Authors: Mitch Horowitz
Ford lived in New York City at the same time that Neville began his discipleship with Abdullah. Neville recalled his and Abdullah’s first meeting in 1931, and U.S. Census records show Ford was living in Harlem on West 131st Street in 1930. (He was also at the same address in 1920, shortly before Joseph Murphy arrived.) Historian Howard Brotz, in his study of the black-Jewish movement in Harlem, wrote of Ford: “It is certain that he studied Hebrew with some immigrant teacher and was a key link” in communicating “approximations of Talmudic Judaism” from within the Ethiopianism movement. This would fit Neville’s depiction of Abdullah tutoring him in Hebrew and Kabbalah. (It should be noted that early-twentieth-century occultists often loosely used the term
Kabbalah
to denote any kind of Judaic study.)
More still, Ford’s philosophy of Ethiopianism possessed a mental metaphysics. “The philosophy,” noted historian Jill Watts, “… contained an element of mind-power, for many adherents of Ethiopianism subscribed to mental healing and believed that material circumstances could be altered through God’s power. Such notions closely paralleled tenets of New Thought …” Ford was also an early supporter of black-nationalist pioneer Marcus Garvey and served as the musical director of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey, as noted earlier, suffused his movement with New Thought metaphysics and phraseology.
The commonalities between Ford and Abdullah are striking: the
black rabbi, the turban, the study of Hebrew, mind-power metaphysics, the Barbados connection, and the time frame. All of it point to Ford as a viable candidate for the mysterious teacher Abdullah.
Yet there are too many gaps in both Neville’s and Ford’s backgrounds to allow for a conclusive leap. Records of Ford’s life grow thinner after 1931, the year he departed New York and migrated to Ethiopia. Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, after his coronation in 1930, offered land grants to any African Americans willing to relocate to the East African nation. Ford accepted the offer. The timing of Ford’s departure is the biggest single blow to the Abdullah-Ford theory. Neville said he and his teacher had studied together for five years. This obviously would not have been possible with Ford, who had apparently left New York in 1931, the same year Neville said that he and Abdullah first met.
In a coda to Ford’s career, he journeyed to Africa, along with several other American followers of Ethiopianism, to accept the land grants offered by Haile Selassie. Yet Ford’s life in the Ethiopian countryside, a period so sadly sparse of records, could only have been a difficult existence for the urbane musician. Here was a man uprooted from metropolitan surroundings at an advanced age to settle into a new and unfamiliar agricultural landscape. All the while, Ethiopia was facing the threat of invasion by fascist Italy. Ford died in Ethiopia in September 1935, a few weeks before Mussolini’s troops crossed the border.
While Ford’s migration runs counter to Neville’s timeline, there are other ways in which Ford may fit into the Abdullah mythos. Neville could have extrapolated Abdullah from Ford’s character after spending a briefer time with Ford. Or Abdullah may have been a metaphorical composite of several contemporaneous figures, perhaps including Ford.
*4
Or, finally, Abdullah may have been Neville’s invention, though this scenario doesn’t account for Murphy’s record.
The full story may never be knowable, but the notion of two young
metaphysical seekers, Neville and Murphy, living in pre–World War II New York and studying under an African-American esoteric teacher, whether Ford or another, is itself wholly plausible. The crisscrossing currents of the mind-power movement in the first half of the twentieth century produced collaborations among a wide range of spiritual travelers. Such figures traversed the metaphysical landscape with a passion for personal development and self-reinvention.
All of these determined seekers compelled mainstream spiritual culture to adapt itself to New Thought’s innovations. But the positive-thinking movement failed in one key respect. And that was in the ideal hoped for by Richard C. Cabot: To marry the possibilities of mind-power methods to rationalism; to devise a metaphysical therapeutics that could find allies among medical authorities and scientists.
The possibilities had once seemed promising. In the early 1950s, Ernest Holmes shared a congenial dinner with Albert Einstein at Caltech. Holmes said that Einstein agreed with his premise “that permanent world peace is not an illusion but a potential possibility and an evolutionary imperative, and that science will
aid
in that evolution.” As late as 1969, the
New York Times
respectfully covered a meeting of the International New Thought Alliance under the headline “Mental Power as Force for Peace Tied to Man’s Triumph in Space.”
