Welcomed Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minkey. We begin the interview series for Unobscured season two with the phenomenal historian Dr Anne Browdie. She is Senior lecturer on American religious history at Harvard Divinity School, where she directs the Women's Studies in Religion program. Dr Browdy has published widely on women in American religious life, exploring everything from spiritualism to Judaism, Christian science, and Native American religions.
She's an amazing scholar and we're so glad she joined us to talk about spiritualism. The research team found her book Radical Spirits while they were working on episodes for my other podcast Lore. Needless to say, it was one of the inspirations for this season of Unobscured. Researcher Carl Nellis started each historian interview by asking our guests what it meant to be a spiritualist in the nineteenth century America. So Dr Browdie's answer to that question is where we'll begin.
This is the Unobscured Interview series for season two. I'm Aaron Maggey. What I would say it meant to be a spiritualist in the nineteenth century was to be part of a movement that was seeking empirical evidence for the immortality of the soul by communicating with the spirits of the dead, and in general that meant communicating with the
spirits of the dead through the intervention of a human medium. Really, what spiritualists believed they accessed through the medium of a human being who was being used for communication and were the spirits of the dead and uh Those spirits might be the spirits of deceased relatives or loved ones or friends who had passed to the world beyond. They might be public figures or historical figures. They could be figures from religious history or political history. They could be um
other cultures, other civilizations. They could be what we're understood to be the spirits of dead Indians, the indigenous inhabitants of the America's um, but they were understood to be the spirits of individuals in general that they were seeking to communicate with. When people came to these seances, what were they looking for? Many people were looking for consolation.
They were looking to be reunited with a loved one who had been ripped away from them by death and one often thinks that the appeal of spiritualism would be limited to times when death is very present, to times of epidemic or of war, And indeed, wars in particular give rise to a lot of interest in spiritualism because
young people are ripped away suddenly. The fabric of reality is really rent by the loss of those we expected to be with us, particularly children, UM, young men in war, loved ones, people very near and dear who's lost made reality um unbearable, understandable, incomprehensible um. And the attempt to reconnect with those lost loved ones is also an attempt to heal the fabric of reality. And you notice I used the present tense there. Communication with the dead is ubiquitous.
Everyone does it. It occurs in all times and places, at certain periods. It takes a kind of form that more than one person experiences, and that gives rise to a community of communication with the dead, a community of people who understand this as a goal that they can seek together. And that's what spiritualism is in nineteenth century America. It's a new religious movement of people who believe that they can find scientific evidence for the immortality of the soul.
By communicating with the spirits of the debt. And you mentioned that some of those spirits they are both kind of the lost loved ones, but some of those spirits are figures like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, William Penn, Daniel Webster, even more recent at that time, you know Henry clay Um or after his death, Theodore Parker. Sometimes they were addressing just one or two people in a in a small science, but sometimes they're addressing large crowds through a
trans lecturer like Corre scott Um. Just tell us about spiritualist relationship to history, kind of written large. Mm hmmm. Well, I'm glad you brought up trans lecturers because I had really only spoken about family seances, where people are seeking communication with an individual from their own life and their own circle. And trans mediums were public lecturers who gave lectures guided by usually though not always a particular spirit.
Sometimes they went into trance and were guided by a more generalized sense of spirit presence, but usually it was an identifiable external intelligence with a specific identity who spoke through the medium in a public setting. And the trans lecturers are a very important development in American history because they are the first large group of American women to
mount the podium and speak in public. There certainly had been other instances of women who had did had done this, most of them under some kind of spirit guidance, whether it be the Holy Spirit um uh or spiritual inspiration connected to the Bible. But trance speaker is who saw themselves as communicating messages from spirits, were the first significant group of American women to go on tour as public lecturers,
and you asked about the spirits who spoke through them. Um. In general, trance speakers had particular relationships with particular spirits, so that um while a public a public figure might deliver a message through a spirit, they usually were figures who came back repeatedly to speak through a specific spirit. When public spirits inspired trans lectures, they often delivered communications on subjects that they were concerned about during their own lifetime.
So in the case of Benjamin Franklin, he was a favorite medium for the communication of scientific information, and the notion that spirit mediums could communicate scientific information was understood as another kind of evidence of spirit presence. Because um most of the mediums were people who did not have education.
The ideal medium was the fourteen year old girl, someone who was understood as being innocent, naive, um, and therefore incapable of duplicity, incapable of making up a trans lecture that came through her during in a in a public setting.
Of course, that issue that you just pointed at played a large role in our first season of Unobscured, because we were looking at the same on which trials and question of whether the young girls who were claiming afflictions could be witnesses against established church members and leaders in the community as well as kind of outsiders or each other. Um And I'm thinking about uh. In addition to Radical Spirits, you've written Sisters and Saints and edited a number of
other projects on the religious history of American women. How significant is spiritualism as a chapter in American women's history. You just kind of pointed at the public stage. But do you have some more reflections on kind of what's the significance of spiritualism in this kind of long history of American women and religion. Well, that's a great question. I don't think anybody has ever asked me that question, really, um and I could talk about it for a long time.
So you cut me off if I've said enough. But in some ways the spirit medium is like a mirror image of the ideal Christian woman at the same time that she pushes the characteristics of the ideal nineteenth century Christian woman to its extreme. So you know, what's sometimes referred to as the cult of true womanhood in the nine century posits the notion that women by nature are pure, passive,
and pious. And the understanding there is that women um in some ways reflect the qualities of a perfect Christian better than men do. That they are untainted by the the competitive values of the marketplace and of the economic sphere, and therefore they reflect the values of the home, the domestic values of Christianity, a place of charity, of nurture, of retreat from the marketplace, the world of politics where men get dirty through competition, um, And that women rather
reflect a place of purity where Christianity can blossom. So spirit mediums push this idea to its radical extreme, that if women have these spiritual qualities more than men do, then they can send spirits that they are are perfectly
suited to be vehicles for divine knowledge. Now that's, of course, the opposite of what the Christian churches are teaching, particularly the established churches that recognize the authority of education, the authority of scripture, the authority of apples, stalic succession, the notion that priesthood in the Catholic or Episcopal Church, for example, is passed from man to man through the laying on
of hands back to Christ. And it's this uninterrupted lineage of male religious authority into which no women have ever intervened. The idea of the spirit medium presents us with a very different possibility of religious authority if women could convey spirituality because of their innocence. You know, I've met mediums who are alive today who give this same feeling of personalities where there's space for other things to pass through. And we have many other psychological terms that we might
use to describe that in this day and age. But it's very close to the idea of a young girl who doesn't present impediments to an external intelligence that wants to use her as a vehicle for communication. Spiritualism uses concepts and experiences that derive from the history of Christianity and from Christian experience that are related to gender, and it kind of just pushes them a little too far. In this direction or that direction until they no longer
qualify as orthodox Christianity. And so spiritualism in some sense tells us where the limits are of orthodoxy, the limits of what's acceptable for Christians, because, after all, Christians are taught in many contexts that they should try to communicate with benevolent spirits who are looking after them, who are looking down from heaven to lead them in positive directions.
