “Spirits, is he easily fooled?” asked Mrs. Kane. Three raps came in reply. “I can always get an affirmative answer to that question,” Mrs. Kane remarked cynically, and proceeded to explain to her caller that a slight dislocation of the bones in the foot enabled her to make these sounds with an imperceptible movement. “Split-foot” and the long dresses of 1847 were at last explained and Mrs. Kane asserted that Ann Leah Fox Fish, by this time the wife of Daniel Underhill, respectable president of an insurance company, had known of the deception all the time and had forced the exploitation of it on her younger sisters. Mrs. Underhill, who was still highly thought of in spiritualistic circles, made no statement, but her husband reluctantly suggested that both Maggie and her sister Katie would do well to keep sober occasionally and particularly to avoid the ingratitude of attacking the eldest sister, since the Underhills had twice furnished apartments for them. Mr. Underhill admitted that there were frauds in spiritualism—Madame Diss De Barr, who had performed materializations, was one of them—but he deplored the fact that one of the founders of spiritualism should turn against the faith. The Herald story naturally caused a sensation, but most good believers attributed it to drink and to the long tragedy of Mrs. Kane’s widowhood. In the next month, Katie Fox, now Mrs. Jencken, arrived from England on the Persian Monarch. She also had had difficulties in New York, especially with the Gerry society which had accused her of habitual drunkenness and had taken away her children, but now she declared herself done forever with drink and thoroughly in sympathy with her sister’s attack on spiritualism. “Alleged immoralities,” figured in the headlines, and Mrs. Jencken declared spiritualism one of the greatest curses the world had ever known. She too asserted that Leah, who was twenty-three years older than herself, had encouraged and managed the rappings from the very beginning. She made it clear that the furor they created, and the excitement, had caused herself and her sister to lend themselves to the fraud. On the 21st of August, Margaret Fox Kane, in spite of many threats sent to her by spiritualists, appeared at the Academy of Music. The New York World for the following day gave a brief account of the proceedings:

  “A plain wooden stool or table, resting upon four short legs, and having the properties of a sounding board, was placed in front of her. Removing her shoe, she placed her right foot upon this table. The entire house became breathlessly still, and was rewarded by a number of little short, sharp raps—those mysterious sounds which have for more than forty years frightened and bewildered hundreds of thousands of people in this country and Europe. A committee, consisting of three physicians taken from the audience, then ascended to the stage, having made an examination of her foot during the progress of the ‘rappings,’ unhesitatingly agreed that the sounds were made by the action of the first joint of her large toe.

  “Only the most hopelessly, prejudiced and bigoted fanatics of Spiritualism could withstand the irresistible force of this commonplace explanation and exhibition of how ‘spirit rappings’ are produced. The demonstration was perfect and complete, and if ‘spirit rappings’ find any credence in this community hereafter, it would seem a wise precaution on the part of the authorities to begin the enlargement of the State’s insane asylums without any delay.”

  The Fox sisters, it is said, later recanted their confession, but the student of mass-manias and intellectual fads is impressed by one thing which the recantation does not touch, namely, that the exposure of a fraud is one of the least successful ways of combating it. It may work in isolated instances, it may help to detach those who are wavering but, apparently, the faithful are as readily nourished by exposure as they are by divine manifestations. The Fox sisters were confessed drunkards and, if they did not stick to their own “betrayal” of spiritualism, they showed at least that they were not precisely trustworthy. Yet if their career has had any deterrent effect on the progress of spiritualism, the Society for Psychical Research does not know of it. It is not within the scope of this book to analyze the proceedings of that society, nor to question in any way the validity of spiritualistic phenomena. The interaction of spiritualism with other manifestations of the radical spirit, which is our theme, is already sufficiently complicated.

  Of this interaction, we catch glimpses through a flawed crystal, the temperament of Orestes Augustus Brownson, who was a spirit naturally radical, but was driven by despair of reform movements, and by the motions of his intellect, to end his life in the Catholic church; not serenely, but in violent controversy with Catholics and Protestants alike. Brownson’s career and ideas offer us a sort of conspectus of the times and his one notable work of fiction, The Spirit Rapper, is as illuminating as any of the facts. He was at one time a member of the Presbyterian church and later preached to a Universalist congregation in Albany after which, at Utica, he fell under the influence of Fannie Wright.

  This persecuted reformer, who suffered the concentration of all hostile abuse, since she was at once abolitionist, suffragist, anti-capitalist, infidel, and free lover, had already failed with the Nashoba plantation. The interrelation of radical movements was so close in those days that it is worth while retreating a little chronologically to take in the whole of Fannie Wright’s career. She was an Owenite not only by personal affiliation, but in theory and, as she and Mrs. Trollope walked the deck of the steamer which brought them to America, she told the snobbish Englishwoman that she proposed to prove the equality of all men by giving equal education to blacks and whites. Like most reformers, she was unwilling to carry one reform through. “Integral” reform was one of the watchwords of the day and the stern, sturdy, Scotchwoman, who was then a little over thirty years old, proposed to abolish the slavery of marriage as well as the slavery of serfdom. So, in her invitations to Nashoba, she followed one of the Rappite principles and anticipated one of the laws of John Humphrey Noyes, by making it clear that married persons entering her community ipso facto relinquished any special claim upon each other. A husband was to enjoy no precedence over any other member of the community in seeking the favors of his wife. She lagged behind the dogmatism of Noyes, however, because she did admit the propriety of lasting unions so long as they were based on the affections and were entirely voluntary. She was one of the earliest defenders of unmarried mothers, protesting against the prolonged and unwilling chastity and unfruitfulness of women
who had to wait for an appropriate marriage. She said that if a woman became a mother, under the influence of “kind feelings,” she hoped the time would come when no one would care to inquire whether she was a wife. Miscegenation was another doctrine to the practice of which Nashoba gave countenance. The religion of manual labor was also one of the cults. However, by paying $200 a year, gentlemen unused to work in field and factory might be relieved from manual work and left free to enjoy the other exceptional privileges of this community. After Nashoba failed and the negroes had been settled in Hayti, Fannie Wright began the propaganda of her ideas by publicity. With tireless energy, she waged war against Owen’s three great curses, marriage, property, and religion and, in connection with his son, Robert Dale Owen, published a weekly, The Free Enquirer, at New York, and lectured throughout the country. In Cincinnati, she caused a sensation with her speech on the Nature of True Knowledge and, in Philadelphia, she came upon the platform of the pretty Arch Street Theatre with a bodyguard of Quaker ladies in their sober costumes and, in the course of a startling and eloquent lecture which was much applauded, she produced “an emotion” by announcing that according to Jefferson, the father of our country was not a Christian.

  It was in 1829 that Brownson heard Miss Wright at Utica and was so impressed that he stayed after the lecture and had a long conversation with her. He then attended her series of four lectures at Auburn, and it was agreed between them that he should become a corresponding editor of her paper. In the issue of December 7, 1829, Miss Wright announced that “Mr. Orestes Augustus Brownson has held out to her the hand of fellowship and become attached to The Free Enquirer,” a publication as infamous in its day as The Masses was in 1917.