One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  Jewish congregations were touched as well. In the 1920s members of the Reform rabbinate made insistent pleas that rabbis be trained in mental therapeutics and taught to guide Jewish congregations in the use of healing prayers and inspirational religious readings. This resulted in the first pastoral counseling classes at rabbinical seminaries, a trend that quickly expanded to other denominations.

  New Thought’s most dynamic voices had long promoted a vision of therapeutic spirituality, and their efforts altered America’s religious landscape—to the point where churches had to become forces not only for salvation but also for healing.

  The Gospel of Usefulness

  Americans of the early twentieth century were primed for this project—this quest to remake religion as useful—by their fascination with ideas and protocols that were deemed “scientific.” For many people, the scientific method—by which a hypothesis could be tested through a set of repeated steps and empirical results—held out the hope of identifying the inner workings of life, and improving on them.

  The Victorian age and the generation after were electrified by scientific advances. Louis Pasteur identified germs as the root cause of many diseases. Charles Darwin postulated the orderly development of biologic life. Albert Einstein probed the hidden mechanics behind energy, matter, and time. Sigmund Freud identified childhood traumas as the roots of adult neuroses. Even in politics, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that the hidden dynamics of life could be traced to economic exploitation, which resulted in inevitable patterns of class conflict.

  All of these theories and outlooks shaped the central idea of modernity: That outer events possessed unseen yet knowable antecedents. Many social scientists, academics, and everyday people believed that through a proper grasp of natural laws—whether physical, social, or political—life’s secrets could be unlocked and daily existence improved.

  The modern faith in science and utility was felt in the realm of the spirit, too. In the years immediately following World War I, religious scholar Horatio Dresser wrote: “Our thought of God has become practical, concrete. This newer conception of God also belongs with the desire of modern man to test everything for himself, to feel in his own life whatever man claims to have felt in the past that exalted him.”

  Dresser, William James, and others wondered if certain spiritual practices could be shaped into a regimen that would produce observable, repeatable benefits. James had used the term “Gospel of Relaxation” to describe “certain psychological doctrines and show their practical applications to mental hygiene.” He presented a set of mostly New Thought practices (“act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there”), which he believed could improve confidence, help deter illness, and create more easy-going relationships. Could this be the start of a modern, rationalist program for psychological and spiritual health?

  Among New-Thoughters, the language for this project had long been in place. “We must deal scientifically with our faults,” Emma Curtis Hopkins had written. Phineas Quimby had foretold a “science of health and happiness.” Poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote of “The Science of Right Thinking” and Wallace D. Wattles of “The Science of Being Great.” By the early decades of the twentieth century, mind-cure and New Thought acolytes were eager to prove the efficacy of spiritual practice.

  Heartland Rebels

  At the forefront of this mission stood a group of “happy warriors”—a dynamic set of writers, teachers, and innovators who created the New Thought renaissance of the first half of the twentieth century. These impresarios shaped positive thinking as it is understood today: as a program to successful living. In most cases, they are little known; but these men and women articulated their ideals with such persuasiveness that their books, sermons, and spiritual regimens reshaped mainstream religion—and, eventually, much of modern life.

  The happy warriors who ignited this revolution in practical spirituality had few ties to institutional faith. They were charismatic, independent teachers—many with their own original take on the positive-thinking creed. They had heartland names such as Frank B. Robinson, Glenn Clark, Ernest Holmes, and Roy Jarrett. In many cases, they were part of no historical religious tradition, although they repeatedly proved their ability to reach mainstream worshippers. They were often self-educated, with reading tastes that ran to Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Blake, Emanuel Swedenborg, Mary Baker Eddy, and Warren Felt Evans, as well as works of Theosophy and occultism, and the religious scriptures of the East. Indeed, these figures were probably the last leg of the positive-thinking tradition that had clearly imbibed the work of American metaphysicians such as Evans and Andrew Jackson Davis, whose names soon slipped into obscurity.

  The new breed of positive thinkers increasingly borrowed, reprocessed, and recirculated one another’s phrases and concepts. There were times when some of them crossed into ethical lapses. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that this generation lacked vision. Rather, in the grand tradition of American religious experimentation, these men and women distilled ideas from their own perspective, verified those ideas through their lived experience, and tested their utility before audiences at metaphysical churches, occult lodges, and big-city auditoriums. These early- to mid-twentieth-century teachers did not always use the term New Thought, but they very clearly saw themselves as apostles of a mind-power revolution.

  No single chapter, or book, could encapsulate all of them. But the most dynamic among them, who appear in the pages that follow, bent modern culture to their passions.

  DR. RICHARD C. CABOT:

  PROBING MEDICINE AND THE MIND

  In the wake of the medical licensing laws, the early twentieth century was not a propitious moment for religiously or psychologically oriented approaches to medicine. Most physicians regarded any form of positive-thinking or faith-based methods, even when used as complementary treatments, as smacking of Christian Science, a philosophy they considered cultish and dangerous. Protestant churches took a similar view. While Catholicism had long maintained a measured faith in healing miracles and shrines, most Protestant seminaries and pulpits saw religious healing as something that had ended with the apostolic era.