And whether they're formal theological doctrines of their religions teach that or not, popular culture teaches that, and it abus Christianity very broadly in practical settings, in in the personal experience of popular Christianity. So the ideas of spiritualism should not be so foreign to Christians, and in many cases
they're not. In many cases, people who are church members, um even members of other religions are also participating in communication with spirits, even though it formerly formally contradicts the doctrines of their faith. The are a number of traditions within Christianity that address the communion of saints in some way, right or um, that's right, yeah, yeah. You mentioned the way that spiritualism kind of explores or pushes the boundaries
of orthodoxy sometimes leaps over them. Um. In the decades before UM, there was the kind of formalization of what is modern spiritualism in the late eighteen forties. UM. There are some other pressures on American Christianity and American religion. Uh. Some historians talk about the significance of Jacksonian democracy for
American life in the decades before spiritualism arrived. UM. Can you address maybe what we mean by Jacksonian democracy and what influence it had on American religion and kind of the twenties and thirties. UM. Well, I won't address Jacksonian democracy because I will not tread into political history for here of going outside my expertise. However, the period of the eighteen twenties and thirties is known as the Second Greade Awakening, and it's sometimes referred to as the period
of the democratization of American religion. When we see religious authority and experience sweeping the country through revivals, and we see a declining emphasis on an educated clergy, on religious hierarchies, on religious education, and an increasing emphasis on religious experience that is accessible to any individual. Anyone who accepts Christ,
accepts their sinfulness and their need of Christ's salvation. UM. So the Second Greade Awakening is a period of mass revivals and UM that's also a kind of preparation for spiritualism because of it, it's a religiously democratizing impulse that's fantastic. UM. There were also movements in science and in thinking about the human person and the human mind through mesmerism and animal magnetism, some of those things that laid the groundwork
for magnetic trances and clairvoyance UM. But there were also influences in communications technology that we're changing the way people were thinking about communicating across distances. And you talk about uh, women being attuned to the spirits in a way that men weren't. Can you talk a little bit about maybe the way that changes in thinking about the human mind and what was possible with technology also laid the groundwork
for spiritualist thinking and practice. Well, you have to remember the shock of technological advance, Electricity, the telegram of these things were like magic for a society in which they had not previously been existed or known, and they were poorly understood and um as they came to be introduced as ideas before people witnessed them personally, it was as plausible that there could be a spiritual telegraph that would connect communication through human mediums with the spirits of the
dead as that there could be a telegraph that would send communications across the country without anybody being able to hear them or see them. And I don't think it's any coincidence that the first spirit messages that were communicated through the Fox Sisters were communicated by raps wraps on the table, on the furniture, on the wall, on the floor, which if you think about that, it sounds like UH
tell leograph tapping out Morse code. And the the first UH seances were conducted by writing the alphabet out on a piece of paper and the person UH who was running the seance would pass their hands over the alphabet until raps were heard, and then stop on that letter and write that letter down. And during some of the first communications, they had a hard time separating these letters that they received in this way into words. It wasn't
always clear what the messages were. So if you think about this, it's a it's a technology that is kind of mimicking and inspired by the new technologies of electricity and the telegraph. They're trying to do something very similar but with spirit power. And if you think about it, it's kind of boring. Um two. And what what that informs me of is the great hunger for spirit communication. If you think about people and these they have other things to do, but they are sitting around a table.
Think how long it took to get a spirit message by passing your hands over the alphabet until you heard raps at a single letter, and then you had to repeat that process maybe fifty or a hundred times to get a brief spirit message. And meanwhile, you're kind of hoping that you have a human medium who will be
an effective vehicle for communication. You're hoping that you have created the right atmosphere in the seance room that will make a spirit comfortable to communicate and confident that this is a medium through which they can communicate, and an audience that will be receptive to their message. So you have a lot going on, and just think about I mean this is we tend to think of seances as a parlor game, and certainly they could become that, and
they did become that a popular entertainment. But the first seances, I don't think we're games at all. I think they show us the deep, deep hunger to communicate with the spirits of the dead, the deep hunger to be reconnected with loved ones that we have lost, and the deep hunger for knowledge of the divine, for knowledge of what
will happen after we die. Mm hm And you mentioned the Fox sisters, uh, before we get there, um, very very soon before uh, Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie seer um publishes on harmonial philosophy, and you mentioned the trying to get the atmosphere right conducive to spirit communication, and the idea of harmony becomes very important to spiritualist practice
and belief. UM. Can you talk a little bit about Andrew Jackson Davis and how his ideas were significant and his trances were significant in a way that distinguished them a little bit from say, the Shaker visionaries or other trance or clairvoyance experiences that preceded him. So Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie see or the prophet of the Harmonial philosophy was quite different from the Shaker visionaries who preceded him.
They were um seeking messages or receiving messages, whether they sought them or not in the context of a community gathered around a single figure, mother Ann Lee Um. Andrew Jackson Davis didn't have that kind of community around him. He tried to create it, but he never had that sense of authority that Mother Anne did, or the sense of creating a community that would live by a set
of agreed upon rules. So he was really just preaching this harmonial philosophy to like minded individuals wherever he might find them. And I wonder whether his philosophy would have caught on in the way that it did, And it
certainly did catch on in a very powerful way. But I wonder if it would have done that without the Fox Sisters, because the Fox Sisters brought a kind of popular accessibility to spirit communication, whereas Andrew Jackson Davis preached a harmony philosophy that made room for spirit communication but placed it in a much broader context. He the spirit who spoke through him was the spirit of Emmanuel Swedenborg, and Swedenborg's vision, which Andrew Jackson Davis was inspired by,
Um described a world of spheres. Swedenborg had been involved in the mining industry, and he understood the world in terms of levels, both levels under the ground and levels spheres above the ground that are through which the soul advances in its journey towards heaven. So there's a notion of progression, and this is something that Andrew Jackson Davis wrote about that people found very meaningful, the idea that
the soul continues to progress after death. Where Orthodox Calvinism and Protestant faith taught that whatever virtue you had accomplished in your life at the moment of death or lack of virtue determined your faith for eternity, that you would either be damned or you would be blessed to sit at the right hand of God for eternity and saved thereby from the flames of hell and eternal suffering. You would go to one of those two places according to the state of your soul at the time of death.
This was a source of huge anxiety to family members who might not have known the state of their loved one's soul at the moment of death. They might not have felt confident that their loved one was among the elect who had been selected by God to enjoy His blessings forever and be reunited with their family in heaven.
So if this is a source of huge anxiety, and Andrew Jackson Davis address that anxiety with the idea building on Swedenborg, that the soul can continue to progress in grace following death, and many spirit messages described the so, for example, people who communicated with children who had been lost, some of them even before the age of being able to speak, not to mention, before the age of reason
of knowing the difference between right and wrong. How could you know what the fate of such a child would be if they couldn't choose whether to do good or ill.
So families had a lot of anxiety about this, and the notion that a child could continue to progress after death allowed people to hear spirit messages from their deceased beloved babies and children who could describe to them how they continued to develop, continued to learn, were educated, learned to read and write, and develop in all kinds of ways after death, and usually these messages of consolation also assured the parent or the survivor that the deceased spirit
continued to care about them after death. A particularly consoling idea for the parents of children who had been lost before they could express gratitude or or fealty or loyalty or love to the parents who loved them so much. M hm. And you you mentioned that in this second grade awakening period it um, there there are multiple ways in which Christianity is fragmenting. I think there's the I think it's Emerson, or maybe it's the Row who says that the stern old face have all been pulverized. Right.
And so you're looking at an American religious landscape that includes now Methodists and Universalists and Shakers and Quakers and Baptists. And there are these practices in the in the in the period like camp meetings and circuit preaching and a new privileging of religious enthusiasm. And how did this kind
of uh, i'll say, riotous religious atmosphere um. You mentioned this a little bit, maybe a couple more of your reflections on how it opened a space for spiritualism and maybe which traditions, which theological traditions, do you see as the strongest influences on Spiritualism's origin. Well, you would think that those who were involved in what you called riot us expressions of spirituality might be the most likely to give birth to spiritualist communication. Not so, it was more
the quiet faiths. It was Quakerism, Unitarians, and universalists who were apt to explore spiritualism. Quakers in particular, had already a notion that the individual contains within themselves a perfect transcript of ultimate truth, that each individual is a transcript of the mind of God, and so we should look
within ourselves to know the mind of God. And that notion of what Quakers called the inner Light was very close to what spiritualists would do when they looked to individual mediums to hear the voices of spirits, to hear spiritual knowledge UM coming from an individual, and the idea that an individual medium could look within themselves could so the the seance had some commonalities with a Quaker meeting, where Quakers sit in silence to await the voice of God.
That's what spiritualists are doing. Also, they're waiting for a spirit voice they Now, Quakers would never be so rude as to do what is often done in a spiritualist church service or um seance, which is to boldly ask are there any present? Are there any spirits present who wish to communicate um? Spiritualists do not wait in silence as uh Quakers might. They create the conditions to promote
spirit communication UM. But it's interesting that they do view silence quiet, perhaps proceeding by preceded by him singing or prayers that would create the ambiance, the atmosphere in which a spirit would feel comfortable communicating. Let's go to talking about one of those particular Quakers, who is a remarkable historical figure that I had never heard mentioned or addressed in any of the histories that I've read, but who just stands out as so key to a number of movements.
I'm talking about Amy post Um. Nancy Hewitt's just published a fantastic biography of her called Radical friend Um. But I would love to hear your reflections on Amy Post as a Quaker in Rochester, New York, because she's at the she's at the center of women's rights conventions, she's helping to run the underground railroad through Rochester, and she's there to be the midwife for spiritualism. Can you tell us a little bit about Amy Post? Absolutely. Amy post
is one of my favorite historical characters. She was in the room where it happened, not just for spiritualism, but for so many new developments in radical, radical religion in the area of Rochester, New York. And she was a critical figure in spiritualism because of the degree of respect that she commanded. So she became kind of a mentor
to the Fox Sisters. She lent credibility to this development of spiritualism by her friendship with the Fox Sisters and also by her um by the fact that spiritualism spread through her net work of radical Quakers. And these were Quakers who were champing at the limits of Quakerism, who were not content to observe the restrictions that the Society of Friends placed on them. They were not content to restrict their friendships to members of the Society of Friends.
