One Simple Idea (11 page)

Christian Science was not out of the picture in the new era—the church gained some flexibility from licensure regulations on grounds of religious freedom. Nor did Christian Science and the various mind therapies lose their sense of purpose. Indeed, James continued to experiment in these areas until his death in August 1910 (a year that also marked the passing of Mary Baker Eddy). But a good deal of the desperation that had once driven Americans to seek alternatives within mind-cure or Christian Science was lifting as the twentieth century opened.
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For all the medical changes of the early twentieth century, many Americans remained eager to explore—and, above all, to make practical use of—the hidden frontiers of the mind. Advances in science actually stoked rather than dampened this enthusiasm. The dawn of the century marked a rapid discovery of previously unseen forces. The physical sciences detected subatomic particles and pioneered the uses of x-rays, streaming
electricity, wireless signals, and radio waves. Physicians isolated viruses and microorganisms. Psychologists probed the unconscious roots of neurosis and trauma. On all fronts, scientific progress pointed to a world of covert influences.

Money itself could seem to emerge from out of unseen realms. The expansion of stock markets, bond trading, and share holding presented increasing numbers of people with a means of profit making no longer bound to the tangible exchange of goods and services. In turn, a thickening stream of consumer products appeared in the pages of catalogues and the windows and aisles of convenient, modern stores.

In his 1921 essay “My ‘New-Thought’ Boyhood,” writer Charles Thomas Hallinan reflected on the changes he saw as he was growing up in Minnesota during the late nineteenth century: “A big department store—the first of its kind in the country—had sprung up in our raw, windy Western city.… That department store played the very devil with our peace of mind. It multiplied enormously the apparent necessities of life, and brought the luxuries just without our reach.” To this material problem, many people sought a spiritual solution.

Americans began to ponder the question of how to use mental power to attract money. But this idea did not get its start in the brandy-addled minds of business barons sitting in gentlemen’s clubs, or among gimlet-eyed hucksters devising get-rich-quick schemes. In actuality, the concept of a metaphysical approach to wealth was set into the public firmament by people with socially progressive and even radical instincts. As seen in the experience of the early graduates of Emma Curtis Hopkins’s seminary, the New Thought movement represented a mosaic of seekers who had simultaneous impulses for avant-garde religion and radical politics.

A circle of turn-of-the century social progressives, who moved in between cultures of metaphysical experiment and political reform, saw the money-attracting powers of the mind as a path to social equity, a means of evening out and redistributing the balance of wealth. When such figures identified themselves politically, they were variously suffragists,
democratic socialists, black liberationists, trade unionists, and animal-rights activists. Their values squared less with the business worldview of Gilded Age magnates than with the redistributive impulses of the “Social Gospel” and even the economic radicalism of Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party of America. The prosperity gospel that dominates many of today’s largest and most conservative evangelical churches begins with the story of these spirited radicals.

An Englishwoman with a passion for suffragism helped bring the prosperity gospel to America. Her name was Frances Lord, and she journeyed to the United States as a guest of feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton sought Lord’s assistance in devising
The Women’s Bible
, a radical retelling of Scripture that recognized the role of women. But Stanton’s helpmate quickly removed herself from this work in order to venture into metaphysical realms that developed on the edges of the women’s rights movement.

Before coming to America, Frances Lord was known as an advocate of progressive education methods, as well as an early English translator of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. In 1882 Lord made the first English translation of Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
. She was attracted by the radicalism of Ibsen’s tale of Nora, the awakened housewife who determines to break free of her domestic role. Concerned that readers would mistake
A Doll’s House
for children’s literature, Lord retitled the play
Nora
.

In 1883, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her daughter, Harriot, met Lord on a trip to England. Stanton found the English translator “a woman of rare culture.” She also discovered Lord to be a woman of occult passions. Through Lord’s influence, Stanton recalled, “my daughter and I had become interested in the school of Theosophy and read
Isis Unveiled
by Madame Blavatsky.” Lord directed Stanton to other works that emerged from the occult revival generated by Blavatsky, including journalist A. P.
Sinnett’s
The Occult World
and mystical writer Anna Kingsford’s
The Perfect Way
.