  Indeed, during the Reformation, Protestant movements often cast aspersions on the healing claims of the Catholic Church, considering talk of medical miracles as nothing more than the church’s attempt to shore up its role as the exclusive organ of God’s word on earth. That attitude more or less prevailed at the start of the twentieth century.

  A few early-twentieth-century physicians grudgingly used bread pills or sugar remedies to placate hypochondriacal patients, and some doctors recognized the usefulness of hypnosis as an analgesic. But any talk of using mental or faith-based treatments was considered heresy in the medical community.

  Richard C. Cabot, a young, Harvard-educated physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, had a different take.

  Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1868, Cabot, from his earliest years, inhaled the atmosphere of New England Transcendentalism. His father, James, was an intimate friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, to whom he served as editor, literary executor, and early biographer. The Cabot family attended a liberal Unitarian church, and Richard studied at Harvard under William James and Idealist philosopher Josiah Royce.

  William James was already devising the principles of the philosophy known as pragmatism. The heart of James’s pragmatic outlook was that the measure of an idea’s value was its effect on conduct. On this, James was uncompromising. To speak of allegiance to one creed or another was meaningless, he reasoned, unless you could demonstrate its impact on human behavior, “its cash-value, in terms of particular experience,” he wrote in 1898.

  Such thinking gave Cabot a framework for his own radical inquiries. He decided to become a medical doctor—but, crucially, he held to the belief that healing, like all facets of life, must be a composite. He believed that biologic cures in no way precluded, and often were aided by, the confidence of the patient, which could be fortified b
y faith, suggestion, and realistic, healthful self-belief. Taking a leaf from James’s pragmatism, Cabot insisted that if a method healed, it was valid, whether the treatment was allopathic, alternative, spiritual, emotional, or any combination. While Cabot firmly believed that “spiritual healings” were really mental in nature, he conceded that the faculties at work were sometimes inscrutable, and warranted further study.

  “It is a thousand pities that these dissensions—these sectarian dissensions—have occurred in medicine as well as in religion,” Cabot wrote in 1908. “We ought to get together. There is truth in all the schools; indeed there is nothing more characteristic of the American spirit than the realization of that fact.”

  Cabot was a brilliant laboratory researcher—at age twenty-eight in 1896 he wrote the first English-language textbook on hematology. Yet he turned down an opportunity to become the first bacteriologist at Massachusetts General Hospital; two years later he accepted a less prestigious position in the outpatient department. Cabot was more interested in face-to-face treatment than in lab research. He believed that physicians were assuming an inappropriately distant and inflated role in the new century, and were neglecting the experience, emotions, social problems, and fears of the patient. In response, Cabot hired the nation’s first medical social worker at Massachusetts General in 1905. The hospital administration disapproved of the move and refused to pay her. Cabot paid the salary himself.

  The following year, Cabot joined forces with a controversial and intriguing healing program, which emerged from an Episcopal church in Boston’s Back Bay. Called the Emmanuel Movement, for Emmanuel Church, which housed it, the project was a psycho-therapeutic clinic, presided over by the church’s Reverend Elwood Worcester and his associate rector, Samuel McComb. The men sought to aid patients through prayer, support-group meetings, affirmations, hypnotic suggestion, and medical lectures delivered by Boston physicians.

  The Emmanuel Movement sharply distanced itself from both Christian Science and mind-cure, insisting that its focus was limited to “functional nervous disorders,” such as alcoholism, depression, migraines, chronic aches and pains, and digestive and bowel ailments. (This focus on “functional disorders” became a point of controversy, however, as the Emmanuel Movement also treated patients for tuberculosis, an infectious disease that then had no cure.) Further distinguishing itself from the mind-cure field, the Emmanuel clinic would see patients only on the referral and diagnosis of a physician. Reverend Worcester framed the clinic’s activities not as an alternative to medicine but as a complement. The Emmanuel group received enormous, and often positive, media exposure, frequently from the nation’s largest magazines, such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping.

  Cabot became the Emmanuel Movement’s chief medical advisor in 1906. He was intrigued not only by the relief that its methods seemed to bring, but by how the movement addressed a large number of ailments that, while real enough, didn’t necessarily belong in the physician’s examination room. “Now, without trying to limit the field precisely,” Cabot wrote in 1908, “I should say that the diseases which are essentially mental or moral or spiritual in their origin should be treated (in part at least) by mental, moral and spiritual agencies. Cases of this type constitute in my experience about two-fifths of all the cases that come to an ordinary physician …” To Cabot the complementary approach was suited to disorders such as insomnia, digestive and bowel problems, and phantom aches and pains.

  He felt, furthermore, that American medicine blinded itself with its specialized divisions. Every healer, from an osteopath to an allopath to a Christian Science practitioner, could speak of cure rates for those diseases that came to them, but not to the field of ailments in general. As Cabot saw it, medical professionals’ frame of reference was too narrow, their willingness to collaborate too limited. Share patients and share data, he urged.