They were not content to restrict their religious practices to members of their own faith. And Spiritualism helped them push it, the push it the limits of what the Quaker faith permitted, both socially through their organization and who they could communicate with with, but also religiously what the sources could be
of spirit knowledge. So she's in Rochester, New York. Um, could you briefly describe what made Rochester, New York the right place to serve as this kind of nerve center, not just for spiritualism, but the women's movement and some of these other things that were going on at the same time, what made Rochester the place where things arrived and sprang out from Rochester with that area was called
the burned Over District. Upstate New York was known as the burned Over District in the early nineteenth century, and what that meant is that it had been burned over by the spirit that waves of the flames of revival had passed through Upstate New York, leaving in their wake newly organized evangelical churches and religious communions um, Mormonism, Seventh Day advent Is Um, new religious developments UM that seemed
to find root and receptivity in that arena. It's no coincidence that Upstate New York and Seneca Falls in particular, which is a small village not far from Rochester. It's no coincidence that these areas gave birth both to spiritualism and to the women's rights movement. And there were a lot of individuals who participated in the very formative moments and events of both these two movements. Many of these people were involved in the abolition movement. Many of them
were involved in Quaker networks. They were people who were pressing the idea of individual agency so that they really um press the idea of the autonomy of the visual
in both a spiritual and a political sense. So this is what we see in the radical wing of the abolition movement, people like um William Lloyd Garrison, who really saw abolition as an extension of the idea that it is heretical for one individual to assert ownership over another individual, because they are asserting the authority of God over one of God's creatures. And only God has the authority or
the ability to hold that control. And human beings, be they white or black, be they men or women, must ultimately place their allegiance in God alone, and not to any human master, whether it be a slave master, whether it be a priest or minister, whether it be a husband who had authority, legal authority over his wife in almost every way at this time. He owned his wife's property, had authority over her physical person, over her children, over
where she lived. And all of these questionings of personal and religious authority were intertwined so that the appeal of a form of religiosity that could cut through all forms of religious authority by saying you the individual, or if not you, then the fourteen year old girl in your household, can cut through the structures of religious authority. You don't have to ask a minister, you don't have to ask your Sunday school teacher, you don't have to even consult
the authority of the Bible. You can learned directly what the divine order is, what happens when we die. You can find out directly. You can have direct knowledge of ultimate truth. And in uh, Well, eighteen forty eight is a is a is a key year. Key year. Frederick Douglas and William c Now arrive in Rochester to launch the North Star, and they share an office with Amy Post and the New York Anti Slavery Society. Right, but more happens in eighty eight in the history of the
women's rights movement and in the history of spiritualism. Can you maybe give us a capsule of those events? What happens in eighteen forty eight? Well, eighteen forty eight is a pivotal year in many many arenas, um specifically in
relation to spiritualism and women's rights. Eighty eight is when the Fox sisters first to hear the wrappings that they attribute to the spirit of a dead peddler, that they hear wrappings on the walls and furniture of their small cottage in Hydesville, New York, and that when it is taken seriously by adults, ultimately gives rise to the spiritualist movement.
Is also when the first women's rights convention is called in Seneca Falls, New York by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Katie Stanton, and the very table where they right the famous Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence that gives the first real statement of women's rights in North America. That table, which is now in the Smithsonian
had been rocked by spirits. It had been uh, the wraps had rapped on that small mahogany table, and many of the same people were present at both of these events. You have to remember that the Seneca Falls Convention, when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Katie Stanton put out the call for the Seneca Falls Convention, an unprecedented call. It was to discuss the civil, political, and religious rights of women. Now, what are religious rights and who cares about religious rights? Well,
they did. They were just as concerned with their rights in their religious spheres as in the civic and political spheres. They cared about whether they could vote in their churches as much as whether they could vote for the school board or the Senate, And they were excluded from lay rights in the churches in the same way that they were excluded from voting rights in civil society. They were eluded from ordination in the churches the same way they
were excluded from elective office in civil society. So religious rights offered direct parallels. They were excluded from religious education, from seminaries and um Bible scholarship the same way that
they were excluded from law schools and secular colleges. So there was an exact parallel that was discussed at Seneca Falls, and the Seneca Falls Convention declared that when men usurp the rights of authority in the church by excluding women from the clergy and from religious office, that they step into the place of God by excluding women from religious rights. So we often think of Seneca Fall as the birth
of the woman's suffrage movement. In fact, women's suffrage was a very controversial proposition at Seneca Falls, and not everyone supported it. It was ultimately included, but it was hotly debated. And religious rights, I'm sure we're also controversial, but no more so than women's suffrage. And we don't think of Seneca Falls so much as the birthplace of religious rights, but when they came to write the history of women's suffrage,
they included those developments, and in many religious documents. For example, the fiftieth anniversary History of the Women's Missionary Movement traces its origins to the Seneca False Convention and to the women's rights movement that they saw that as the point of origin for women demanding equality in the churches and
in the religious sphere. What is it that takes what starts out as just kind of a neighborhood kerfuffle where the Fox parents are talking with their daughters and get some neighbors to come and hear this sound and try to figure out what it is. What takes that neighborhood event into the public sphere and and and forms it into a new religious movement. How does it grow so fast? Well, there's several answers to that question. The most immediate one
is the Post family. Amy and Isaac Post, who took the Fox sisters into their home and gave them credibility.
And they were so much at the network, They were so much at the node point of this large network of abolitionists, radical reformers, and radical Quakers at information spread quickly through them, but it spread faster than that once the news of the spirit rappings was out and once adults had taken it seriously, And that is a key point I personally, Actually, this is not a personal conviction. It's my conviction as a historian. Um My own view is that there is too much emphasis on the Fox
Sisters in the history of spiritualism. They are an important moment, and they are uh. Their initial wrappings did give birth to a new religious movement. But if the adults around them had not taken this seriously as spirit communication, it would have made no difference. That these adolescent girls heard these rappings and attributed them to a dead peddler. It would have made no difference if adults hadn't taken them seriously.
If adults who were well respected and and we're known for their religious piety hadn't taken them seriously, it would have made no difference. But once that happened, once this had been taken seriously by adults, spirit communication addressed a hunger. And it's possible that the democratization of spirituality in the second grade awakening loosened up the receptivity of the American public so that they were willing to hear spirit communication
from sources that had not been previously considered credible. Yet, there were other kinds of hungers that spiritualism was addressing as well, the hunger for consolation. This is a time when families are becoming more connected to younger children. Infant mortality is on the decline, and therefore one can afford to become more invested in one's love for an infant child or a young child, even though the mortality rate before five years old continued to be higher than after that.
So losing a young child was often in the purview of women. Women were the attendance of both birth and death, and children died in their arms at home, and so women, as they came to place more hope that their children might survive, were more and more devastated by their loss and looked for a form of consolation after their death. There's another cultural asports or social movement, uh that's important in this era that we're going to explore, or that
we that we are exploring in the show. Um that is part of that network that spread spiritualism and that's the utopian the radical utopian movement. Um. Those radical Utopians were on the ground floor with spiritualism, so to speak. UM, could you briefly describe the religious impulse behind many of the utopian communities like Northampton and Hopedale and Fruitlands of Nida Brook Farm. There was a religious impulse behind this this movement in these communities that were being founded. How
important were the Utopian collectives for spreading spiritualism in your view? Well, the utopian communities all had a religious impulse and they were all different. Many have had a charismatic leader who had a religious or utopian vision that was guiding. UM. The particular community formation Hopedale, which was one of the most important for the spread of spiritualism, was considered a
community based on what they called practical Christian socialism. And of course, a communitarian ideal and a socialist ideal go hand in hand because of the idea of shared property. Holding property in common is a common element of utopian settlements. And believe me, socialism is a lot easier if you have a religious motivation. Without a religious motive, not that many people are willing to share property UM or to live in harmony to to place their desires as individuals.