“Full of these ideas,” Stanton wrote, “I soon interested my cousins in the subject, and we resolved to explore, as far as possible, some of these Eastern mysteries, of which we had heard so much.” Once back home in America, Stanton visited her cousin Elizabeth Smart Miller in Geneva, New York. The cousins tried to lure mystical thinker and Egyptologist Gerald Massey to travel from New York City to tutor them. But Massey was ill, and Stanton shifted her attention to other goals—specifically, a radical interpretation of Scripture intended to annotate and highlight the contributions of women in shaping the Judeo-Christian tradition. The project would consume Stanton for some nine years.

Stanton’s re-visioning of Scripture grew out of a perspective she had developed during her study of philosophy in the 1860s. She grew particularly interested in the ideas of positivism—which held that the world, in all its facets, is governed by discernible laws. In the same way that nature and the cosmos function under cycles of immutable laws, Stanton reasoned, social laws would inevitably anoint women as the progenitors of a spiritual and societal revolution. But for women to commence this cycle, she believed, female intellects first needed to explore alternatives to orthodox Christianity and the limits it had placed on feminine accomplishment. This gave rise to Stanton’s sympathies for Blavatsky and the female leaders of New Thought.

Stanton saw a reformulated Scripture as the ignition point of feminine awakening. Yet her closest confidant and collaborator, Susan B. Anthony, was, by the 1880s, uninterested in spiritual matters, of either the occult or traditional variety. To Anthony religion belonged to a dead past. “Barbarism does not grow out of ancient Jewish Bibles,” she wrote Stanton, “but out of our own sordid meanness!!”

If Stanton was going to complete her feminist retelling of Scripture, she required new helpers. “It was perhaps this search for soul mates,” wrote historian Kathi Kern, “that drew a hesitant Stanton toward the
practice of Mind Cure and New Thought in the decade of the 1880s. Several new friendships beckoned her into the circles of these popular ‘new religions.’ ”

In Stanton’s eyes, Frances Lord had shown impeccable metaphysical, literary, and reformist instincts. In 1886 Stanton and Harriot appealed to Lord to travel to America and help them begin their project. Accepting the invitation, Lord reached Stanton’s home in Tenafly, New Jersey, on August 4, 1886. Things started out well enough. “Miss Lord and I worked several weeks together,” Stanton recalled. The younger woman “ran through the Bible in a few days, marking each chapter that in any way referred to women. We found that the work would not be so great as we imagined, as all the facts in teachings in regard to women occupied less than one-tenth of the whole Scriptures.”

But Lord’s interest soon wandered. She began hearing word of the mind-cure scene, and especially the classes being taught in Chicago by Emma Curtis Hopkins. Lord had complained of discomforts of the ear, eye, and leg, and she resolved to journey west to seek out mind-cure lessons. She experienced some early, encouraging improvements. Her experience in Chicago gave her the faith that mind-cure represented “a Great Social Reform” that would allow individuals—and women particularly—to assert control over their health.

Throughout 1887 and 1888, Lord was in and out of Chicago, where she took classes from Hopkins, purchased a New Thought–oriented newspaper called
The Woman’s World
, and—in the mold of Hopkins’s earliest student-practitioners—began teaching mind-cure methods herself.

Stanton had lost Lord’s assistance, but that didn’t deter her from enlisting other women in the New Thought world—including ex–Christian Scientist Ursula Gestefeld and suffragist Louisa Southworth, a speaker from the Hopkins graduation. Stanton wistfully wrote off Lord. “Miss Lord became deeply interested in psychical research,” she concluded, “and I could get no more work out of her.” This disappointment, however, did not mean the end of their friendship. By early 1887, Lord
had persuaded Stanton and her daughter to enroll in a mind-cure class when they made a return trip to England. In the spirit of intellectual inquiry that marked Stanton’s career, she agreed to take the metaphysical course, she told a friend, because “we are not fanatical on the question but searchers after truth.”

