S2 – 11: The Sheep and the Ghosts

for her than British high society. Their money rolled out the red carpet for Kate. Traveling companions and pocket money were hers to command. She arrived dressed in fine new clothing. Her parting from Maggie might have been painful, but the optimism of her friends lifted Kate's spirits, and the sensation that greeted her only raised them higher. Society receptions brought

with them some very welcome attention. Foremost among Kate's new admirers was the British lawyer Henry Yunkan strikingly handsome and an accomplished spiritualist writer. He had a magnetism that Kate couldn't deny. But even as she held seances, appeared in London spiritualist newspapers and saw more of Henry Well. Kate also found a glass back in her hand. That was the brandy. There was always the brandy, but there was no time to fight it. Kate began a series of

tests with the scientist William Crooks. He had once hired Henry for legal advice on some of his business ventures, and the two men were friends. Now William Crooks was on a hunt to identify the spectral energies that flowed through a seance. Soon enough, Kate was navigating not only Henry Yunkin's overtures but also William's prime. The scientist tried to stop her from giving any seances without him. He

didn't mind that she was an alcoholic. He may have even agreed with her opinion that when the alcohol shattered her conscious mind, it made her more open to the spirits. The results, as he would record them, were astounding for power and certainty. I have met with no one who at all approached Miss Kate Fox, he wrote, in a rush of enthusiasm. It seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to

be heard. I have heard them in a living tree, on a sheet of glass, on stretched iron wire, on a stretched membrane, a tambourine, on the roof of a cab, and on the floor of a theater. I have heard them on a glass harmonicon. I have felt them on my shoulder and under my own hands. Things came to a head though, when Crooks tried to push Henry away

from Kate, because it forced her to choose. Did she want to continue submitting to the chemist's badgering and drink away her frustrations, or did she want to choose a life with Henry, who offered her his arms and his opulent townhouse as refuge. One spring afternoon, Kate and Henry were walking together through a friend's manicured gardens. He dropped to a knee and took her hand. He asked her

to marry him. In response, Kate burst into tears. She confessed her addiction and the cycles of recovery and relapse that had kept her going back to the Swedish Movement Cure Hospital for as long as she had lived in New York. But Henry was insistent Kate followed in Leah's footsteps. The New York Herald reported that at Kate's wedding, joyful spirits raised the banquet table from the floor in salute.

Kate sat with William Crooks for a few more tests, but not long after her marriage, Kate had a good reason to finally cut them all off together. She was pregnant, so William Crooks had to turn his investigations to others. Fortunately for him, there were plenty of other mediums with wealthy benefactors willing to fund his experiments. In eighteen seventy three, Cora a fived in England and she began to appear

in the chemist records assisting with his experiments. Assisting, that is, because William Crooks had already focused his attentions on another medium, Daniel Hume. He had been the favorite of the wealthy and powerful for years, and his displays had gone from eye catching the downright astonishing. Daniel had been examined by a slew of professionals. He had lost court cases and fortunes with them. He'd been ridiculed by the poet Robert Browning,

and performed seances in France for Napoleon the Third. He had even married into the Russian nobility before losing his wife to tuberculosis. In eighteen seventy three. The Earl of Dunraven had just published a celebration of Daniel's mediumship. Now Crooks was publishing astonishing reports about measuring Daniel's psychic force. Claims and counterclaims that rose up in response kept London buzzing. Those debates went on even after Daniel Hume left England.

He returned to Russia, where he married a second heiress, and, like so many others, he retired from mediumship. Storms, contests, arguments and investigations would go on, stirring the public interest. But Daniel had risen into the upper echelons of European nobility. Now he considered himself above spiritualism as well. His last years in Russia, France and Italy were spent in comfort, and that final retirement into a life of ease was just one more reason that Daniel Hume was remarkable. This

is unobscured. I'm Aaron manky H. New York City was a boiling cauldron. Victoria Woodhall had beaten the Wall Street casino when she made her run on Gold at the end of eighteen sixty nine, but she didn't take her fortune and withdraw from the public debate. The public had tested spiritualist mediums for decades now, she wanted to turn the tables. So when the New York Herald, excited by the novelty of the first woman stockbroker, offered Victoria a

weekly column, she accepted. In her first article, she wrote, while others of my sex devoted themselves to crusade against the laws that shackle women in this country, I asserted my individual into pendance, believing as I do, that the prejudices which still exist against women in public life will soon disappear. I now announced myself as candidate for the presidency. That's right, Victoria Woodhull was running for president. She decided to live the part too. Victoria left the house where