And remember the American Constitution in shrines property as an individual right that is uh equivalent to the pursuit of happiness. So to give up the notion that individual property equals happy us you have to be very deeply committed and piety religious fervor go a long way towards making that possible. Of course, the Quakers are the most successful communitarian religious experiment in American history. That is beyond the communities of
Roman Catholic religious orders. Utopian communities are looking for truth. They are composed of zealous people deeply committed to the pursuit of truth, and spiritualism offers as a vehicle for truth that is on the present. Truth is always available. If you have access to a spirit medium, a spirit might speak through them at any time. And it's who is ready to sacrifice and dedicate their life to a zealous pursuit of truth. It's a very appealing to have
access to spirit communication. So spiritualism grows and gathers followers through the networks of radicals and utopians. You know that network that Amy post was at this important point in um. But it also inspires serious opposition UM pretty early on, and then through its growth it was gathering members, but it was also making enemies. UM. Can you talk a little bit about the opposition to spiritualism and maybe if any come to mind, who were the antagonists of spiritualism
in the early days. All of the things that made spiritualism attractive to radicals made it abhorrent to conservatives, social, political, and theological. And I shouldn't even say they needn't even be theological conservatives. They need only be people committed two religious institutions, because spiritualism is really a form of religious anarchy. If anyone can make contact with the spirits of the dead, you don't need religious authority, You don't need a religious hierarchy,
you don't need the authority of the Bible. You can if you can go directly yourself or through a medium, to religious authority that has the potential to undercut all kinds of institutional authority, religious and otherwise. Spirits tend to be antarchic, not all of them, but they have that potential because they could say anything, and they can disagree with each other. If you don't have a scripture, a
written scripture in which doctrine is recorded. What is to keep spirits from spa outing different doctrines at different times and places. Nothing? And they did, and uh they often. Spirits often affirmed political or social views of the mediums or their communities. And they had the potential for very radical communities, particularly communities that were questioning the legitimacy of
traditional marriage. That we're questioning traditional gender hierarchies. UM. Spirits had the potential to affirm the religious validity of departures that were extremely threatening to established faiths, and they did so. Free love is one of the movements that is often associated with spiritualism, and that was anathema to establish Christian Church, which saw the sanctity of marriage as the bulwark of society and um something that the Church gives birth to, sanctifies,
and depends on. So questioning of the a traditional view of marriage was extremely threatening. Spiritualists espoused the idea of spiritual affinity. And I don't want to attribute this to all spiritualists because they were not all equally social radicals. Um, some could be quite conservative socially, but social radicals tended to be spiritualists, and they found in spiritualism and in the idea of spiritual affinity UH support for the aggregation
of traditional marriage. The idea of spiritual affinity was the idea that we have one ordained match in spirit life, and that if we are if we marry someone who is not our true spirit match, our true spirit affinity, that marriage is immoral. And so if a woman should be forced into marriage or should voluntarily marry for reasons other than true love, then her marriage was illegitimate, and
the same for a man. So spiritualists saw the way that women were forced into marriage by economic necessity as a religious impropriety because it was coming between the natural attraction of a man and a woman that is ordained
by God. To who say that they could be joined by the state, and that a husband could be given legal access to his wife's body by a ceremony of the church and the state, whether or not she felt in her soul, in her being a spiritual affinity for that man that made her want to unite with him and with his body in sexual congress. So you can
start to hear much of American society getting upset. It's not hard to see how these very controversial um and non conforming ideas were upsetting to the majority of religious groups and to societies that saw church and state and family as mutually supporting institutions. Mm hmm. Let's let's follow this line for a few minutes. Because in the lives of some of the prominent spiritualist mediums like Cora Scott hatch Um and Victoria Woodhull, Uh, they were not just
hearing these doctrines but living through often brutal marriages. Um. Can you talk a little bit about uh, kind of the maybe a little more about the state of marriage kind of at mid century, and um, maybe what they meant by free love, because maybe our ideas are a little more inflected by maybe the seventies than what a spiritualist would mean by free love in the in the
eighteen forties, fifties, sixties, seventies. That's absolutely right. The idea of free love in the nineteenth century was very limited because it was not an idea that said you should be able to have sex with whomever you please. Was not that by a long shot. The idea of free love is that you should be spiritually free to love your true affinity, whether you are legally married to that
person or not. So the freedom to love that was espoused by nineteenth century, free love advocates was a freedom of the individual, and it gave particularly women freedoms that they did not have under the law. What free love meant in the nineteenth century and to most spiritualist advocates, was that if a woman did not feel spiritual affinity to her husband at that time, she had no obligation
to have sexual relations with him. She had full autonomy over her whole being and she needed to determine for herself whether the person her husband or not, who join with her sexually was her true affinity or not, and
spiritualists advocates were very harsh, particularly women. Reformers were very very harsh on men who complained that they should be able to have sex out of wedlock because they were bound in marriage to someone who was not their true affinity and they had met an unmarried woman who was their true affinity. Well. Women spiritualist reformers had no time
for this sort of thing at all. They were very, very firm with the idea that if you are married to someone who is not your spiritual affinity, you are committing a crime of the spirit and you need to come forward in the light of day and declare that
and declare who your spiritual affinity is. So they were advocates of divorce and some of the early which was not readily available um Andrew Jackson Davis's wife, Mary Loved Davis, was married at the time that they met, and she moved to Indiana to receive a divorce, a legal divorce, and that was the only place where she could do that at that time. But to get a divorce in order to be able to unite with her spiritual affinity, she risked the custody of her children, and she risked
never seeing her children again. And women had no guarantee of custody, which was usually understood to go with the father at that time. So this was not a an opportunity casual liaison, at least that is not how the women reformers understood it. Andrew Jackson Dave self later discovered that the woman who had been his partner on the spirit on the Spiritualist lecture circuit for so long and his partner in reform, the beloved reformer, Mary Loved Davis.
He later concluded that she was not his true affinity and that he wanted to sever his relation with her and Mary, a younger woman. Spiritualists were shocked by this, and it really, Um, it was very detrimental to Andrew Jackson Davis is standing in the community. And it gives you some of the irony of these radical ideas that sexual will 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 sixties and seventies. Let's keep talking gender and power a little bit. Uh. There are mediums as spiritualism grows, Uh, like the Fox Sisters, Cora Victoria, Emma Brittain who comes to the United States as Emma Harding before she's married. Um. There are also mediums like Andrew Jackson Davis or Daniel Douglas Whome. Um. How was the were the experiences of
male and female mediums different in the eighteen fifties. Certainly there is a stereotype that the passivity of the female medium could make her a victim of a um, a male merchandiser, and there were examples of this. Cora Daniels. It's hard to know what to call her. Her Cora Scott, Hatch Tappan, Daniels Richmond to use all of her four married names, as well as her h unmarried names Scott, under which she became first entered the public record as
a public medium. Her marital history encompasses just about every possibility of the relationship between a female medium and a husband or um a male figure. Her first husband was a promoter who really um was much older than her and wanted to be her manager. She was very appealing and successful public medium and trance speaker. She had beautiful golden curls, and she was very popular on the lecture circuit. She had a golden voice of silver tongue, and people
flocked to her public performances. She was written about in the newspaper, and she was an enormously desirable and appealing figure. And her first husband did, to some extent take financial advantage of that UM and that became a stereotype of the innocent young woman who is subject to spirit control and to the control of a domineering male manager who will exploit her talents. UM. Her subsequent husbands were quite different.
Her next two husbands, her second and third husband's, were reformers. They were people who traveled with her on reform circuits. They were both involved with both abolition and Indian rights and UH, they really saw their marriages to her as um part of their reform activism, and they traveled with her as partners on the reform circuit um, so they were kind of peers. Then her fourth husband, Richmond, really was in the service of her mediumship, and he published
volumes and volumes of her spirit lectures. He employed typographers to take down what she said in trance and uh to trance to write it out, and he prepared these volumes and volumes of her spirit extures for publication. So he really devoted himself to promoting her mediumship, not to exploit it, but out of respect for what she had accomplished.
