One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  These shifts in economics and medicine changed the needs of the American public, and the face of New Thought.

  * * *

  *1 The predominance of female Christian Scientists was striking. In 1900, for example, of 2,564 Christian Science practitioners, or trained healers, 79 percent were women; ten years later, of 4,350 practitioners, 89 percent were women.

  *2 Hopkins continued a relationship of sorts with her husband, George. The two did not divorce until 1900 (after which he remarried), and George visited her at least twice in Chicago. Less clear are Hopkins’s relations with her son, John. He was apparently left in the care of relatives back in New England. John died in 1905 at age thirty, probably of influenza. At the time he was living near his father in Manchester, New Hampshire.

  *3 Cramer is often cited as taking a class with Hopkins in 1887 in San Francisco—though this is sometimes disputed.

  *4 Horatio Dresser, in his 1919 A History of the New Thought Movement, said Holcombe “was the first writer in the mental-science period to employ the term ‘New Thought,’ capitalized, to designate the new teaching in the sense in which the term is now used.” While this reference is widely repeated, the Holcombe pamphlet, in fact, does not show that capitalization. Nonetheless, Holcombe’s buoyant and accessible work did call out the phrase.

  chapter four

  from poverty to power

  The working class may become the

  master class whenever they will

  begin to do things in a Certain Way …

  —Wallace D. Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich, 1910

  The 1890s was an age of medical progress. Ads for patent medicines, from digestive syrups to baldness-curing creams, could still be found in most magazines, but medicine, like other fields of study, became more scientific and systematized. Colleges began graduate programs in the sciences and psychology. Physicians and researchers made dramatic advances in treating and preventing microbial diseases. The American public for the first time began to view doctors as figures to be trusted rather than feared. State legislatures and courts, meanwhile, started to stringently scrutinize the mental-healing philosophies.

  In several well-publicized cases, patients had died after receiving Christian Science treatments rather than normative medical care. No prosecutions resulted, as the courts were unable to demonstrate that conventional treatment would have resulted in different outcomes. In the wake of the controversy, the state of Massachusetts began to pass licensing laws designed to prevent religious healers from calling themselves medical practitioners. Other states had been tightening medical laws for several years: as early as 1880 the New York state legislature barred magnetic, or Mesmerist, healers from practicing medicine.

  In Boston, Harvard philosopher William James grew alarmed that such moves would dampen the country’s mood of inquiry and experiment. In 1894 and 1898, James personally lobbied against licensing bills in Massachusetts intended to prohibit nontraditional medical practice, particularly the activities of Christian Scientists and mind-healers. Both times James won measured victories. He believed that mental healing was an unknown territory filled with possibilities, and that to place limits on it so early in its existence could stifle its potential. “I regard therapeutics as in too undeveloped a state for us to be able to afford to stamp out the contributions of all fanatics and one-sided geniuses,” James told a friend in 1894.

  James personally used mind-cure and Christian Science methods several times between 1887 and 1909, receiving treatment for insomnia, depression, anxiety, and angina. He found the results could be at once tantalizingly effective and frustratingly elusive—a fact over which he agonized. “I think,” he wrote a friend in 1909, “there is a certain impediment in the minds of people brought up as I have been, which keeps the bolt from flying back, and letting the door of the more absolutely grounded life fly open. They can’t back out of their system of finite prudences and intellectual scruples, even though in words they may admit that there are other ways of living, and more successful ones.”

  James’s position was difficult for his narrowest critics to understand. It wasn’t that he wanted to be right about the merits of mind-cure; rather he wanted to be thorough. He believed that allopathic medicine remained mired in its own brands of half-tested ideas, blind spots, and a general lack of transparency. Hence, James encouraged an open search for clinical possibilities—in both traditional and irregular fields of practice. Above all, he loathed seeing experiments in mental therapeutics stilled or stigmatized.

  James brought to the mental-healing question the same passion for intellectual inquiry that fueled his interest into laboratory research of claimed psychical and paranormal phenomena. He nurtured a truly constructive skepticism—an approach that would be lost on future generations of critics, who were often unable to balance intellectual discretion with radical inquiry.

  “It seems to me,” James wrote to a friend in 1898, “it is not a question of fondness or non-fondness for mind-curers [heaven knows I am not fond and can’t understand a word of their jargon except their precept of assuming yourself to be well and claiming health rather than sickness which I am sure is magnificent] but of the necessity of legislature interference with the natural play of things.”

  James’s crusade for the open study and practice of mental healing came into public view in 1894. That year the Massachusetts state legislature was considering a bill prohibiting medical practice other than by physicians who held degrees from recognized medical colleges. In a letter of March 17, James protested the bill to the Boston Evening Transcript, naming three grounds for its rejection:

  I. It is too grandmotherly, and goes against the best political habits and traditions of our State.

  II. It adds but an infinitesimal degree of security to the citizens’ chances of being faultlessly treated when sick.

  III. It tends to obstruct the process of therapeutic knowledge.

  To those reasons, James added one additional note, which drew upon the public’s lingering mistrust of the mainline medical profession, even near the dawn of the twentieth century: “The serious therapeutic inadequacy which the population of Massachusetts, taken in bulk, is exposed to is the inadequacy of the regularly educated profession.”

