Authors: Mitch Horowitz
Mulford’s writing at
The Golden Era
contributed to a post–Gold Rush literary boom in San Francisco. Historian Franklin Walker considered Mulford one of a handful of writers whose muckraking, realistic portraiture helped birth that renaissance. Yet the former gold digger soon fell back on old business instincts (which, in actuality, were never very sharply honed). In 1872, Mulford raised five hundred dollars from local businessmen to send himself on a lecture tour of England to promote business opportunities in California, still a little-known place. Some biographers have viewed the English tour as an example of Mulford’s guile, but it was a period as difficult as his gold-prospecting days. The
writer-lecturer was forced to live on ten shillings a week, the equivalent of less than two dollars. The tour was more hardship than triumph.
Returning to America the next year, Mulford become a newspaper reporter in New York City. But in time he “grew thoroughly tired and sick of chronicling in short meter day after day the eternal round of murders, scandals, burglaries, fires, accidents and other events which people deem it indispensable to know and swallow after breakfast.”
Bored and depressed—familiar themes in his life—and coming off a marital split, Mulford quit newspaper work and in 1883 spent fifty dollars building a cabin in the swampy woods of northern New Jersey, seventeen miles from New York City. He entered the woods to live like Thoreau, but the forest idyll became another disappointment. Lonely rainy days were difficult for him to bear. At such times, he recalled, “I raked up certain old griefs out of the ashes of the past, borrowed some new troubles out of the future and put them all under the powerful microscope of a morbid imagination, which magnifies the awful about a thousand times, and diminishes the cheerful.”
Mulford experimented with using his mind to control his moods. “But I couldn’t,” he found. “I failed.” Yet he clung to the belief that an assertive mind could bring light into the dark corners of life. “I do retain a faith in its curative properties for the blues, if long enough persisted in,” he wrote in his diaries.
Mulford’s struggles with depression gave him an idea for a new type of work. In 1884 he left the cabin to resume his writing, but in a fresh way that would allow him to pursue the topics of his choosing, without facing newspaper deadlines or a police blotter. That year he conceived of creating his own line of advice-oriented pamphlets. Although his mental therapeutics had failed in the woods, Mulford believed that the mind, while perhaps too weak on its own, could summon spiritual laws to its aid.
He had gotten his first inkling of this notion back in San Francisco, where he covered séances and the local Spiritualist scene for
The Golden Era
. Mulford first participated as a bemused skeptic and later as a believer,
though always with a touch of sardonic remove, writing in
The Golden Era
in tones that could have been ascribed to H. L. Mencken if the famous skeptic had awakened one morning, to his dismay, to find himself a believer in talking to the dead:
I am not particular that my readers should imagine that I am a sort of spiritual Barnum keeping a keen look-out for curiosities of this sort. Nearly all I have seen of this science has come into my path. I have been forced to see it. I have no inclination for [séance] circles. As a general rule I detest them. I rank them with wakes and revival prayer meetings. I am perfectly willing to grant that what we term wonderful things can be done through invisible agencies.… I am already being sought after as a sort of inspector general and ghost detective for haunted houses. I waive the honor. Catch your own ghosts and convince yourselves that it is a reality or a humbug. True, the subject is very interesting to me. But it has slums and I desire not to wade through them.
Mulford’s forays into Spiritualism nonetheless convinced him of the existence of “invisible agencies” and higher laws. His hunch that these hidden forces could aid man in daily life seemed to crystallize when he visited Boston in 1884. There he came under the influence of the mind-cure culture, or as it was sometimes called, the “Boston Craze.” The city was developing a reputation, parallel to Chicago’s, as the northeastern capital of the mind-power scene. Mulford acknowledged this influence obliquely: “It was for some mysterious reason necessary to go to Boston to start any new idea or movement.”
In May 1886, Mulford raised enough money to finance his first run of advice pamphlets, which he published under the name “The White Cross Library.” He produced them steadily, seventy-four in all, until his death in 1891. First sold by mail subscription, Mulford’s pamphlets were later repackaged into a six-volume book,
Your Forces, And How to Use Them
,
issued by a New York publisher beginning in 1890. This body of work arguably became Mulford’s steadiest and most influential literary achievement—it was certainly his most commercially successful.