By this time, she was a mature woman, well respected nationally as a leader in spiritualism, and he married her with knowing that that's who he was marrying, a very very powerful woman, leader, well known on the public platform. Another another woman whose story we're following through Unobscured is
I'm a Hearting of Britain. She begins her life performing music as a young woman, makes contacts in occult circles, playing music for their for their meetings and music halls in France and in England, then comes to the United States and performs on the stage before UM. There there's some testimony that she was converted to spiritualism Matta John Conklin seance and Conklin is someone we followed to the White House, uh later on in our story. UM, but she gives us a look at someone who came from
performing on stage to spiritualist mediumship. Can you talk a little bit about the way that her life gives us a glimpse into that side of spiritualism and public performance. Spirit mediums could be subjected to really dreadful test conditions, and because they depended on passivity to allow spirits to communicate through them, they often found themselves in positions where
they could be exploited. They were tied up, placed in bags um nail that were nailed to the ground in order to create what we're called test conditions where they could not fraudulently communicate with spirits. Um. The idea of a test takes us back to the idea of spiritualism as scientific investigation. So they're trying to they're trying to construct conditions for a laboratory experiment where they're controlling the variables, and controlling the variables could mean subjecting a lone woman
too very dire physical constraints. The other point of similarity between a spirit medium, particularly a trance speaker, and a performer is that it was okay to look at them. Spirit mediums trans lectures were often the first woman that people in the towns where they spoke had seen as send the public platform. Remember that the theater was not a morally neutral environment. Women of the theater were considered
to be public women. They were considered to be women of the night, and not uh not necessarily women of the moral caliber that one would meet at one's church or want one's son to marry. The idea of a woman appearing in public was a breach of protocol. So the very some of the early women who made public statements and became known for them in the nineteenth century would give them to their brothers to read because they did not want to appear in public. They did not
want to be the object of the male gaze. They did not to be in what was at that time called a promiscuous assembly, that is, an assembly of men and women where men could look at women freely. Women were considered to be appropriate to the private sphere, to the sphere of the home, of the protections of domesticity, and being public. A public woman was often another word for a prostitute. That is, there was a moral equivalence between a woman being in public rather than private and
selling her body. So women mediums walked a delicate line between maintaining their moral stature, which they felt very strongly about, because to be a vehicle for spirit communication, one had to maintain one's purity m so that one could be an an appropriate vehicle for spirit. A spirit, a pure spirit would not want to communicate through a person who
is not pure in mind, in heart, and soul. So the purity of the medium was very, very important, and it was a little bit suspect if a woman ascended the public platform to speak in public. But trance speakers had a kind of out that other women didn't have if they spoke in public, because trance speakers, we're not claiming to speak for themselves. They were claiming that this was an external intelligence speaking through them, and intelligence that
they did not control. So they were not speaking through their own authority already, they were not speaking on their own authority. It was one else's authority that was so they were not breaking the taboos of propriety that a woman should not speak in public in the same way that an actress was who appeared on stage in the theater,
or an abolitionist lecturer. Remember the first women who spoke as abolitionists, the grim Key Sisters, had rotten fruit thrown at them because of the scandal of a woman preaching in public. It was considered to be immoral. So when spirit medium spoke in public, they were in this kind of intermediate space where they were not speaking for themselves, they were speaking for someone else. Another one of the amazing people that were following with this story is Sojourner Truth. Um,
and she's a pub speaker. Can you talk a little bit about the dynamics of speaking in public for her? Well? So Journer Truth really draws our attention to the extent to which race contributes to the construction of femininity. So journal Truth wasn't subject to the norms of femininity because she was not granted the privileges of femininity as someone who had been enslaved, as someone who had been in
domestic service. Um. As someone who lacked legal rights. As an African American UM, she did not have the privileges that Christian morality ostensibly accorded to women. So her blackness conflicted with the norms of femininity that were accepted at this period in the minds of those who refused to
accord her those privileges. Sojourner Truth had other sources of strength to appeal to, and in Sojourner Truth, who is such a fascinating figure, we see the intersection of a number of streams that are intermingling in American religion at
this time. For one thing, we see the impetus uh the the way that African traditions come in through the African American population UM and how African traditions come spirit presence is a point of intersection between American spiritualism and many of the traditions that came with enslaved Africans to the New Worlds, where the idea of spirit presence, the idea of communication with with ancestors, is very much part
of many many African traditional practices. In so Turner Truth, we see someone who um has African traditions as part of her heritage, who is exposed early in her life to the proliferation of Christianities that is happening in the Burned Over period. Who becomes um ensconced in a community of with a charismatic figure, who um is attracting people to all kinds of novel ideas. But ultimately she becomes a spiritualist, and she does that when she is a
public figure. So, for so Turner Truth, she's been through a number of parts of her religious evolution already by the time she encounters spiritualism, but it intersects with her role as a reformer and with the reform communities that she is part of. So for her, she interestingly is someone who shows a different kind of vulnerability that spiritualism
can address. Whereas white women could be empowered by spirits to do things that they were considered incapable of because of their innocence, so journal Truth was empowered to do things that she was considered incapable of because of stereotypes about black femininity and about blackness, and about her ignorance,
her presumed ignorance as a presumed illiterate black person. So spirits could empower her to do things she was assumed to be incapable of because of her lack of access to education and the authority of education, just as a young girl might draw on spirit authority because she was uneducated like a she didn't have the education that someone with biblical learning or ministerial training would have. Someone who was African American was also barred from those same kind
of opportunities that an adolescent girl was. And like an analystent girl, African Americans were considered to be less governed by rationality, which was considered to be incompatible with mediumship. Masculinity education was considered to make the personality too organized for a spirit to use you as a vehicle. But blackness, femininity, youth, ignorance,
innocent these were all qualifications for spirit mediumship. Could you say a bit more about what black spiritualists like sojourn or Truth or Harriet Jacobs or Harriet Wilson would have faced in even in abolitionist circles and utopian and reformist movements. Um, there were forces at work in these movements that maintained racist attitudes and relationships. Uh, they faced racism and bigotry
even among other abolitionists. There's been some good writing about the way that their mediumship was in conflict with even these new ideas of authority and hierarchy. Do you have
any comments on that that you could offer. Spiritualism provided the opportunity to cut through any kind of structure of authority, be it political authority, the authority of gender hierarchy, the authority of racial hierarchy, the authority of the slave system of human bondage, the authority of the state, the authority of the church, the authority of the Bible of the clergy. All of these structures of authority presented opportunities for spiritualism
to cut through them. So somebody who is suffering under any of these forms of authority could be empowered by spirit to oppose them and to be liberated from them. Now, there is no reason to think that someone who was liberated by the spirit from one source of authority wouldn't necessarily see the harm or the hierarchy, or the immorality of all sources of authority. In fact, those who said that all sources of authority are equally challenged by spiritualism
were the most controversial. Those were the figures who challenged the authority of marital bonds, of private property, of all kinds of controversial things, so you can see how there is gradation that spirit you might spiritualism might empower you just to cut through one source of authority or fifteen, and there's going to be people everywhere on that continuum. I don't find it a bit surprising that spiritualists and abolitionists were not completely liberated from all sources of hierarchy.
In fact, I don't believe that any human being is. I believe that a hundred years from now, whatever sources of authority or oppression we are blind to today, the historians of those next generations will be critiquing the people who think they're so woke today for whatever it is that we are blind to by our own circumstances. That was certainly the case for the abolitionists and the reformers
of the nine century. For someone like Harriet Jacobs, spiritualist networks would provide communities where she would find some sympathetic people, some people who accept her mediumship, who were willing to follow her leadership, who were willing to support her in her spiritual quest, but not all, whereas in another environment everyone would have opposed her. Spiritualism is often positioned at as an interesting midpoint between, to put it crudely, faith
and science. I mean, we've talked a little bit about that already. Um, empiricism and belief in the spirits, kind of touching on technology, that kind of thing. Um For believers, it kind of offered empirical proofs for belief in the spirit world. For materialists or religious dissenters, it was a you know, a phenomenon of the natural world, or may
be seen a little bit differently. Could you describe whether this kind of liminal zone or this this space that spiritualism occupies, was it more of an asset or a liability for spiritualists in the eighteen fifties. Wow, that's a
fascinated question. There are many scientists who were deeply committed to investigating spiritual communication, and many scientists who were deeply invested in a Societies for psychical Research were founded both in the United States and in Great Britain and in Europe, and these were composed of scientifically mind people, including many scientists who were committed to exploring the possibility of spirit communication under very strict test conditions. I was it an
asset or a liability? I don't really know how to answer that. Because many scientists are people of faith. Many scientists, both then and today see a sympathy between scientific inquiry and religious faith. They see the miraculousness of God's creation as the subject of scientific inquiry and something that is imbued with natural laws that can be discovered through scientific investigation. So there's always been a mix of science and faith.
I don't think that middle space will ever disappear, and certainly many religion just figures have viewed scientific inquiry and continue to do so as a path to the discovery of God's law and the intricacy and miraculousness of creation that embodies the natural law of of of God's mind.
M We talked earlier about some of the opposition to spiritualism that would be mustered through the church theologically um or we talked about it in terms of a conservatism of wanting to, you know, defend the borders or the margins of what was a traditional hierarchy UM but there were other kinds of antagonisms to spiritualism, maybe out of those motives, but that took the form of sometimes antagonistic investigations.