But the push to find common ground between mind-power and science puttered out, and would not be heard again for another generation. New Thought books were considered too miraculous in tone, and too magical in their claims, to win attention from scientists, physicians, or literary and journalistic arbiters of opinion.
Medical researchers, however, did begin turning new attention to the placebo effect after World War II. The impetus arrived when caregivers at an Allied battlefield hospital in southern Italy eased pain among injured soldiers by telling them that the saline solutions they were receiving
were morphine, a substance of which the hospital had run short. Yet even as civilian researchers reconsidered the possibilities of mind-body medicine, they did so without a nod toward, or even any historical awareness of, the claims of the mental-healing movement. No new intellectual champion, akin to Cabot or William James, emerged to draw correlations between modern medical questions and the experiences that mind-cure advocates had reported since the late nineteenth century.
The mind-power movement was invisible within the intellectual culture. In a sense, this absence reflected the movement’s second historical failure. The first had occurred earlier in the twentieth century when progressive figures such as Helen Wilmans, Wallace D. Wattles, and Elizabeth Towne found themselves unable to sustainably wed mind-power culture to movements for social reform.
Even as New Thought’s intellectual and social aims floundered, however, its popularity soared. Or, rather, the popularity of its methods did. The term
New Thought
was only occasionally heard. Positive-thinking ideas, stripped of mystical language, congregational labels, and any historical moorings, began flowing into mainstream culture—and not just the religious culture: sales conferences, board rooms, dinnertime conversations, therapy offices, and even political campaigns began buzzing with the metaphysics of optimism.
This development arrived after World War II, when a newer and less overtly mystical generation of positive-thinking teachers made their impact felt. These newcomers had taken careful measure of New Thought’s successes and failings. They meticulously distanced themselves from the occult language and miraculous claims that could turn away mainstream people. This fresh breed of thought-crusaders finally, and permanently, transformed positive thinking into the philosophy of American life.
*1
The Jewish Science movement remains active. The Society of Jewish Science maintains a congregation on Manhattan’s East Side. That congregation’s longtime religious leader, Tehilla Lichtenstein (1893–1973), was the first female head of an American Jewish congregation. She took over the pulpit from her husband, Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein, after his death in 1938. Like Emma Curtis Hopkins’s seminary and other New Thought–inspired groups, Jewish Science evinced a notable pattern of early female leadership.
*2
This book contained Larson’s “Optimist Creed.” His switch in the copyright dates, from 1910 to 1912, created the lasting misimpression that the world-famous meditation appeared two years later than it actually did.
*3
For many years, Unity’s residential housing was segregated. Unity’s black ministerial students and guests were denied residency until 1956, when Johnnie Colemon, an African-American female ministerial student from Chicago, embarked on a successful petition drive to open campus housing. Colemon became founding minister of one of the nation’s largest New Thought congregations, the Christ Universal Temple, in Chicago.
*4
Neville may have hinted as much, especially in light of his love for Hebrew symbolism. He affectionately called Abdullah “Ab” for short—a variant of the Hebrew
abba
for “father.” Neville may have fashioned a mythical “father mentor” from various teachers.
Nothing is impossible.
—Ronald Reagan
In the 1920s two revolutionary self-help authors arrived on the American scene. The two men had never collaborated but they possessed a shared instinct. By stripping New Thought of its magical language, they reconfigured mind-power principles into a secular methodology for personal achievement. Each went on to write landmark books whose titles and bylines became synonymous with success:
Think and Grow Rich
by Napoleon Hill and
How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie.
Hill was more clearly a product of the mind-power culture. His first book, in 1928, was an eight-volume opus called
The Law of Success
, a
title borrowed from Prentice Mulford. Like Mulford, Hill believed that the mind possessed clairvoyant energies and forces. In particular Hill emphasized the existence of a “Master Mind,” an over-mind of shared human consciousness, which reveals itself to us in moments of intuition, in hunches, or in prophetic dreams. Tapping into the Master Mind became the centerpiece of his work.