the spirit of Demosthenes has sent her. She took her family and moved into a mansion in New York's Murray Hill, just off Fifth Avenue. It was a massive and luxurious home with columns and high windows. But if it all made Victoria feel more legitimate, it didn't sway the opinion of New Yorker's most still thought. Her announcement was only a joke, as the pages of the New York newspapers testified. Soon Victoria realized she needed to do more than just

make money and make pronouncements. She needed to make friends and build power, and she needed a newspaper of her own to do that. So in May, Victoria and her sister Tenny launched a new magazine. They called it wood Hole in Claughland's Weekly. Raising a banner like that brought allies. One in particular, whose wild writing was just victorious style. He considered himself a planetary grand master of all the Freemasons,

his words, not mine. He wanted to bring down the powers that be and install himself as pantarch, benevolent ruler of the world. Most people, though, just called him Stephen Pearl Andrews. Here's author Mary Gabriel. He was one of these fringe figures in the United States who had dabbled in everything philosophy, journalism, academics, a bit of politics. And so he came to her as a journalist and said,

you know, I can help you edit this paper. And in fact, she was so busy launching her political career and juggling so many things that she handed it off to him with Blood supervising and Stephen Pearl Andrews under his direction, the Woodhull and Claughland's Weekly became an incredible, creaking Oregon. He was afraid of no one. No one else was publishing articles attacking marriage as the shoals that

wrecked American women. No one else in polite society was publishing articles about the New York Police working as hired guns for its brothels. No one else was perceptively exposing the frauds and hijinks of Wall Streets capitalists. After all, what other papers were helmed by Cornelius Vanderbilt's personal medium. Victoria had the inside scoop on the predatory schemes of the insurance company boardrooms and the railroad tycoons. So Stephen

and Victoria came out swinging. By the fall of eighteen seventy, the paper was flying out to twenty thousand readers. Still, Victoria was a candidate without a party. She was an outsider to spiritualist circles and a newcomer to the cause of women's rights. But with Stephen Pearl Andrews guiding the magazine, Victoria could set her mind on Washington, and she finally

found an ally there as well. Soon enough, Massachusetts Congressman Beast Butler strolled into Victoria's luxurious mansion to make her acquaintance. He had seized New Orleans with the Union Army, he had impeached a president with his radical congress. Now he'd heard a new call, one that demanded votes for women, and he came to lend his aid. Victoria and Butler plotted ways to put her in front of a Congressional

committee to read an argument for women's suffrage. The newly past fourteenth Amendment recognized the rights of all people born or naturalized in the United States, and because women were people, they had the right to vote as well. It was that simple. When Butler introduced Victoria to the House Judiciary Committee in January of eighteen seventy one, she was joined by Susan B. Anthony, and she was the first woman to address a Congressional committee in American history, and that

success brought others. The first invitations came from women's rights groups. Victoria started speaking to gatherings around New York. Soon some newspapers were calling women's rights activists wood holds women, much to the frustration of longtime leaders like Elizabeth Katie Stanton,

but others wanted Victoria's novel and inspiring presence. She spoke at the Cooper Institute to a labor meeting in that spring, and as she made circuits through various reform groups who saw her new prominence as a sign of hope, Victoria started to imagine a new political party that could unite them into something real. In fact, Victoria was elected president that fall. When she arrived at a meeting of the American Association of Spiritualists, she found a group that was

hardly as large as their name promised. It seemed that battles between trance speakers and materialization mediums throughout the eighteen sixties had whittled down their numbers, but Victoria spoke anyway. Eventually, her lecture brought her to her favorite subject, the toxic institution of marriage and the double standard that crushed women for things their husbands did without shame. A heated debate followed at the meeting, both over changing the meaning of

marriage and about Victoria herself. Was she the spiritualist whispered a free lover? Still, despite the controversy, and despite Victoria's visit among them being her first, they decided she was now the right person to lead them. When their votes came in, Victoria was president of the American Association of Spiritualists. The choice sent ripples of concern through spirit circles around

the country. Victoria traveled to speak across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan in the fall of eighte She was met with and trailed by hushed voices. She gained followers along the way, too, but the rumors also grew. The word had gone round that Victoria was living in her New York mansion with both of her husband's James Blood and Kenning Woodhall. A fight between James and her mother had reached the court, and the press had published the revelations of their unusual

home life. For decades, concerns over free love ism had kept some women's rights activists from embracing spiritualism and its radical impulses. The fever came to a head that November when Victoria took the stage at New York's Steinway Hall and gave a talk she advertised as Principles of Social Freedom.