How did spiritualists react when in Uh say that the fox sisters relative Mrs Culver published an account of Maggie admitting in the eighteen fifties that her raps were staged or um to something like the one investigation by the Buffalo University faculty, after which professors published a report that said the girls were making the sounds with popping joints. Um. What kind of affected these approaches to spiritualism that were kind of exposures or something like that? Um? What did
this early negative press, Uh? What influence did it have on spiritualism as a movement. Because spiritualism is a religion that never had an orthodoxy or a religious hierarchy that could say who's in and who's out, Spiritualists were really free to respond in any way that they want to. Certainly, these exposures created a crisis of faith for some people.
For some people, it simply meant that while those mediums were not genuine, it was worth continuing their investigations until they were satisfied that they found a medium who was genuine. And fraud is a very fraud subject in spiritualism, because there are no questions that there have been fraudulent mediums who perpetrated deception on the public and profited by it. And that there have been gullible people who were embarrassed and disserviced by fraudulent mediums. Now, that is also true
of many professions, law and medicine, for example. UM not to mention politics provides opportunities for deception and double speak and misrepresentation. Does that mean that all participants in it
have those motives and are dishonest? These are the questions that spiritualists asked about their mediums, and to my mind, as a historian, I feel completely confident in saying that the majority of mediums were absolutely sincere in their belief that they were channeling communications from the spirits of the dead. I do not believe that the American public is gullible enough, or that there are enough good liars to create a movement of this size and impact and durability solely through fraud.
You also had um some antagonism from the press. The New York Times often published mocking articles about spiritualism. The Boston Career mustered the forces of the Academy against Spiritualism and hosted their own investigation with Harvard faculty UM. But in many other cases, spiritualists had allies in the mainstream press. Horace Greeley was famously a spiritualist, and and spiritualists themselves often lefted the chance to spread their message through journalism. Um.
How important was the spiritualist use of periodicals for the movement? Well, you've just come on one of my favorite topics, the spiritualist press of the ninete century. Um, the the revolution in communication, the print revolution of the mid ninete century was absolutely crucial to the spread of spiritualism because spiritualists
were radicals. They were radical about something. They were religious radical, if not radicals, concerning slavery or or other reforms of the day, and so they were likely to be in the minority opinion of the small towns in which they lived across America. What periodicals provided for them was the ability to form non geographic communities, communities of like minded people who did not see each other face to face.
So you really begin the Um, you see the seeds of the virtual communities that have become so important in
the digital age. In the periodical press of the nineteenth century, you could subscribe to a periodical published in Chicago or Milwaukee or Boston, no matter where you lived, and you would receive it through the mail, and you would see on it the names of other subscribers in your small town or in your state, and it would give you the potential to communicate with them, to create a network in your community, to learn when speakers might be coming to your state, when a speaker might come to your
to the capital of your state, that you could go and here and meet other like minded people and receive further intelligence about the religious movement that you adhere to.
So the periodical press was enormously important. It also spread news about traveling mediums and trance speakers did travel on a circuit, and they didn't have the religious organizations, you know, their Methodist circuit rider had the church to set the circuit that they would ride and announce where they would be on such and such a date and on such and such a schedule. Spirit mediums didn't have that. They
often traveled on faith. That is, they would um be hosted by spiritualist families in the communities that would invite them. And the the compensation that they received was what was taken at the door, what what contributions were taken up when they passed the hat, and they really didn't know how they would be received, how they would get money
to travel to their next destination. It was not an easy life being a spirit medium, particularly being a woman traveling alone, UM by public transportation on trains and stage coaches to smaller places. UM. It was was an arduous movement, and the newspapers were critical to spreading word and making this possible. M UM. In your view, what were some
of the most significant periodicals spiritualist periodicals. I don't think many historians would UM contradict me if I said that the two most important periodicals were The Banner of Light, published in Boston, the longest lived and most widely read of the spiritualist periodicals, followed by the Religio Philosophical Journal in Chicago, which was really the voice of the Midwest. UM. And then there were many periodicals published and smaller communities periodicals.
Publishing a periodical was a form of ministry. UM. Editors and publishers often did not make a profit on the periodicals that they published, but they understood this as a way of spreading the word of the spiritual manifestations and of joining like minded people into a community of faithful m That's great. I'm glad you said that, because we're focusing on the Banner of Light as Our as our. I mean, it does seem pretty clear that it's the biggest.
But you know, we're following the editors of the Banner of Light to their to New Orleans on the trip that they take down there in the eight fifties and looking at the star Carmon Nique and you know some of the things that we're going with spiritual north anyway, So that's fantastic. Let's talk more about another issue that brings spiritualism or race right to the to the surface of spiritualism, UM, which you mentioned earlier, and that is
Native American UH Indian spirit controls spirit guides. UM. How do you think about this practice which was so common in spiritualism. What is the myth of the vanishing race? And how did Indian spirit guides reflect or deflect that
myth in the years after the Civil War. So spirit mediums very much participate in the myth of the vanishing race, which is the idea that the indigenous inhabitants of North America are part of the past and that there cultures and populations will give way, um to the new inhabitants of North America coming from Europe. The UH, the myth of the vanishing race. I don't actually like that term, the myth of the vanishing race um, because it's not
Europeans did slaughter millions of Indian people. So it's not just a myth. That's also a military and economic enterprise UM. But there's also a mythological underpinning that is critical to the American enterprise, to the notion of the United States as a nation with a manifest destiny ordained by God two bring American civilization and Christianity across the continent from
sea to shining Sea. And that idea requires a spiritual justification for replacing indigenous inhabitants with inhabitants from Europe as well as people brought here in slavery from it m HM. So it requires a a spiritual understanding that can justify that displacement and the displacement of people's from their lands and the gifting of that land to new inhabitants. Do you have a general way of that that when you're talking about Native spirit guides Indigenous spirit guides, um, how
do you describe it in general terms? The practice Indian spirit guides are part of a longer American tradition that dates back long before the spiritualist religion emerges in the
eighteen forties. Remember that the Patriots who dumped the tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party dressed up as Indians and used hat wielded hatchets while they were dressed as Indians, with the idea that the Indian embodied both independence and a lack of British sovereignty, but also savagery and a wild response to uh tea being the epitome of civilization as well as a staple necessity of
British life in the colonies. Um So, this notion of the Indian as a symbolic representation was well imbued in American culture before spiritualism comes on the scene, and spiritualists participate in ideas about romantic ideas about Indians that are have already begun to develop um and are developing in
American literature. Lydia Mariah Child writes a romance about uh a woman who falls in love with an Indian and then the Indian mysteriously fades away into the sunset while she develops a more appropriate romantic relationship with a white man.
And so there is this ability in America can culture to espouse positive views about Native Americans at the same time that one assumes that they are people of the past who are dying away and who are appropriately part of the past that is part of the land of
the spirits. So spiritualists Indian guides of mediums often describe a place they describe as the summer Land, a land of natural beauty and an undisturbed natural land where Indians live in peace and harmony as do white people, and where there is no conflict between the indigenous inhabitants and those who have displaced them. So it spiritualists participate in the fantasy that Indigenous America and a European dominated a Erica can live in harmony and can be part of
the same spiritual vision. UM. But that's a fantasy, and spiritualists also participate in the process of displacement. Now, spiritualists are always reformers and they are very active in Indian rights reform movements. They are an extremely critical of massacres
of Indians. They protest against them. There is one spiritualist named Samuel Tappan in particular, who is an Indian rights reformer and um who is on the Commission that is charged to invest investigate the Sand Creek Massacre, when Cheyenne and Arapaho people who were under government protection were massacred by the U. S. Army during the Civil War, and he's extremely critical of American Army officials who perpetrated that massacre.
He spends his life trying to find justice for the people who were killed there and for the Cheyenne, Indians and Rabbajos who were harmed by that. But he at the same time views the United States as a westward movement, that is, the spiritual progress, and he at the same time participates in the progress of the railroad westward, the progress of the oil industry, the industries that require Native land, that require Native people to be displaced in order for
them to succeed. So spiritualists are in a um an odd position in my view, where they are espousing Indian rights, but they are also perpetrating stereotypes that place Indians in the past, in a romantic past, where Indians are appropriately living in the spirit world and providing support for spirit mediums um rather than exercising sovereignty in the present. When the Civil War began, how did spiritualists respond so Spiritualists had many of the same responses that other reformers did
during the Civil War. That is, they supported the war effort, they supported abolition, but they were so committed to a new age of spiritual communication, when human beings would be able to evolve farther within phut from spiritual wisdom, that they wanted to keep their radical reforms and the Sisterhood
of Radical Reforms alive during the Civil War. So when most of the reformers like Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Lucretia Mott and lots of the other figures dropped everything to support the Women's Loyal League and support the Union and create a highway of vegetables that women reformers in Chicago sent from the North to the the scurvy laden soldiers in the Union Army, spiritualists kept having spiritualist conventions when most reformers had just dropped everything but the war effort.