Mulford was never wholly upfront about his sources, but he seems to have drawn upon the work of Warren Felt Evans and Swedenborg. He repeatedly used the phrase
thoughts are things
. It became one of the mottos of the mind-power movement and today is a keynote of business motivation. The expression was actually tucked into the folds of Warren Felt Evans’s 1876 book,
Soul and Body
. Evans had used the term in a Swedenborgian manner to describe the spiritual world in which our inner-selves dwell: “In that world thoughts are things, and ideas are the most real entities of the universe.” What transpires in the spirit world, Evans believed, is mirrored in our own. Mulford had a knack for detaching such ideas and phrases from their mystical moorings. In his hands “thoughts are things” became a formula for profitable thinking.
Mulford’s writing in
Your Forces, And How to Use Them
could be seen as the most successful popularization of Swedenborg. Echoing the Swedish mystic, Mulford described the world of spirit and the world of thought as extensions of the same reality. While only once naming Swedenborg, Mulford argued that every individual routinely experiences the same out-of-body journeys as the seer:
You travel when your body is in the state called sleep. The real “you” is not your body; it is an unseen organization, your spirit. It has senses like those of the body, but far superior. It can see forms and hear voices miles away from the body. Your spirit is not in your body. It never was wholly in it; it acts on it and uses it as an instrument. It is a power which can make itself felt miles from your body.
In a tantalizing passage for mind-cure acolytes, Mulford explained his perspective on the mind’s divine power: “Thought is a substance as much as air or any other unseen element of which chemistry makes us
aware. It is of many and varying degrees in strength. Strong thought or mind is the same as strong will.” And elsewhere: “In the chemistry of the future, thought will be recognized as substance as much as the acids, oxides, and all other chemicals of to-day.” This seemed to complete the promise that “thoughts are things.”
To sympathetic readers, Mulford’s explanation of the powers of the mind sounded at once metaphysical and scientific. In particular, his approach combined New Thought philosophy with news of experiments that were emerging from the British Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in 1882 to test claims of after-death communication and nonlocalized mental phenomena, or ESP. In essence, Mulford’s ideas conjoined the emergent field of psychical research to a contemporary-sounding iteration of Swedenborgian philosophy. Whereas the published case studies of the British psychical researchers were clinical and demanding, and Swedenborg’s translations were dense, verbose, and difficult to follow, Mulford’s writing was delightfully simple, exuding pithiness, practicality, and adventurousness.
Unlike Emma Curtis Hopkins and Frances Lord, for whom prosperity was one factor among many in the march of the happy warrior, Mulford addressed the wealth question head-on. One of the first chapters in
Your Forces, And How to Use Them
was an essay called “The Law of Success.” The title probably came from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lecture of the same name, which Emerson adapted into his 1870 essay “Success.” Emerson’s essay celebrated the powers of enthusiasm, but with a tough world-weariness that denied man the ability to seize his every wish. Mulford was nowhere as discriminating as Emerson, but neither was he without accomplishment by his own lights. Mulford’s 1886 “Law of Success” pretty thoroughly laid down the template for spiritual self-help. He wrote in terms that the genre has never really deviated from, or surpassed:
Your prevailing mood, or frame of mind, has more to do than anything else with your success or failure in any undertaking.… The mind is a magnet. It has the power, first
of attracting thought, and next of sending that thought out again.… What kind of thought you most charge that magnet (your mind) with, or set it open to receive, it will attract most of that kind to you. If, then, you think, or keep most in mind, the mere thought of determination, hope, cheerfulness, strength, force, power, justice, gentleness, order, and precision, you will attract and receive more and more of such thought elements. These are among the elements of success.