The hall was packed, thousands more milled outside. Victoria took the stage and began to lay out in stark terms that women needed the same freedoms as men, the freedom to end a bad marriage, the freedom to start over without being condemned by society. In fact, she said marriages without love were adultery and marriage laws should be repealed. This message shocked the crowd into an angry upheaval, but that's because it wasn't direct enough. They wanted something more.

Someone in the crowd shouted the question they all wanted, answered, are you a free lover? Here's Mary Gabriel. Once again, Victoria flat and read, Hi, Yes, I'm a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may to love as long or short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please, And with that right, neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.

So with that statement, Victoria became, really, I would say, without doubt, the most notorious woman on the speaking circuit in the United States. Victoria's words dropped like a hammer on her political aspirations. The New York Herald called her speech the most astonishing doctrine to ever be heard in America. Victoria had admitted to being the thing her accusers shouted about the loudest. The president of the Spiritualists, who wanted to be the president of the nation, was a free

lover for the women of her world. This was a radical liberty. But the question now hung in the air. Could Victoria continue building power or would this public confession of something so hated shatter her life into pieces. The land of the free, Sojourner Truth still saw that vision of a future held out to Black Americans. The political radicalism of the Spiritualists in New York was shaking its lecture halls and printing presses. That was Sojourner Truth style,

just as she had done decades before. By now, though, Sojourner couldn't keep the same pace of lecturing and, as she called it, agitating. But she had lived long enough to see emancipation still following the voices of the spirits and the voice of God, she knew the work wasn't finished quite yet. Like so many Spiritualists, she supported the work now to get women the vote and something else that was just as close to her heart. She wanted to see a place in the United States where Black

Americans could live in peace. Sojourner had found places for herself in the American landscape. She had purchased land in Rochester, New York, as well as in Battle Creek, Michigan. They were homes where her daughters now lived. Ever since the end of the Civil War, when she worked with Amy Post to shelter freed people around Rochester, she had kept up that search in the eighteen seventies, even as she approached the threshold of her own death. She pressed on

in her work. Here's historian Margaret Washington. I think that is the culminating point of her life, although she continues to be active. She's very active in the anti capital punishment movement and the temperance movement. But I think that in terms of her service to African Americans, it is the petition movement to create a black homeland in the West, because black homeland is the mantra right. It first starts with trying to get them settled in the West. And

there's no question that she saw the need. On a visit to Washington in eighteen seventies, she saw how many freed people were still without homes and jobs in the capital. Elsewhere across the country, the government was carving open land for the railroad magnates and offering ownership to white homesteaders. The government has given land to the railroads in the West, she told one audience, so why couldn't it do so much for the people whose labor had built the country's wealth.

With that in mind, she traveled throughout New England, selling photographs of herself and asking her fellow reformers to add their names to her request that Congress should provide homes for black Americans on federal land. After being invited to a meeting of the American Women's Suffrage Association in Boston, Sojourner gave a fiery speech defending women's right to vote and included a call for land and education for the

freed people. When one of the leaders of the meeting asked so journal to be brief, she shot back that she would speak when the spirit moved her, not when people moved her, which, in her defense, had always been so journals way. The spirit moved Sojourner into the halls of Congress to see her petition brought up for discussion, but despite the number of people who had signed it, she was let down. Benjamin beast Butler, her trusted radical, never even brought the motion to the floor, even without

a bill to support them. Though black Southerners were leaving the South to settle in the Western States in the years that followed, Sojourner said she traveled to greet them in the Land of John Brown, as she called it, and it was in Topeka, Kansas, that Sojourner found a movement of people arriving to start over. They had begun their move in Louisiana. The years after the Mechanics Institute massacre in eighteen sixty six had not been easy in