And that meant that at spiritualist conventions, the reforms of free love and vegetary and ism and women's rights we're still being discussed, even though women's rights conventions had been dropped for the duration of the war. So you see this cadre of extremely radical reformers still advocating for women at a time when everyone else thinks there's something more important to talk about. You mentioned already the way that the massive scale of death during the Civil War influenced
the growth of spiritualism. Can you talk a little more about how the war and is aftermass shaped attitudes towards spiritualism kind of generally, and did that differ north to south. I'm not sure that it differed north to south. A huge amount of carnage during the Civil War nor South, black, white, free enslaved. A huge number of people lost their lives, and you can see how that would generate interest in
communication with the dead. But there's something else going on during the Civil War, which is the enormous carnage in bodies. And Drew Faust has written about the changing attitudes towards the dead body. The people try to retrieve the bodies, and that's how we get the whole embalming industry that
has its origins in the Civil War. And so attitudes towards death are shifting a little bit at this period, and spiritualism is going to kind of move with that and around it and in it and through it and out of it. So some people now are going to be more focused on the body and the wanting to retrieve the body and bury the body and have a place in a cemetery where they can go to be
reunited with their loved one. But you know that some people who are taking advantage of the rural cemetery movement and burying that loved one in a family plot, are going to want to communicate with them and are going to go to a seance or to a spirit medium to try to do that. A lot of people died.
We really have never seen anything like that on American soil since then, when death was close at hand, and uh so, of course some people are going to be inspired to seek communication during that period, including in the South. And we do see spiritualism in the South in this period, never to the same extent as in the North, but we do see it there as well. Mm hmm. Victoria Woodhall was someone who had her family had been involved in various often criminal practices, and in the years after
the Civil War. Um Mary Gabriel's bio of hers one that we're using, and she talks about her family pick and clean the bones of the communities in the border states that we're grieving. Um. But then Victoria goes to New York and she and her sister Tenny become personal clairvoyance for Cornelia's Vanderbilt. And then Victoria becomes a more prominent figure in the women's movement by virtue of that new position, that new influence, that backing, that money, and
she starts her her stock brokerage. Can you talk about the way that Victoria wood Hall enters the women's movement at the end of the eighteen sixties and seventies. Well, Victoria Woodhall is a very dynamic and appealing and attractive figure, and practically everyone who comes in contact with her has strong feelings about her of one type or another, and a lot of suffrages see her as a fantastically appealing
and articulate spokeswoman for their cause. She attracts a lot of attention, and uh, they see that as an asset that the movement can benefit from and needs. Now, I have to admit I have not read the Mary Gabriel biography of Victoria wood Hall, and I really need to because I'm a huge fan of her new book on the Ninth Street. Women of Abstract Expressionism. UM so I really want to know what she had to say about Victoria Woodall. But I personally am not a Victoria Woodhall fan.
I view Victoria Woodhull primarily as an opportunist who would find sisterhood with any movement that provided her an opportunity for self advancement and an cause that she felt she could advocate where she would have a group of people who would stand behind her and follow her and adulate her and place her in leadership. She certainly found that both in the women's rights movement and in the spiritualist movement. She didn't really make a lasting mark on either one
of them. She made a lot of trouble for a lot of people. She got a lot of people in trouble through their affiliations with her UM and her association and advocacy of free love, which tainted other people with the the taint of immorality, whether they had earned it or not. UM. So, I might not be depending on what it is you want to say about Victoria Woodall, I might or might not be the best interview. Well, no, that's okay. I'm interested on a couple of events that
she was involved in. Your point of view on the when Victoria Woodhall travels from New York to Washington, d C. In eighteen sixty nine. She goes to the Women's Rights Convention that's in Washington, and she comes away frustrated by the internal divisions in the women's movement. Can you describe the conflicts in the women's movement at the time that Victoria was observing that made her feel like the women's movement wasn't going to make the kind of difference that
she thought she could. So at the end of the Civil War, the women's movements divide over whether the needs of African Americans for legal rights are so urgent that they should take precedence over the rights of women, or
whether women and African Americans should be enfranchised together. The men's rights advocates who advocated for abolition and for the Union cause always believed that they were part of a movement that always advocated for the rights of women, and that they were fighting simultaneously for the human rights and equal rights of blacks and of women black and white.
That turned out not to be the case, and that was a very very divisive issue at the end of the Civil War and the women's movement um experienced tragic divisions over that conflict. So what I can also say, um about Victoria Woodhulls election as president of the National Spiritualist Association. Spiritualism was never a movement that prospered through organization. In the twentieth century, the Spiritualist Association of Churches would
become a denomination. But at the time that Victoria wood Hall was elected to presidency of a national organization of spiritualists, it was really not a meaningful or representative body. So although she relished being elected president of anything, it didn't really make her a leader in spiritualism, and her affiliation
with spiritualism was brief. How would you describe the relationship between the women's rights movement and spiritualism in the eighteen seventies as we're kind of marching forward out of the eighteen sixties into that next decade, and you mentioned the trouble that Victoria brought to the movement by her by association with her. Um, what rolled the spiritualists teaching on sex and marriage and uh Mrs Satan as she was
sometimes called. Um, What role did those teachings about sex and marriage and spiritualism play in attracting and repelling advocates of women's rights to the spiritualist movement. Well as the nineteenth century moved on, all sorts of religious nonconformity showed
appeal to advocates of women's rights. So women's rights advocates are investigating and becoming involved with Theosophy, with Christian Science, with a diversity of New Thought and New Age movements that a spouse equal rights for women and that permit
women's leadership. So we have we have movements espousing a diversity of religious opinions that are in some way critic call of traditional gender roles that women's rights advocates are exploring in different times and places and to different extents. So when Elizabeth Katie Stanton comes to right or I should say, to edit her own critique of the Bible as sexist in the eight nineties, the Women's Bible an
incredibly controversial document. Most all of the women who are willing to cooperate with her on that are members of unconventional religious movements, and that would include Spiritualists, Theosophice, New Thought, Christian Science, and other movements. Now, Elizabeth Katie Stanton really wasn't very happy about that, because there were lots of Christian women's rights advocates who were not exploring new religious movements, and it was Stanton's hope that they would support a
critique of the sexism of the Bible. People like Francis Willard and other women who advocated women's suffrage but were also leaders of popular Christianity and so they had a much larger following than the Women's Suffrage Association. Stanton hoped that they would support a critique of the Bible that would show the parts of the Bible that spoke about
women's rights and what they said those women. The Christian advocates of women's rights and of women's suffrage, would not collaborate with Stanton on this project because for them, the Bible was above reproach. They saw the Bible as a source of women's rights and they didn't want to talk to anybody who was going to critique it, and they knew that they would lose credibility if they did so.
When Stanton gathers all these unconventional people, including spiritualists, to critique the Bible, she becomes incredibly unpopular, and the Women's Suffrage Association itself condemned Stanton for doing that. In the seventies. There are also battle lines drawn within spiritualism. Um we have the rise of materialization mediums. Can you talk about what we what we mean by that when we look back and we say materialization mediums. And in your book he wrote about um the way that there was a
kind of division. I think you wrote about it in terms of trance mediums and materialization mediums. And if you if you could address what was going on with their conflict. Sure so. Try mediums communicate the presence of spirits through their words, through their intelligence, through the wisdom that they want to impart to human beings. Materialization manifestations claim to prove spirit presence through the physical presence of the spirit in the room. Now, what is the physical spirit? The
physical presence of the spirit. Spirit is usually seen as opposed to matter, So how could spirit manifest physically? And different mediums demonstrated the physical presence of mediums in different ways. Some they would have of musical instruments in the room and they would invite the spirit drum the guitar in a darkened room and demonstrate their physical presence that way.