Hill jettisoned any vestige of the mind-power movement’s earlier social consciousness. “I gave a beggar a dime,” he wrote, “with the suggestion that he invest it in a copy of Elbert Hubbard’s
Message to Garcia
.” Hill was referring to Hubbard’s famous 1899 essay about an American soldier who displayed remarkable drive in carrying a message behind enemy lines to a Cuban rebel leader during the Spanish-American War.
Message to Garcia
was Hubbard’s paean to self-will and personal accountability. Hubbard’s social outlook, however, wasn’t quite what Hill’s tribute implied.
When not praising the rugged virtues admired by Hill, Hubbard had produced articles on the horrendous working conditions in southern cotton mills, helping instigate some of the nation’s first child labor laws. Hubbard and his wife Alice, a suffragist and New-Thoughter, were killed on a peace mission to Europe in 1915 to protest World War I to the German Kaiser. A German U-boat torpedoed their passenger liner, the
Lusitania
, off the Irish coast. They died with nearly twelve hundred other civilians. “Big business has been to blame in this thing,” Hubbard had written of the war before his journey, “… let it not escape this truth—that no longer shall individuals be allowed to thrive by selling murder machines to the mob.”
Hill overlooked that side of Hubbard’s work. Instead, he geared his appeal to the modern striver who wanted to get ahead. This focus probably grew from the influence of the man Hill came to idolize, and whose ideas undergirded his own: the industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
Napoleon Hill became interested in the science of success in 1908 while working as a reporter for
Bob Taylor’s Magazine
, an inspirational journal founded by the ex-governor of Hill’s home state of Virginia. The publisher, Bob Taylor, took a particular interest in up-by-the-bootstraps life stories of business leaders. Through Taylor’s connections, Hill was able to score the ultimate “get”: an interview with the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.
Hill described his first encounters with Carnegie—“the richest man that the richest nation on earth ever produced”—in terms that brought to mind Moses receiving the tablets on Mount Sinai. Whatever impression Hill left on Carnegie, the industrialist made no mention of the younger man in his writings. Nonetheless, Carnegie’s memoirs do paint the image of himself as a man who enjoyed discussing the metaphysics of success.
In his 1920 autobiography, which appeared the year after his death, Carnegie recalled that as an adolescent he “became deeply interested in the mysterious doctrines of Swedenborg.” A Spiritualist aunt encouraged the young Carnegie to develop his psychical talents, or “ability to expound ‘spiritual sense.’ ”
Carnegie’s earliest writings probed whether there are natural laws of success, a theme that reemerged in Hill’s work. In 1889, Carnegie published his essay “Wealth”—which might have gained little note if not for its republication by England’s
Pall Mall Gazette
under the more provocative title by which it became famous: “The Gospel of Wealth.” Taking a leaf from the neo-Darwinian views of philosopher Herbert Spencer, Carnegie described a “law of competition” that he believed brought a rough, necessary order to the world:
While the law may be sometimes hard to the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great
inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial but essential for the future progress of the race.
Where Wallace D. Wattles had extolled creativity above competition, Carnegie welcomed “laws of accumulation” as necessary means of separating life’s winners from losers. But Carnegie’s essay had an interesting wrinkle. He counseled giving away one’s money in acts of philanthropy as the legitimate culmination of worldly success. And if the rich didn’t find a way to disperse their fortunes through philanthropy, Carnegie called for a nearly 100 percent estate tax to settle the matter for them.
At their 1908 meeting, Hill eagerly questioned Carnegie about his success-building methods. The steel manufacturer urged the reporter to speak with other captains of commerce to determine whether a definable set of steps led to their accomplishments. Carnegie offered to open doors for Hill. Hill spent the next twenty years studying and interviewing businessmen, diplomats, generals, inventors, and other high achievers in an effort to map out their shared principles. He finally distilled seventeen traits or habits that these outliers seemed to have in common. They included concentrating your energies on
one definite major aim
; doing more work than you are paid for; cultivating intuition, or a sixth sense; showing persistence; reprogramming your thoughts through autosuggestion; practicing tolerance of opinion; gaining specialized knowledge; and convening around you a collaborative Master Mind group, whose members could blend their mental energies and ideas.