  While Cabot believed in the efficacy of faith-based or mind-cure treatments, his support rested upon a strict distinction between “functional” and “organic” ailments. The mind-healing movements, he insisted, were highly capable of treating the kinds of functional diseases seen at the Emmanuel program—that is, bodily discomfort and stress-related disorders—which were not bacterial or structural. However, organic disease—biologic and organ-centered disorders—absolutely required standard medical care.

  “Our friends the Christian Scientists,” he wrote, “entirely ignore the distinction between organic and functional disease. I believe that organic disease is not helped to any extent by mental means, while functional disease has been helped a great deal by this means. Hence, there is nothing more important than to make clear this distinction.”

  Cabot’s reasoning squares with the findings of today’s most well-regarded placebo studies. The director of Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter, Ted J. Kaptchuk, told the Wall Street Journal in 2012: “Right now, I think evidence is that placebo changes not the underlying biology of an illness, but the way a person experiences or reacts to an illness.” (It should be noted that Cabot considered placebos deceptive and he explicitly opposed their use; Kaptchuk’s contemporary research, by contrast, centers on “transparent placebos,” in which a patient knows he is receiving an inert substance. Kaptchuk’s studies are considered later.)

  For all the possibilities, Cabot and the Emmanuel Movement had limited success in winning the support of mainstream medicine. Cabot produced case studies and statistics showing traceable benefits from the Emmanuel program of prayer, encouragement, and religious counseling. Most medical professionals, however, turned up their noses. In journals and talks, physicians often complained that Emmanuel conflated the activities of doctors and clergy, and confused the public. (Cabot himself was never fully satisfied with the completeness of Emmanuel’s record keeping.) “The Emmanuel movement,” wrote physician Charles Dean Young in 1909 in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, “was and is, unquestionably well meant”—mental and spiritual healers had by this time come to realize that praise for good intent lined the steps to the guillotine—“but its originators are powerless to confine it within its legitimate bounds as the medical profession is powerless to prevent quackery, and, for some reason, the dear public does so love to be humbugged.”

  That same year Sigmund Freud visited America and, while he acknowledged knowing little about Emmanuel, the psychoanalyst told the Boston Evening Transcript on September 11: “This undertaking of a few men without medical, or with very superficial medical training, seems to me at the very least of questionable good. I can easily understand that this combination of church and psychotherapy appeals to the public, for the public has always had a certain weakness for everything that savors of mysteries …”

  Ironically, the Emmanuel Movement, and other early strains of mind-cure, whetted the American appetite for Freud’s theories of the unconscious. William James, who had contemporaneously labored to track the existence of a “subliminal mind,” was dismayed by Freud’s certainty that his psychoanalytic movement alone had science at its back. James wrote a colleague on September 28 that Freud had “condemned the American religious therapy (which has such extensive results) as very ‘dangerous because so unscientific.’ Bah!”

  The controversies were no help to Cabot’s career. In 1912, in what must have been a significant personal disappointment, Cabot was passed over for his expected appointment as Harvard’s Jackson Professor of Medicine, one of the university’s oldest medical professorships. Harvard instead opted for a professor who was more active in laboratory science. Cabot continued an important medical career, including as a director of battlefield medicine in France during World War I.

  Following the war, Cabot launched a new campaign to urge American seminaries to train clergy in clinical and patient counseling. In 1925 he partnered with Anton Boisen, a minister who recovered following his institutionalization in a mental hospital to become one of the most eloquent voices for training seminary students in pastoral thera
py. Cabot and his supporters met with measured success, helping to start pastoral training programs at Massachusetts General Hospital and Worcester State Hospital.

  While widely copied in its early years, the Emmanuel Movement reached its end in 1929 with Reverend Worcester’s retirement. There were no ready successors to his leadership. Indeed, none of Emmanuel’s imitators were active for more than a few years. Emmanuel and its offshoots had petered out for reasons foreseen by Cabot: Ambitious clergy may have been willing to assume a counseling role, but they lacked training to sustain rigorous, ongoing programs. “The average clergyman,” wrote Carl J. Scherzer, a hospital chaplain who had studied Emmanuel, “was not academically trained to undertake such a healing program even though he possessed a personality that might predict a reasonable amount of success in it.”

  Cabot died in 1939, ten years after Emmanuel closed its doors.

  Although Cabot and Emmanuel failed to win over mainstream physicians, the movement proved a greater impact on the churches themselves. In a national survey of liberal Protestant ministers in the early 1950s, more than one-third of respondents reported using methods of spiritual healing, which included affirmations, individual and group prayer, and acts of forgiveness—all elements of the Emmanuel program. This was a marked change from Protestant clergy’s indifference toward such measures at the start of the century. And Cabot’s calls for pastoral clinical training found new champions in the next generation.

  RABBI LOUIS WITT:

  “WE CANNOT HIDE THESE THINGS FROM THE WORLD”

  When I was growing up as a teenager on Long Island, I once heard a young rabbi tell a religiously and politically conservative congregation that when we suffer inside we can also become deeper human beings. The formula for self-growth, he said, is “to turn your pain into a painting.” Some may have found it hokey, though judging from the silence in the room his remarks made an impact. I never forgot them.