Some materialization seances allowed people to experience being touched by a spirit having a departed loved one brush your cheek with her fingers in a darkened spirit closet, and then disappear. Some materialization mediums exuded a spirit substance from their bodies
called ectoplasm. So all of these attempts to demonstrate the physical presence of a here it suggest an opportunity for fraud, and many of the materialization seances gave rise to serious accusations of fraud and discrediting of both mediums and spiritualists who accepted communications through materialization manifestations. Whereas trans mediums were looking to communicate wisdom, not to communicate the embodied presence. Now they also attempted to give tests to prove that
a particular spirit was who they said they were. So they would ask questions, or they would ask an investigator to ask questions that only someone who knew that person during life would be able to underto answer, or that only that person themselves would be able to answer. Um. So it wasn't that they weren't trying to prove spirit presence in the same way that the materialization seances were,
but they were not um. They did not make recourse to elaborate closets and spirit cabinets and um guitars and violins that uh, the materialization mediums said were necessary for spirit communication to occur. You you said a few minutes ago that spiritualism never prospered through organization and in the in this period, uh, can you describe how gendered power namics led trans mediums to oppose the formation of the
American Association of Spiritualists. Well, once you start having electing national delegates, which is what the National Association of Spiritualists attempted to do, then the qualities of a spirit medium are no longer going to be the most valuable qualities in a religious leader, because the person who you want to send to a national meeting to argue for your point of view is not necessarily the innocent, naive, pure passive young girl who is a spect who is effective
in allowing a spirit of a deceased family member to communicate with you. So, once you start having organizations, you want people who are good conscious speakers, who are good organizers, who are strategic thinkers, UM, who have good financial sense, who can hold the purse strings, all of the more masculine characteristics that mediums were not considered to possess. So mediums felt that the wisdom of angels was being locked
out when spiritualists started to form organizations. Even so, and I find this so interesting in light of that UH Cora is one of the people who all the way to the end of the century is working to form stable institutions for spiritualists. Can you talk about her role in UH in building churches and helping a certain tradition of spiritualism to form as a denomination. That's a great point.
She is such a capacious figure. Cora starts as an innocent teenage girl UM who is a medium for Indian spirits and other kinds of spirits and and for deceased family members, and she moves through a long life. I described how she develops, how her career develops through her husband's and the kind of evolution of her husband's but she's also going through a personal evolution to become a
figure of authority. And she does become the vice president of the National Spiritual Association, and she really is able to make that transition to a more organized group and to a role as pastor. So she has a settled congregation in Chicago, and that is something that UM is more like a church that will be part of a congregation. Then the Spiritualist associations where mediums traveled and they often
didn't speak in a settled congregation. They often were speaking in uh universalist church that was being made available for the occasion, or in a town hall, or in some other kind of free church that they were permitted to youth to use, because without organization, they couldn't finance their own structure, they couldn't pay their own minister, they couldn't support a settled clergy member. But Cora really made that transition to being the pastor of an established Spiritualist church
in Chicago. There was another kind of discourse that was growing in significance and that it seems to me, and I'd love to get your views on this, crashed into Spiritualism in this in these and eighties and towards the end of the century, which is um growing uh interest in new ideas about abnormal psychology and the formation of the discipline of neurology, and there are these other explanations for what's going on with a trance, with a fit, with a vision that it seems often because some of
the early neurologists were very antagonistic to spiritualism competed for explanation of what a spirit voice was. Can you can you describe what was going on like with neurology and how these ideas of a new medical discipline uh competed or related with spiritualism. Well, we see the rise not only of neurology but also of gynecology as a medical specialty.
And you have to remember that the study of women or of the female reproductive system takes off from a tradition that sees the womb as the cause of hysteria in women, that women lose their sanity because the womb is wandering around the body. But there certainly is an association of gynecology and neurology as having common interests in identifying the sources of female insanity, and mediumship is considered
to be one of those. There are medical textbooks that describe the disease of mediomania that are um written by
early gynecologists and neurologists. So there is this notion that women are more susceptible to irrationality and insanity, and that mediumship is an outgrowth of that, and that it is not a manifestation of spirit presence, but rather that mediumship is a manifestation of insanity, and there certainly were cases where people were committed to mental asylums where spiritualists were because of their conviction that they were communicating with spirits.
Now that is not completely an artifact of the nineteen century. I have heard similar theories advanced in the twentieth century where I have heard um schizophrenia, for example, associated with mediumship because one of the things that mediums do that you hear when you visit a spirit medium, you will hear them speak in different voices. When different spirits speak through them, and they sound different, it sounds like they're
different people speaking. And that is something that is also reported in schizophrenia, that when a different personality inhabits a person, they speak in a different voice. I have heard speculation about schizophrenia and mediumship, have no qualification to comment on it, but that idea certainly continues that people who hear voices are crazy. So there still are people who hear voices and believe that they are spirits, and there are still
people who think that those people are crazy. Um. But as these medical specialties are developing for the first time in the nineteenth century, spiritualism but set against them, and there definitely is a a head on collision by the authority that is being wielded, and the medical doctors need to assert in order to create a new medical specialty, because in fact, the medical doctors are also somewhat suspect.
They dig up cadavers and dissect them, and uh, they are also struggling for authority and credibility in the same way that spirit mediums are. Not in the same way, but perhaps in a related dynamic um to what is going on in the religious sphere. We opened our conversation in the thirties and forties with religious practices like camp meetings and started preaching in a new privileging of religious enthusiasm, second grade awakening. Spiritualism kind of grew out of religious ferment.
What was its place in American religion at the end of the century. Well, at the end of the century,
religious ferment continues. It looks a lot different, and we're heading towards new religious ferment and ferment in the early twenty century where heading towards the fundamentalists liberalism crisis in the nineteen twenties, where American religion is really going to become very polarized between theological liberals and conservatives and social liberals and conservatives, and the mainstream churches are going to turn one way, and some of the newer evangelical denominations
and movements are going to turn another. UM. But there is a third element here, and it is new thought, which is overlapping really with everything UM. New thought is is UM part of the notion of progress in the twentieth century and spiritual evolution. And there are lots of developments and there continue to be new religious movements. We
in the late nineteenth century. We have UM in we have the World's Colombian Exhibition, where we have Americans exposed to many of the religions religions of Asia for the first time, and we have Swamy's and other Asian religious leaders recruited to come to the United States and teach Americans about their faith. And so we have the whole movement of Theosophy which is attempting, attempting to combine the wisdom of the East and make it accessible to westerners.
UM and spiritualism moves in and out of all of these developments, because spiritualism is always available, you can always talk to the dead, and in any movement whether you think that wisdom is going to come from Egypt or from Tibet, or from South America or from Australia, you can always make contact with the spirit from one of those places who can give you wisdom that draws on those traditions and on esoteric um practices from another part
of the world. So as the world becomes smaller in the twentieth century, spiritualism continues for a vehicle of all kinds of channeled documents and channeled wisdom, and it continues to move into and out of many other new religious movements. When our listeners are hearing this narrative history from the fifties to about of spiritualism and its place in American life, what do you hope as a historian that they will
take away from this history or learn from it. I hope that they will be open to people whose views are different from their own. And I hope that they will be open to people who they may have dismissed as crazy because of their religious beliefs, but whose religious convictions allowed them to act with conviction in ways that we now find enormously admirable. And they would not have been able to do that without the spiritual inspiration and
liberation that they found in spiritualism. That's beautiful. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Are we done? We're done? Hey, folks, it's Aaron here. I hope today's interview helped you deepen your understanding of everything involved in the world of spiritualism. But we're not done yet. We have more interviews to share with you, so stick around after this brief sponsor
break to hear a preview of next week's interview. Next time on un Obscured, she will not accept the fact that her son has been sold, and she basically campaigns all over the neighborhood of Ulster County, rilling people about this, and especially the Quakers because it is against the law. But what enslaved woman has the wherewithal to challenge the
slave power. Well Bell did, and she got help from the Quakers, and she eventually was able to get her son back, but she raised a huge ruck buss A lot of the slaveholders were angry with her for having done this. The Quakers were adamantly anti slavery, and they helped her get a lawyer and eventually get this boy back. Within a year he was back, and when she got him back. She went to court and got him back.
He was covered with bruises. He told her that the man who had purchased him, who was also a New Yorker who had moved to Alabama, had had his horse hoof the boy. The boy, her son's name was Peter. In the face, he had a big gash in his forehead where the man's horse had hoofed him. And she was so angry that she asked God for retribution, and she told him to render unto them double for everything they had done to her son. As far as she was concerned, that was her curse that she was leveling
against this family. And within a few months, the woman who was married to the man who had sold her son and brutalized him, was killed by her husband, and in a very brutal way. He basically, according to the narrative, he had cut her wind pipe out in a drunken fit. Un 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 is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Monkey. For more podcasts for my Heart radiocs, iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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