The direction which the Enquirer was taking was made clear when Fannie Wright and Owen helped to organize the Working-men’s Party. This was at a time of unrest in American labor and the two methods of agitation which have continued to this day developed then their fixed character. Some of the hundreds of labor journals favored legislation procured by political action; others worked for solidarity in trade unionism. Strict party lines were being broken in minor elections by the success of labor candidates and, even if the labor party in any one place was insignificant in numbers, it could still make its influence felt if the major parties were so equally divided that a few votes could turn an election. On one side, we see Tammany Hall fighting or dickering with labor parties and, on the other, we note a growing body of social legislation intended to soothe the outraged conscience of laborers and liberals. The Workingmen’s Party was founded in Philadelphia, in 1827, and became of some importance about the time Brownson joined Fannie Wright. At this time it sponsored a meeting of mechanics and laborers to protest against the foul conditions in which sempstresses were compelled to work in that city. “Into this Party,” says Brownson, “I entered with enthusiasm.” He might have added that he also left it with enthusiasm for, at the end of nine months, he swung to the support of a Jackson candidate and, after the election, gave up the Party entirely. The truth was, as he himself puts it, “I never was and never could be a Party man, or work in the traces of a Party.” He denies that he ever gave up the cause of the workingman. It may be noted that, even twenty years later, Fannie Wrightism was still being used in Congress as a synonym for socialism and mob rule, and the Cincinnati Mirror and Ladies’ Parterre always considered it funny to remark that Fannie Wright, “the high priestess of infidelity and all-things-in-common, had committed amongst other things, marriage.”[2]
Brownson afterward withdrew himself more and more from radical movements, although they had a fascination for him which he could not resist. He would flutter among them, get his wings singed, and retire with some bitter commentary. But he was right in saying that he never gave up the causes for which the movements stood. Nothing could be more vehement than his denunciation of the factory system when, in 1839, the Boston Times caused a sensation by a series of articles on the morals of women workers in the Lowell mills:
“The great mass wear out their health, spirits, and morals, without becoming one whit better off than when they commenced labor. The bills of mortality in these factory villages are not striking, we admit, for the poor girls when they can toil no longer go home to die. The average life, working life we mean, of the girls that come to Lowell, for instance, from Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, we have been assured is only about three years. What becomes of them then? Few of them ever marry; fewer still ever return to their native places with reputations unimpaired. ‘She has worked in a factory’ is almost enough to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl. . . . The man who employs them, and for whom they are toiling as so many slaves, is one of our city nabobs, reveling in luxury; or he is a member of our legislature, enacting laws to put money in his own pocket; or he is a member of Congress contending for a high tariff to tax the poor for the benefit of the rich; or, in these times, he is shedding crocodile tears over the deplorable condition of the poor laborer while he docks his wages 25 per cent.; building miniature log-cabins, shouting Harrison and ‘hard cider.’ And this man too would fain pass for a Christian and a republican. He shouts for liberty, stickles for equality, and is horrified at a southern planter who keeps slaves.”
On the question of slavery, Brownson was, for once, a moderate. Although he disliked slavery, he would do nothing to put an end to it in those cities and territories where it legally existed but contented himself with opposing its extension elsewhere. The abolitionists, he considered hypocritical, self-seeking demagogues, destructive in mind and contemptible in character. Yet when a mob composed of Southern gentlemen and respectable Boston merchants prevented the anti-slavery society from holding a meeting, Brownson’s sense of Justice was outraged and he denounced the city in The Reformer, of which he was then editor. In other things he was not so liberal. The recognition of Louis Kossuth provoked him to say that “the government has really let loose one of the most dangerous characters now living. The president knew it is a profanation to apply the term patriot. . . .” And although he was a great friend of Ripley’s and, in fact, is said to have converted Mrs. Ripley to Roman Catholicism, he accepted no Brook Farm ideas of equality, saying:
“They carry their zeal for reversing so far as to seek to reverse the natural relation of the sexes, to dishonor woman by making her the head, and sending her to the legislature, the cabinet, or into the field to command our armies, and compelling man to remain at home, and nurse the children, wash the dishes, make the beds, and sweep the house. Already are the women assuming the male attire, and beginning to appear in our streets and assemblies dressed out in full Bloomer costume; and little remains for the men to do but to don the petticoat and draw the veil over their faces.”