Within the American New Thought scene, meanwhile, Lord had discovered her natural element. In the space of several months she became an independent teacher, a newspaper publisher, and, in fall of 1888, the author of a substantial and rigorous manual,
Christian Science Healing: Its Principles and Practice with Full Explanations for Home Students
. It was here that Lord struck the opening note of the prosperity gospel.

Lord’s massive book focused chiefly on physical healing and emotional well-being, mostly by means of affirmations, prayers, and denial of the “false” conditions of illness or bodily pain. But Lord’s most significant departure, toward the close of the book, was a “treatment” for overcoming poverty.

Lord provided a six-day program of affirmations and exercises to break down the mental bonds of poverty. On the first day, readers were to disabuse themselves of the idea that they were “unlucky,” disadvantaged, or in any way lacking in the ability to become good earners, and declare:

A notable element of the Lord affirmations was her emphasis on ethics. By the time the six-day program is ended, Lord reminded the reader: “As Spiritual life intensifies, the desire for mere possession of wealth
always lessens.” She assured that “Money will come to serve you when you are fit to rule it.” She warned against the desire to “ ‘keep up appearances’ ” and to “extend the Ego artificially by having a share in all that is going on around, whether it concerns us or not.”

For Lord, the extension of mind-cure methods into prosperity was entirely natural. Her aim was not self-inflation but liberation. Just as mental therapeutics could free the body from the former abuses of the medical profession, so, she believed, could the prosperity mind-set contribute to the liberation of women or working people from the strains of the Industrial Age, a goal that steadily gravitated to the center of New Thought.

The writer who most decisively advocated the wealth-building power of the mind is a journalist almost no one remembers: Prentice Mulford. In a sense, Mulford’s work is the “missing link” in the positive-thinking movement’s transition into a contemporary philosophy of personal success. Mulford’s writing of the late 1880s reflects the crucial moment when the abstruse, nineteenth-century language of the movement fell away; in Mulford’s work there emerged a remarkably modern and appealing vernacular, which won a vastly expanded audience for mind-power metaphysics.

In some ways, Mulford was the most important of all the early self-improvement writers. His personal life was itself an exercise in repeat transformations—and, toward its end, he struggled to live by the principles he pioneered.

Mulford was born to a wealthy Long Island family in 1834. His father’s early death cut short his fortunes. At age fifteen, he was forced to leave school to support his mother and three sisters by running the family’s sole remaining property: a four-story hotel in Sag Harbor, Long Island. After about four years the hotel failed. Day labor was too dull
and dead-end a prospect for Mulford. The ambitious and curious young man instead went to the sea, joining the last leg of Sag Harbor’s whaling industry.

By the late 1850s, with whaling in decline, Mulford found himself stranded in San Francisco. With the Gold Rush booming, he took up life as a prospector, working in mining camps among other displaced men. It was a punishing daily routine spent bending over, digging and panning. Readers were hungry for news about prospecting, which was heavily romanticized at the time. Although Mulford hadn’t set his mind on becoming a writer, in late 1861 he began producing wry newspaper portraits of mining life, under the pen name “Dogberry.” Unlike other writers, who made the Gold Rush seem like a great adventure, Mulford depicted its losses, hit-and-miss luck, and physical hardship. Miners saw him as a voice of their own.

By 1866, with his mining ventures stagnating and his freelance articles paying meagerly, Mulford finally got a break. He was offered an editing position at
The Golden Era
, a San Francisco literary journal whose contributors included Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. A friend recalled Mulford showing up in the city looking like “a weatherbeaten young man, as shy as a country boy, and with many traits that must have resembled Thoreau in his youth.” Mulford recalled arriving with “an old gun, a saddle, a pair of blankets, an enfeebled suit of clothes and a trunk with abundant room for many things not in it.”