New Orleans. But while some Black Southerners marched north and west to settle at a distance from the trials of the city, others, like the Sir Carmonique, stayed put, and the spirit moved them as well, to continue remaking their city itself into the land of the free. When JB. Valmore died in eighteen sixty nine, the Sir Carmonique shrank

by one member, but of course he didn't leave them. Henri, who brought the cirque together before the war and reunited it after it was over, recorded messages from his dead friend. He wrote that Valmore came back in part to forgive on re for any tensions in their partnership and to urge the circle to continue their work so no. Losing

one of their leaders didn't slow the Sircarmonique down. In fact, it was in the first years of the eighteen seventies that Henri and the other spiritualists in the circle were at their most active. One of their members, who owned a cigar shop, began hosting their seances, and the fate of the city again came to the four in the messages they received from spirit visitors. While the spirits of

loved ones like Henri's father and now JB. Valmore continued to visit their seance tables, it was the warnings against the greed of materialism that rose to the top of their concerns. Over and over, the spirits emphasized politics of greed created unfair divisions between the rich and the poor. As the spirit of JB. Valmore reminded the circle he had been a humble blacksmith, but in the Circle of Harmony, his love and charity paved the way for him to

be a true apostle. He was a reminder that Henri would take to heart as his position in the city continued to rise in eighteen seventy, he was appointed to be the tax assessor for the city's third district and then director of a parish school board. While Sojourner worked a secure education for the freed people of the West, Henri did the same for the black community in New Orleans. Here's historian Emily Clark. He serves a term in the Louisiana legislature. He serves on a school board, not the

school board of his father, but for public schools. They've got a pretty respectable home in the Tremain neighborhood, kind of living a New Orleans middle class what we might call middle class for the re contry Auction period life. As un resettled into the city's public life, the spirits continued to urge him and the other members of the

cirque to remember the poor. The message came from them from the spirit of Senator Daniel Webster, who inspired Unrea's ambitions, but it also came from anonymous spirits who drew his sympathy. Once the spirit of a woman arrived at a seance and simply said that she was one who suffered. The explanation of that suffering could have been printed by Victoria Woodhall. This nameless woman was born to a wealthy family, she told the circle, but she married a predator. He scooped

up her inheritance and then abandoned her. In the years that followed, she had supported herself through sex work, but found no one to help her until she crossed into death. Now she said she was comforted by Mary Magdalen the New Orleans at the seance table of men. Her radical message came across clearly. A society that would judge and

punish women for reviving abuse was unjust. A society in harmony, however, would look like something new, Not a hierarchy, but a circle where the poor were lifted up and men and women joined hands to seek out the wisdom of the past and map out the future. And it was a future Henri and the others we're still willing to fight for.

Theodore Tilton knew what the future looked like. He had fallen in love, first with the writings of Karl Marx, who inspired his belief in a democracy that could overthrow the rich and powerful, and second with a fierce woman who was determined to do the same, a woman by the name of Victoria Woodhull. Through seventy one, while Victoria was campaigning for president and publishing the dirt on her enemies among the rich and powerful, she was also spending

a lot of time with Tilton. Still then had flown into the public eye as a journalist and as a protege of Henry Ward Beecher, New York City's celebrity pastor, and that year his journalistic eye turned toward a conflict that would grow more important over the coming decade. Here's

Mary Gabriel once again. The kind of conversations that were murmured before the Civil War in the eighteen forties, and the kind of revolutions that occurred in eighteen forty eight, and the discussions and the political arguments that began to heat up erupted in the Civil War in the United States, But afterwards they didn't die down. In fact, groups coalesced, and two of the most powerful groups to call us were labor unions. And this was something that was happening

in Europe. And in fact, once again, when we can talk about Carl Marks, because he had formed in eighteen sixty four something called the International working Men's Association, and the International working Men's Association had already made its mark on history. Mars was in London, but some of the group's French members had joined a revolution in France. They had seized Paris and ruled for two months in the spring of eighteen seventy one. They called their government the Commune.

Anxiety about the same thing happening in the United States bubbled from the New York newspapers, but the Spiritualists weren't worried. In fact, the Banner of Light proclaimed to its readers that the principles of the Commune were the same as the principles of spiritualist seedbeds like Hopedale. To a reformer like Tilton, their argument was extremely convincing. With Tilton now on their team, Victoria and Tenny decided to make their

newspaper a mouthpiece for the International. As their publicist, Victoria became an organizer for the International in New York. She gathered workers to her meetings and sent word to Marx that he had followers in New York City. Soon enough, Victoria's cohorts were recognized as Section twelve of the International working Men's Association. And if they were going to turn their weekly newspaper into the mouthpiece of the Working man's movement.