He was a genuine anti-feminist, protesting to the end against the idolatry of women, with its assumption that the Christian virtues are peculiarly feminine, “that the human character of our Lord was woman-like” and that, by the extension of suffrage and the privilege of holding office to women, “our whole system would almost instantly be elevated in its moral tone, our manners would be refined and purified, our legislative assemblies and courts of justice would be incorruptible. . . .” He was reactionary too in politics, detesting “European red-Republicans, socialists, Carbonari, free masons,” and their parallels in America. And as he threw himself violently into an aggressive Catholicism, he developed a severe morality and, reviewing The Scarlet Letter, he called it a product of perverted genius and said, “The story is told with great naturalness, ease, grace, and delicacy, but it is a story which should not have been told.” His one work of fiction had a definite moral purpose: to establish the connection of spiritual manifestations, “with modern philanthropy, visionary reforms, . . . and revolutionism.” This connection, he claims with sufficient reason, is asserted by spiritualists themselves. Brownson said of the Spirit-Rapper that, while it was not biographical, it had a trace of biography in it. Its central character is carried through almost all the fads of the time, abandoning each one as Brownson himself abandoned them. There was phrenology:
“I paid some attention to Gall and Spurzheim’s new science of phrenology. . . . I have since abandoned phrenology. . . . I was arrested for a moment by Boston transcendentalism, but I could not make much of it. Its chiefs told me that I was not spiritual enough . . . at that time I had not paid much attention to Mesmerism. . . . [He pays attention to it and abandons it for the communist theories of St. Simon which in turn are displaced by table turning and then by world reform.] Close by me lived the Fox family. There were three sisters; one was married, and the other two were simple, honest-minded young girls, one 15, the other 13. As I passed by their house I saw them in the yard. I greeted them, and offered them some flowers which I held in my hand. The youngest took them, thanked me with a smile and I pursued my walk. These were the since world-renowned Misses Fox. . . . They are in good faith, as they some time since evinced by their wish to become members of the Catholic Church. . . .
“Even now the first stage is hardly passed and the movement I commenced by a present of flowers to these simple girls has extended over the whole Union, invaded Great Britain, penetrated France in all directions, carried captive all Scandinavia and a large part of Germany, and is finding its way into the Italian Peninsula.
“The Public never suspected me of having had any hand in producing the Rappo-Mania; and the Fox girls, even to this day, suspect no connection between the flowers I gave them and the mysterious knockings which they heard; and nobody had supposed Andrew Jackson Davis, the most distinguished of the American mediums, of having any relations with me. He does not suspect it himself, yet he has more than once been magnet
ized by me. . . .”
The hero requires a certain Priscilla to accompany him on his mission to young Italy. She was his moral inspiration and, although she was married, she hardly pretended to conceal the fact that she loved him and loved him madly. “But love or lust was not precisely my ruling passion, and I would as soon have taken another with me as Priscilla, could she have served my purpose as well. Even in my worst days I was as much repelled as attracted by a woman who could betray her husband’s honor, and I always found a woman, mastered by her passion, and ready to give up all for love, as it is called, a troublesome rather than an agreeable companion.”
The end of the book deals with an unsuccessful attempt to use the Pope in the cause of Young Italy but “our magic failed us; a more powerful magician . . . intervened.” And the hero, himself a mighty magician, admits that the world will laugh at him for “starting back with fear of death and dread of hell.”
It is not a very lucid book, but even its vagueness and obscurity make it an excellent reflexion of the chaos of the time. Brownson is typical of the intellectual debacle in the age of prophecy. He was willing to accept any heresy if it promised salvation; but he was too gifted to cherish his own illusions and too volatile to remain long in one camp. He flitted from one to another. He joined, fought, and deserted. In the end, he had to discover a discipline for his disordered spirit, and found it in the oldest Christian Church. Had he waited a few years he might have been seduced into the newest. It was just around the corner.
[1] Students of heredity will be interested to know that, after the parents were separated, the father took to drink.
[2] She married Phiquepal d’Arusmont, a disciple of Pestalozzi.
XXII. Northbound Horses.
IN the gay flush of a new century the life of the spirit ought to have been a priceless thing for Americans. Lecturing in 1901 at the austere and venerable University of Edinburgh, William James gave his approval to America’s “only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life” and declared New Thought adequate “to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind.” Early in the new century, schools rose in America teaching how to cure baldness by holding the thought of life while rubbing the scalp. Instruction on how to go into the silence was purchasable at twenty-five cents from the same company which promoted an invention to “burn air”—“it will become a bigger money maker than Bell Telephone.” In Washington, there was a school for attracting opulence and the Psychic Research Company gave courses in Zoism, personal magnetism, clairvoyance, and crystal-gazing, palmistry, phrenology, and astrology. Elsewhere, one could learn “Just how to wake the solar-plexus.” William Walker Atkinson, who was known as the Yogi Ramacharaka, announced that he never got tired of the theme “I can and I will.” Ralph Waldo Trine wrote some more books on the great advantage of being in tune with the infinite. Professor S. A. Weltmer made public his discovery of “the long-lost secret of regenerating the human body” by magnetic healing. Nicotine was eliminated from New Thought Cigars and sin and evil were banished from life. In the years of McKinley and Roosevelt, the Love-thought was triumphant. Conventions were held, churches founded, magazines published, songs written in honor of chewing food with the right mental attitude. The “Boston Craze” as New Thought had been called in its early day made its way to Chicago, where it became practical, and to the Pacific Coast, where it lost itself in the rapturous theosophy of Point Loma. It was the era of Success, of Prosperity, of the Will to Health, of Self-Development. Its offspring were Physical Culture and Addison Sims; the Book of Etiquette and Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap-book for a University Education; wall mottoes counseling relaxation and the religion of “Don’t Worry.” People were forbidden to complain of the weather and were told “God is Well and so are you”; or at least they would be if they only held the health thought and said, “I am well,” often enough. Ella Wheeler Wilcox was the sweet singer of the new religion; Dresser, its serious historian; Orison Swett Marden, its practical prophet; Trine, its reincarnation of Emerson; Elbert Hubbard, its bad boy; Elizabeth Towne, its gentle moderator; Atkinson, its leader to mysticism. It loved Jesus and Buddha, Tolstoi, and Nietzsche, liberalism and socialism and anarchism, Unitarianism and Ethical Culture and the wisdom of the East, free love and monogamy, wealth and ascetic virtue. It was scientific and poetic and adored Nature and exalted man. It was pacifist and admired successful brutality. It was precious and went in for simplicity. It was soft.
