One Simple Idea (15 page)

To Wattles, the “Certain Way” meant using the mind as an occult force for attraction, the aspect of the book that interested creators of
The Secret
. And this highlights an important difference between Wattles and other early-twentieth-century writers on the character traits of success, such as Russell H. Conwell and Orison Swett Marden. Those writers endorsed the cultivation of willpower, optimism, and a can-do mind-set. They had no other social aims, and no belief in man’s occult prowess. Wattles, on the other hand, popularized the notion, also seen in Prentice Mulford, that the mind possesses an actual ethereal power—a “thinking stuff” that could literally attract circumstances or manifest desires. This became a core belief of the positive-thinking culture and distinguished it from the earlier character-building literature.

In 1911, Wattles produced his final book,
The Science of Being Great
, also published by Towne. It remains the sole piece of American inspirational literature to celebrate the example of Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs. A hero to followers, Debs was sentenced in 1918 to ten years in federal prison for opposing the military draft during World War I. From his cell he won nearly one million votes for the presidency in 1920 (and probably more if voter suppression were factored in). Writing in 1911, Wattles counseled readers:

In his speeches, Debs, too, encouraged a kind of working-class self-reliance, of both action and thought. “I would not lead you into the Promised Land if I could,” he told audiences, “because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”

In early 1911 Wattles was preparing for another run for Congress on Debs’s ticket. Wattles’s daughter, Florence, a budding socialist orator and organizer, was assembling a ground operation for his next campaign in 1912. She insisted that his loss in the mayoral election had been due to fraud. The twenty-three-year-old Florence told a socialist convention in Kokomo, Indiana:

But her father, who extolled the healing properties of the mind, was frail and often in shaky health. Wattles died of tuberculosis that year at age fifty during a trip to Tennessee. The
Fort Wayne Sentinel
remembered him not for his mystical works but as “one of the best known socialists in Indiana.”

In retrospect, the careers of Helen Wilmans, Elizabeth Towne, Wallace D. Wattles, and others can seem chimerical in their ideal of wedding social radicalism with the metaphysical powers of the mind. Yet their hopes reflected a brief moment in which avant-garde thinkers believed that human beings could develop and hone superior skills, and that life harbored unseen connections and channels of progress.

Indeed, Victorian-era men and women were enthralled with the theory of evolution, which, in the minds of figures like Wattles, seemed to promise that humanity was capable of orderly advancement in all areas of existence. Wattles and his contemporaries saw man as a psycho-spiritual being whose inner powers were as unrecognized as x-rays had once been in the farming towns where he was raised. Progress seemed to promise man’s ability to continually improve his circumstances through the harnessing of natural and social laws, and Wattles believed that if such laws—including mental laws—could be properly understood, it followed that man’s outer life could mirror the refinement of his inner state.

In this way, the possibilities of New Thought also touched the hopes of early-twentieth-century advocates for racial liberation. This was especially true of the black-nationalist pioneer Marcus Garvey, a man rarely perceived as having metaphysical affinities. Garvey, along with his
admiration for James Allen, punctuated his speeches and newspaper articles with telltale New Thought aphorisms, such as “Enthusiasm Is One of the Big Keys to Success”; “Let us Give off Success and It Will Come”; and “always think yourself a perfect being.” And he reminded his audiences of the need for “a universal business consciousness.”

Garvey urged followers to take a “scientific” approach to religion—by which he meant a mental-science, or New Thought, approach. In a speech delivered in January 1928 in Kingston, Jamaica, Garvey told his listeners that whites “live by science. You do everything by emotion. That makes the vast difference between the two races.… Get a scientific knowledge of religion, of God, of what you are; and you will create a better world for yourselves. Negroes, the world is to your making.”

Garvey seldom revealed his influences. But he made a rare exception for two New Thought writers: Elbert Hubbard, whose work he recommended to followers, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the inspirational poet who had studied with Emma Curtis Hopkins. Garvey read Wilcox’s poetry aloud at rallies, including these lines:

Though not widely remembered today, Wilcox is still spoken of in activist circles. The Reverend Al Sharpton told this story in 2011:

Like Garvey, the messianic African-American religious leader Father Divine harnessed the positive-thinking gospel. The influential pre–civil rights era leader wove New Thought themes into speeches, hymns, and aphorisms to imbue his followers with a sense of their innate potentials. New Thought was an unseen source behind Father Divine’s appeal.