They were going to go all the way. Victoria had never done anything less, So on December eighteen seven, he one Woodhall and Clafland's Weekly published the Communist Manifesto in English for the first time. At first, Tilton was introducing Victoria at lectures, then he was defending her in his articles, and he was there by her side when Victoria's kaleidoscope of radical allies announced that they were forming a new

political movement, the Equal Rights Party. They took Victoria as their presidential nominee and invited Frederick Douglas to run as her vice president. Tilton even wrote a glowing biography of her that was rushed to press to support her presidential run. It was very good for Victoria. It may even have been the main reason she was elected president of the Association of Spiritualists. But even as Tilton was learning the story of victorious life, she was learning his as well.

And this is where gossip turned to scandal. Because Theodore Tilton was rowing with Victoria on the river, He was eating late dinners of chicken cake and champagne inside her bedroom. He was spending nights alone with her on her mansion's roof and what she learned, well, it made her angry because among Tilton's stories was the revelation that for years Henry Ward beach Her had carried on an affair with Tilton's wife. In fact, it was one of the events

that had driven Tilton into Victoria's arms. And I hope you can see why she was so enraged. Victoria had declared to the world that she was a free lover, and it had sent a storm of hate and judgment to rain down upon her. Heck, political cartoonist Thomas Nast even published a cartoon about her that called her Mrs Satan. But now she had learned that New York's darling minister, the man who could do no wrong in the public eye, had actually committed a much bigger sin. Naturally, she was livid,

and so she did the only thing she knew. She published Here's Mary Gabriel once again. And so in her newspaper in October in eighteen seventy two, she decided to tell the story of the Beach Your Tilton affair, and in black and white. In this newspaper she went into all the gory details and exposed him for who he was and brought down this house of cards, which was the Beecher family, the Congregational Church in Brooklyn, the religious pillar upon which so much of the moral American myth

was built. She brought it down in that article, and the issue flew off the stands. In response, the Beecher family, especially Henry's sister Harriet Beecher Stow, went into overdrive to defend him. Court battles and published attacks racked Victoria and eventually drained her fortune. Worst of all, Cornelius Vanderbilt withdrew his support. She had become a liability to the women's movement too. In the months that followed, Victoria was set adrift.

And so Victoria, in taking that rash step, basically ended her political career. Ironically, it was the month before she was on the ballot as a presidential candidate that she at this piece, or that she allowed this piece to be published in her newspaper, and on the morning of the election day she was in jail for having distributed that newspaper through the mail, thereby violating u S obsanity laws. And it wasn't just the political support in the United

States that was pulled out from under her. When Karl Marx called a meeting of the International working Man's Association later that year, they looked right at Section twelve in New York and made a decision any section of their organization had to be strictly materialist. Not only was Victoria's New York chapter awash and scandal and fighting for women's rights, but it was also heated by the fires of spiritualism and guided by the voices of the dead. As far

as Marx was concerned, Section twelve was an embarrassment. As a result, the leadership of the working Men's Association kicked them to the curb. Looking back, it was more than a little i run. After a seemingly endless run of success, Victoria Woodhall had been defeated by the one enemy she had never thought to prepare for herself. In September of eighteen seventy three, another panic swept Wall Street over drafts on railroad credit led to a spring of bankruptcies, and

the domino effect of a crash followed. Five thousand businesses closed, a quarter of New Yorkers were unemployed. That was also the month of Victoria closed the doors on her own brokerage firm, but it didn't extinguish any of the fierceness in her voice. She took to the stage at the Cooper Union in fury, railing against the banks on behalf of the lower million, as she called them, who were

always exploited by the upper ten. In the months that followed her historic address to Congress, one of Victoria's most prominent followers had been Isabella Beecher hook Her. Isabella went so far as to call her new friend an inspiration, no longer a banker or businesswoman, but a prospective queen. Now, though, that kind of talk was gone, and not just for Victoria but also for other people whose stories had been

at the heart of spiritualism. In eighteen seventy two, Isaac Post passed away, and for a while his widow, Amy left her home in Rochester to find comfort with an old friend. She visited Maggie in New York. The two women were both bereft. Maggie was missing her sister Kate, hanging on the news about her nephews that would travel

across the ocean from England. Organizing support for suffrage was still at the top of Amy's mind, but the loss of Isaac had cut her loose again, leaving her to search for where she might belong, and after her dramatic public fall from grace, so was Victoria. Amy Post arrived in New York just as Victoria was leaving in eighteen

seventy four. She traveled west, lecturing as she went. She had to return frequently to New York, though, to face a series of snarls in court charges of libel and public obscenity, but also to provide testimony in the case launched between Tilton and Beecher. In the wake of the scandal, the respectable circles of wealth and prominent families no longer wanted to have anything to do with Victoria. But for a traveling speaker, a bad reputation is a great advertisement.