These are the qualities of New Thought as it ran to seed. Its first convention was held in 1899. By the beginning of the Great War, the systematic philosophy which James saw in it was buried under the multitudinous form-letters of charlatan mind-healers, the magazines of uplift and good-will, the arty folders and limp-leather books on Love and Health and Success. This seems a quick degeneration; but actually the process had begun half a century earlier. The sources of New Thought are in Emerson, in Mesmer, in Quimby, in Noyes, in Owen, and in Fourier. When time had weakened the powerful impulses of these men, their followers coined base metal and gilded it with the new words of Science or Sociology. Emerson, particularly, was the favorite philosopher of the sect, although it seems to have read him in extract only. The sage was forgotten who had lived through a score of movements and had written:
“How frivolous is your war against circumstances! . . . The impulse is good, and the theory; the practice less beautiful. The reformers affirm the inward life, but they do not trust it, but use outward and vulgar means. . . .”
Similarly, when they happened to return to Nature, they made an idol of Thoreau, without thinking deeply of his motives when he went to (and returned from) Walden Pond. They did not recall that he had said of the radicals of his time: “My objection to Channing and all that fraternity is, that they need and deserve sympathy themselves rather than are able to render it to others. They want faith, and mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere. . . .” There was enough in the New England Transcendentalists to encourage the leaders of New Thought, and Emerson’s style made him peculiarly adaptable to their needs. It is only surprising how little development they gave to what they took and how consistently each change was for the worse. “Trust your emotion,” wrote Emerson and, out of this, New Thought developed sermons on Keeping Fit, Getting On, and Selling Things. He spoke with awe of the mystic Law of the Universe and one new prophet wrote:
“A New York business man recently told me that he never allows himself to go to his office in the morning until he has put his mind into perfect harmony with the world.”
[And James, with all gravity, quotes another:]
“ ‘I know,’ writes Mr. Trine, ‘an officer on our police force who has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with this Infinite Power, and this spirit of Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide.’ ”
Where Emerson was mystical and vague, New Thought became simply unintelligible. He wrote: “Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet forever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable.” And they:
“As the windows of the morning are unbarred, open wide the windows of the soul that the sunshine, the inspiration, the love-light may pour in as your Creator bids you a cheery good-morning. He sends His greeting through the twittering birds, the breath of the flowers, the murmuring night wind, the voices of the children, the sparkling waves, the mountain grandeur, and the deep sea roar. He bids you—
“ ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ . . . The Divine letting go relaxes you to receive the inflow of power. . . .”
“In the preceding lessons I have endeavored to show that Man is one with an all-comprehensive Being, which flows from center to ci
rcumference and from circumference back to center by its own intrinsic law or mode of motion. This law is not imposed upon it from the outside, for there is no outside, since Being is all there is. Being, or any part of being, moves as it does because it is what it is, and for no other reason. The reason is in itself, and nowhere else.”
Or, to explain geometric diagrams of the Spirit, they wrote, “The blank space in the center of the radiant figure but poorly represents the wonderful reservoirs of Being from which all things proceed,” adding blandly, “and yet that blankness may well symbolize the unexpressed.” There was an effort, too, to get the emotional value out of religious phrases without accepting their obligations, and out of psychoanalysis without accepting its meaning, as in the profound statement that “the outer Consciousness is on its way to an at-one-ment with the inner.”
One idea the New Thoughters rejected; they did not as a rule establish communities. They met and lived together in pretty villages, but the overmastering economic impulse was lacking and, for all their worship of simplicity, they preferred comfort and an income. Emerson had pithily said of the communities of his time that they attempted to make every member rich on the property which would naturally leave every member poor: the prophets of New Thought held poverty to be not quite the will of God. The practice of New Thought was in fact extremely accurate: only its doctrine haphazard and unfortunate. In this it precisely reversed the condition of the communities and movements of a century earlier when theory was the strong point and practice, disaster. Yet New Thought accepted patiently the theory which lay behind early American communism, the pet idea of the 1840’s, Association. Of this Emerson had written with a fine individualistic scorn:
The Stammering Century Page 43