In his 1888 essay “The Necessity of Riches,” Mulford was blunter on material matters, sounding much like a twenty-first-century prosperity guru: “It is right and necessary that you should have the very best of all this world’s goods—of clothing, food, house, surroundings, amusements, and all of which you are appreciative; and you should aspire to these things.” He disputed the old-fashioned ethic of self-sacrifice: “Does ‘Early to bed and early to rise make men wealthy?’ Who get up the earliest, work the most hours, and go to bed earliest? Thousands on thousands of the poor …” Rather, Mulford saw a spiritual solution: “All material wealth is gained through following a certain spiritual law.” What is this law? Only the simple dictum of Christ: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” Once more, Mulford was bringing in his version of Swedenborg. The “kingdom of God,” he argued, is a “kingdom of spiritual law” in which men’s thoughts are actual creative forces. And “if you put those thoughts or forces in one direction, they will bring you health and the good of this world to use and enjoy.… Your every thought is a force, as real as a current of electricity is a force.”
Mulford set the parameters of New Thought philosophy. In his work, physical healing was downplayed; and prosperity, business success, and power were pushed to the front.
Mulford’s gifts for wrestling spiritual philosophies into glib practicalities may have irritated some, but his skills did not escape literary notice. Mulford was one of a handful of New Thought authors whom
William James mentioned by name. James, in a March 29, 1888, letter to his wife, Alice—with whom the philosopher explored mind-cure methods—wrote: “I will send you a mind-cure theosophist book by one Mulford.… Pray read it if you can and tell me what is in it when we meet.” The report must have been reasonably positive, for Mulford remained on James’s mind more than a decade later when he was noted in the philosopher’s 1899 essay on mind-power therapeutics, “The Gospel of Relaxation.” James mentioned Mulford, Horatio Dresser, and Ralph Waldo Trine as New Thought figures that moved him to conclude that “it really looks as if a good start might be made in the direction of changing our American mental habit into something more indifferent and strong.” (By
indifferent
James meant serviceable and utilitarian.)
At a time when Mulford was enjoying his largest readership, his life slipped away. He died not only relatively young, having just passed his fifty-seventh birthday, but also mysteriously. In late May 1891, Mulford set out from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, on his small sailboat,
White Cross
. He told friends that he planned to make a leisurely trek to his childhood home of Sag Harbor, Long Island. It was a seaborne version of his hermitage in the New Jersey woods. His boat was well stocked with food, an oil stove, pens, ink, writing paper, art supplies, blankets, and a banjo. Ever the inventive explorer, Mulford had fitted the boat with an awning that could enclose, tent-style, the vessel’s 16-foot frame, providing shelter from the weather and snug sleeping quarters. But when onlookers from the shore of Sheepshead Bay noticed that the covered boat had been unattended for a few days, they went to explore. On May 30 they found Mulford’s body aboard. He had been dead for three days. There was no sign of illness, injury, or foul play.
“How or why Mulford should have died on an open boat within easy reach of assistance and where the sound of his voice could have been heard ashore is the only mysterious feature that remains of this remarkable case,” the
New York Times
reported on June 1, 1891.
Suicide could not be ruled out. Mulford had once again been writing of his old depression, and struggling to apply his mind-power ideas to
himself, in search of a way forward. On May 11, he wrote in his journal: “The depression you feel is the old self of six years ago.… You will soon throw it off and enjoy more than ever before. Exercise very gently and when your old condition comes out, complain in words, for you then materialize it—which helps to get rid of it much faster.”
And on May 25, two days before his death: “Now you see your mind seizes immediately on trifles and makes mountains of them. I brought you under these conditions that I might more clearly show you this. It is the fear of these things, so bred in the mind, that does the injury; and your mind, in these periods of isolation, will be more readily cleared of these tendencies than in any other way.”
In his struggle, Mulford seemed to think, finally, of the audience who took succor in his work and what he owed them: “You are now fighting for thousands, as well as for yourself and me.… Remember the chief end and object of the boat is to help you get into an element of thought. It is not going so far with the boat—it is going into that new element.… Your material part does not like to get out of the world—your spiritual part does. (The body and the soul did not fit each other.) Recognize the first feeling of gloom that comes as an evil thought. Push it off directly and it is not so apt to find lodgment.”