In fact, the widespread hatred of her ideas was exactly what made her popular, and it provided just the right amount of cover for anyone who did want to come and listen to what she had to say. But there was one group who didn't cut their ties with Victoria. They were used to be in the outside force that put pressure on American life from the margins. They were used to being mocked by conservative moralizers while they offered

their own alternative moral vision for the nation. So in eighteen seventy five, the Universal Association of Spiritualists re elected Victoria as their president for the fifth time in a row. But even that connection to the Spiritualists wasn't enough to keep Victoria moored to the nation where she lived and fought for and had tried to change. It had chewed her up, but it had also given her a platform and a fortune, which she had won and lost. And after all of that, one last mountain came her way

that needed to be overcome. Cornelius Vanderbilt was dead. His son had taken over, and he was determined that his father's disgraceful connections would be out of the way. When it came time to settle Vanderbilt's will, according to one report, he came to Victoria and Tenny with one hundred thousand dollars in hand. The money was theirs if they would disappear. With a brokerage firm, newspaper, and her political aspirations all at an end. Victoria said goodbye to James Blood and

the life they'd had together. Then she climbed aboard a steamer with her two children, along with Tenny and their mother, and then set off for England. In eighteen seventy five, Cora Taypin gave a trance lecture on the topic of spirit materializations. Heaven, she said, was coming to earth, and the spirit who spoke through her was one of her oldest guides, Augustus Blew. He was still remembered as the bright flower of the Hopedale community who had been cut

down in his youth. After Victoria's fall from grace, Augustus came back to Cora. He wanted to encourage spiritualists that the world they were working toward was just around the corner. The marvelous new manifestations of power, he told them, were an indication of a new golden age. They were sure signs that Heaven was coming to earth, that justice would be done, and the power of that justice would be

made manifest. But two years later, after Victoria had been toppled from her lofty perch and chased from the country, the tone was different. Spiritualists were beginning to ask if the fight for the future might be lost, and when Cora and Samuel Tapin divorced in eighteen seventy six, it only added one more name to the list of disgraced mediums. After all, Samuel had been her third husband and the second she had divorced. But there were other problems on

the horizon. It seems that Victoria's escaped to England wasn't the only exit that mattered for the nation. In the South, federal troops who had been part of reconstruction began to return north, and the newly elected president was already wheeling and dealing with the Southern powers to keep political control in white hands. Then, after waves of wage cuts hit railroad workers in eighteen seventy seven, the largest American labor uprising of the nineteenth century began. The U s Secretary

of War viewed the strikes as insurrection. In response, army units in the South, including the troops that were guarding the Louisiana State House, were withdrawn. Everywhere that the railroad workers put down their tools and held up their fists, Their neighbors showed up to help them. Craftsmen, shopkeepers, and farmers along the rail lines fed their families and cheered on their fights with the robber, barons and tycoons who were gobbling up so much of the American landscape and

the profits of enterprise. In Pittsburgh, miners and steel workers followed suit striking to show support for the rail workers who refused to make men like the Vanderbilts any richer. More amazingly, the militia often supported the striking workers they had been sent to aim their guns at, turning their anger back on the tycoons instead. When the militia and hired guns did attack the striking workers, though, things spiraled out of control. When hired gunmen killed twenty strikers in Pittsburgh,

the rail yards were set on fire. Over one locomotives and two thousand rail cars were torched. Strikes in Chicago and St. Louis only added fuel to the fire. And what did these angry workers want? Nothing more than an eight hour work day, an end to child labor, and for the government to take control of the railroads. Samuel Tapan's view of railroad monopolies was finally taking a hold among working people. The New York Tribune wrote that public

opinion is almost everywhere in sympathy with the insurrection. To fight that threat and to defend practices like child labor that made the railroad tycoons obscenely rich, the project to defend black freedom in the South was abandoned. Other changes came as well too. In the North, militias were disbanded. In their place, cities began to recruit an armed police forces in greater number. They traded out unreliable citizen militias for well trained professionals, people who wouldn't blink at using

force to put down a labor strike. From Europe, where he was resting after leaving office, former President Ulysses S. Grant wrote words that seemed to echo sojourn or truth. He wrote about how strange it was that officials who hated him for using the army to defend black Americans in the South now showed and I quote no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike. It was hypocrisy, plain and simple, and a sign that there was one spirit more powerful and most