  Within about two weeks, the legislature struck a compromise, which James supported. Mental-healers and other nontraditional practitioners could function as they wished but could not advertise themselves as doctors or M.D.s. “In principle,” James wrote to the Evening Transcript on April 2, “such a bill seems to me excellent. The people have a right to know who is regular and who is irregular, and to follow their several affinities.”

  All sides seemed more or less placated with the compromise. Within four years, however, the legislature was considering a stricter amendment to the bill, one that would once more outlaw medical practice by any but regularly licensed M.D.s. This time, James personally appeared at the statehouse in Boston to oppose the move.

  In a packed meeting room on March 2, before a crowd that spilled outside the doors, the Harvard philosopher spoke before the legislature’s Committee on Public Health. His speech critiqued the persistence of a guild mentality among medical and research professionals. Cliquish thinking in any medical or professional culture, James said, served to elevate the opinions of those who are apprenticed within a given system, while disparaging or neglecting outsider perspectives. He asked the committee:

  How many graduates, recent or early, of the Harvard Medical School, have spent twenty-four hours of their lives in experimentally testing homeopathic remedies, or seeing them tested? Probably not ten in the whole Commonwealth. How many of my learned medical friends, who to-day are so freely denouncing mind-cure methods as an abominable superstition, have taken the pains to follow up on the cases of some mind-curer, one by one, so as to acquaint themselves with the results? I doubt if there is a single individual. “Of such experience as that,” they say, “give me ignorance rather than knowledge.” And the
Club-opinion of the Massachusetts Medical Society pats them on the head and backs them up. I don’t blame any set of practitioners from remaining ignorant of all practice but their own.… But when ignorance and narrowness, instead of being humble, grow insolent and authoritative, and ask for laws whose only immediate result can be to consecrate and perpetuate them, then I think that every citizen interested in the growth of a genuinely complete medical science should rise up and protest.

  In his typical style, James concluded by shaking off his scolding tone with a wry conclusion: “The death-rate is not rising, in spite of all quackery.” The testimony represented James at his most skillful as a public intellectual. The committee unanimously voted down the bill. Yet it was not a complete victory for James. He was assailed in medical journals, including the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, which called him “a spokesman of medievalism and an ally of quackery.”

  It was also clear that the licensure movement, with or without James at its back, was rapidly spreading. By the time of James’s statehouse address, new licensing laws had been enacted in Ohio and New York, and were advancing elsewhere. During the 1890s, thirty-five states established some form of regulated licensure for medical graduates, and in fourteen of those states licensing was limited to graduates of board-approved schools. By the close of the decade, the Alaskan Territories alone lacked some kind of licensure laws.

  Medical Progress

  While James was concerned that the licensing legislation might cast a chill over experimentation and intellectual inquiry, the overall state of mainstream medicine was, in fact, dramatically and rapidly improving.

  Before the 1890s, American medicine had, for generations, lagged behind the nation’s progress in other areas of science. This was partly due to a lack of teaching and research facilities. At the start of the nineteenth century, only three hospitals existed throughout the country: in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia.

  Although Europe’s medical science and caring institutions of the nineteenth century were not dramatically advanced over America’s, Europeans benefited from a body of practical medical knowledge, from wound dressing to botanical remedies, which had gradually emerged from medieval guilds. Apprenticed apothecaries and informal healers ministered to dwellers of villages and industrial towns, while a higher class of physicians, who were trained in royal academies and universities, served the upper classes, who afforded them a good deal of respect. Europe’s immigrants to America generally came out of farming and craft trades; few trained physicians (who might be able to teach others) crossed the Atlantic.

  Because American towns had little means of educating physicians, people often were left at the mercy of self-taught, erratically trained doctors, who were rarely held in esteem. The situation could be particularly difficult in frontier territories. In 1850, a survey of medical practitioners in eastern Tennessee found that 201 physicians served a population of 164,000—and of those practitioners only 35 were graduates of some kind of regular school. Almost half said they had received no instruction, beyond personal reading.

  The crisis in American medicine experienced a dramatic turnaround in the early 1890s. Two factors brought improvements. On the research front, the “Paris School,” a late-nineteenth-century group of French biologists and physicians, developed advances in germ theory, which convinced doctors in Europe and America that many diseases arose from infections and disorders in specific organs. This finally ended the painful therapies of fluid-letting or bleeding, and introduced new protocols of sanitation and treatment of infections. Second, the Johns Hopkins Medical School opened its doors in 1893 with the express purpose of normalizing and standardizing the manner in which medical education and licensure functioned from state to state. Universities and medical schools began to model themselves on the Hopkins teaching program, which imported methods from German teaching hospitals and medical schools, including mentored residencies and research requirements. With these advances, the nation’s medical profession began correcting the abusive practices that Christian Science and the mind-cure culture had arisen partly in response to.

  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.*

  Hidden Forces

  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.

  “God Is Not Poor”

  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.

&nb
sp; 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.