in control of America, the spirit of greed. William Crooks satisfied none of Spiritualism's critics back in America. His defense of British sciences didn't even satisfy Spiritualists themselves. As far as believers were concerned, there was so much more work to be done, and that included Henry Seibert, a wealthy Philadelphia industrialist who knew just what he wanted to do

with his money. You see, the police were professionalizing, so we're doctors who were now working to purge the public of counterfeit practitioners like the Canning Woodhalls and Buck Laughlands of the eighteen fifties. After so many tumultuous years, all kinds of groups were organizing themselves into stable societies with training,

guidelines and rules. Here's historian Molly McGarry. That was very much an impulse of the era, and historians have described that there as an age of corporation, incorporation, and when Americans become more likely to build institutions and to move away from the kind of anti authoritarian communal impulses of the fervent of the Antebellum years. Henry Seybert had a vision of that impulse sweeping in to clean up the

anarchy of spiritualism. He had actually been curious about spiritualism for years back when Robert Dale Owen published his Seances with Leah. Henry realized that someone needed to create a center for spiritualism in Philadelphia, a home base, if you will. So he made an offer to a medium the city knew all too well, Maggie Fox, she should come down

and live in his spiritual mansion. He said. Once there she would hold seances for him and his clients, and he promised that her salary would be generous, too, something that made the deal hard to resist. It seemed like the perfect retreat from the public seances she had been holding in New York City. So Maggie agreed she would be the high priestess of his new temple. But she didn't day long. That's because his request quickly moved from

the mundane to the downright awkward. You see, he had been a spiritualist long enough to know that pious mediums could hold conversations with just about anyone, so he started to ask for others. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were one thing, but Henry Cybert had his mindset on the eternal. Soon he was asking for conversations with every murtyr and saint in the Protestant calendar. And he didn't just want American leaders either, but famous sages and rulers of the

ancient world. He asked to talk to St. Paul about the way the Bible had been written. He even asked to talk with the old Testament prophet Elijah. When he insisted that he talked with the angel Gabriel, Maggie said it was too much. She was still a Catholic believer, after all. She wanted Cybert's money, sure, but not at the cost of her soul. But if Maggie thought a retreat back to New York could give Cybert the slip,

she was sorely mistaken. Neither did his death, because when his will was read in eighteen eight for the University of Pennsylvania found itself with two gifts of sixty dollars on their hands. The first went toward the University hospital, while the second, well, it had some conditions attached to it. I know, a large donation with strings attached sounds very very unusual. These strings insisted that the university appoints a

new professor to investigate spiritualism. But if Cybert had an agenda for giving his money to establish the commission, the investigators on the commission had an agenda of their own. It seems the chair of the Cybert Commission was a man who resented being told what to believe for cash publicly.

He followed Cybert's instructions privately, though well Let's just say they didn't exactly apply the scientific method, and that became only too obvious when the Commission decided to investigate a series of mediums who had already been exposed as frauds. In his private letters, the chair of the Commission didn't bother to pretend. He wrote that he was a viper warmed by the spiritual nonsense. He said that he wanted to use the Cybert Commission to poison spiritualism's lifeblood and

then strike it dead. Sometime during the first year of the Commission, he decided just where to sink his fings. In November eight eighty three, he invited Maggie Fox to travel back to Philadelphia once more. She agreed to have her spirit rapping tested by a committee. The things didn't quite turn out as planned. That's because Maggie came with her own agenda. Her opinion of Cybert had soured over the years, and she'd had enough of trying to prove

herself to others. Now her only goal was to confound the Commission. She arrived at the chairman's house and settled in for the investigation in his dining room. The Cybert Commission began with a few tests that produced the knocking sounds they all expected. But then Maggie suggested a test she had never passed before. She should stand on glass tumblers, she said, and then produce the raps on the floor. When they lined up four glass tumblers for her to use,

Maggie climbed on board. She stood there holding the hands of two of the men, but were met with only silence. The men moved the glasses and try it again, but failed. Just as before, the Commission published their report to little fanfare. The problems with their methods were obvious, but they weren't

the only prestigious investigators taking on mediums that decade. In fact, the British Society of Psychical Research, which took on not just spiritualism but also claims of telepathy, uncanny dreams, and hauntings, had also spread to the United States. Here's historian Kathy Gutierrez. So there's an American offshoot that begins, and William James

is its most famous investigator believer. And James does not buy into spiritualism wholesale at all, but he does think that the unconscious can communicate with spirits greater than they and he finds this one woman who he secks this detective on for years, and she's just infallible, and so he thinks it's possible. But he also concedes that there's a lot of chicken ring going on. But he's this amazing name and his dad was the Swedenborgian mystic, so

they clearly come from this very religious family. But yeah, so he gives a real intellectual impromoter to the entire spiritualist cause. In fact, William James was one of the observers who took the Cyber Commission to task for its mishandling of their obligation to study spiritualism with a serious objective attitude. But there was something else. When the chair of the Commission had faced off with Maggie, he had asked her whether she claimed the knocking sounds were independent

of herself. She said she never made that claim. He asked her how she influenced the sounds that had followed her throughout her adult life. Her only answer was, I cannot tell, but that it turns out it wasn't quite true. They had birthed the religion at the edge of science.

They had crafted their beliefs from communal impulses. They had given rise to a kaleidoscope of ideas, beliefs, newspapers, communities, and visions of the world, and as the end of the century drew near, the mediums were finally professionalizing too. In eighteen eighty three, Andrew Jackson Davis graduated from the United States Medical College with his m d. He would go on healing visitors, now with the proper credentials to

justify himself to others. At least that was the hope, but rather than give his reputation to boost, he ended up making it worse. Just two years later, he announced to his wife Mary that he had been wrong all these years. She was not, in fact his spirits affinity. He had eyes on a clas mate from his medical school, fifteen years younger than Mary. They would have confirmed all the worst estimations that any outsider had about spiritualists and

free love. But it even took his own people by surprise. Here's historian and browdie spiritualists were shocked by this, and it really it was very detrimental to Andrew Jackson Davis's standing in the community. And it gives you some of the irony of these ideas that sexual liberation in the nineteenth century was a much more complicated idea, given the legal climate regarding divorce, regarding child custody, and the lack

of birth control. It was not what we think of as the sexual freedoms of the nineteen sixties and seventies. Now sixty years old, the Seer of Poughkeepsie had witnessed decades of Spiritualism. He'd watched the movement rise blossom a thousand different colors, and also weather the storms of accusation, opposition, and in fighting. But now it seemed too many that he had abandoned it, just as he had his wife, and sure he would continue to practice medicine and sell

books into his twilight years. He had always wanted others to believe that he was a man of peace and vision after all, but the sour cord he struck after medical school disrupted the legacy of his harmonial philosophy. Unfortunately for Spiritualism, he wouldn't be the only one. By eighty eight, Kate and Maggie had switched places. Kate's marriage brought her two children and ten years of happiness, but when Henry Yenkin died in eighteen eighty one, he left her with

little to go on. Here's author Nancy Stewart. She's still drinking, but it's not terrible, and they seemed to be happy. And then suddenly he dies, and then she discovers that his lego his money. He's originally from Germany. I mean it has to go back there. She's not going to get me money for it. Despite her time in the limelight, it had really been Henry who had been her home in Britain. His death sent her back to New York City, back to the tailor's and the Swedish movement cure. Here's

Nancy Stewart once again. Katie has come back with these children, and she's drinking again, and the children neglected, or at least they're seized by the authorities, and she's accused of being a mother. And Maggie Nemo has gone to England and is doing seances there and she is extremely upset about Katie, and she decides that she is got to confess.

She started with announcements in the newspaper. Word began to spread that in the wisdom of her maturity, Maggie Fox, the woman who had given spiritualism to the world, was about to take it back again. And New York eagerly awaited her arrival. On October twenty one, at the New York Academy of Music, she took the stage before an audience of over three thousand people. She had helped start a movement that had given so many people a feeling

of purpose and hope. It had given them life. But her message that night from the stage in New York would be different this time because her next words would deliver spiritualism a fatal blow. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured, Spiritualism had always threatened the priest, politicians,

and profiteers who benefited from the status quo. It had given spiritual and moral authority to people who had been stripped of their rights, pushed to the margins, and burdened with work while others reaped the rewards. The last thing spiritualists wanted to do, even in the nineties, was to give up on their labors and return to a world of the strong crushing the week. But in the coming decades, Cora and the Chicago Spiritualists weren't the only ones who

saw a spiritualist future finally taking shape. It just wasn't the future they'd expected. Loun Obscured was created by me, Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson

composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at history unobscured dot com, and until next time, thanks for listening Unobscured as a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minkey. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.