Father Divine forged close ties to the New Thought world in the 1920s and 1930s. He especially liked the work of writer Robert Collier, a nephew of the publishing magnate P. F. Collier. Robert Collier had used mind-cure methods in the early 1920s when nothing else could be done to restore his health following a devastating bout of food poisoning. After recovering, Collier became an energetic advocate of New Thought, writing a highly influential 1926 book,
The Secret of the Ages
. Like the work of Wallace D. Wattles, it, too, became an inspiration behind the movie and book
The Secret
.

In
The Secret of the Ages
, Collier used engaging and deftly drawn anecdotes to argue that the powers of the mind were well known to the ancients but lost on modern people. Collier saw mind-power as the force that moved man out of the caves to build the ancient empires of Egypt, Greece, and Persia. To Collier, the power of mind formed the inner meaning behind every ancient parable, from genies in lamps to Christ walking on water. Father Divine liked what he read and gave away large numbers of Collier’s books.

Beginning in the 1920s, Father Divine invited mind-power impresarios—including Collier’s son, Gordon—to the elaborate banquets he hosted for followers at his Long Island home and ministry. Father Divine routinely treated acolytes to sumptuous, multicourse meals in a celebratory, revival-meeting atmosphere. His aim was to instill in them a consciousness of abundance. “This table,” he told banquet-goers, “is but the outer expression … of the condition of the consciousness within. There is no limitation, there is no lack, there is no want.”

He directed followers to repeat “it is wonderful” and “peace” as mantras of positivity. In addition to the books of Collier, Father Divine
gave banquet-goers works by mind-power authors Charles Fillmore and Baird T. Spalding. Spalding was an eccentric gold prospector who, beginning in the mid-1920s, wrote a series of fanciful, and often enchanting, mystical travelogues depicting himself as a student of hidden spiritual masters and mystery schools in the Far East. Spalding borrowed his basic mythos from Madame Blavatsky, but with a novel twist: His hidden masters taught principles that were very much in line with New Thought.

Around 1930, some white New-Thoughters joined Father Divine’s predominantly black movement. Eugene Del Mar, a prominent New Thought lecturer who had studied with Helen Wilmans, became a dedicated supporter. The Anglo-American New Thought writer Walter C. Lanyon grew deeply attached to Father Divine, dedicating books to him and openly using Father Divine’s language and letters in his books. Lanyon’s 1931 work,
It Is Wonderful
, was titled after Father Divine’s signature mantra.

Father Divine’s movement was not explicitly political. But in matters of civil rights he encouraged followers in picketing, petition drives, and letter-writing campaigns. In the 1930s his followers petitioned for an antilynching bill, gathering some 250,000 signatures. Father Divine led followers in hymns and prayers that combined a motivational tone with calls for political progress. When Mississippi senator and Ku Klux Klan member Theodore Bilbo filibustered antilynching legislation in 1938, Father Divine’s followers sang:

Some scholars came to see Father Divine’s organization as one of the precursors of the civil rights movement. Yet Father Divine often confounded journalists and critics with his claims to be God on earth and his encouraging of followers to “channel” his spirit for worldly success. Where outsiders saw audaciousness and megalomania, however, they missed the New Thought currents to which he belonged. Since the 1880s, Warren Felt Evans and Emma Curtis Hopkins had been telling of a “God-Self,” or a divine power within. Robert Collier wrote: “Mind is God. And the subconscious in us is our part of Divinity.” Father Divine saw positive thinking and, by extension, his own deific claims as a means of awakening followers to their holy inner-selves.

His methods could provide a startling uplift in an atmosphere of racial oppression. Scholar of religion Ronald Moran White noted that Father Divine’s practices “undeniably” resulted in “a certain restructuring of his followers’ attitudes toward themselves and the world.”

Even as New Thought’s most eloquent pioneers laid their hopes in a marriage of social reform and positive thinking, the link between mind-power and political protest showed signs of strain as the twentieth century progressed.

Concurrent with the rise of the prosperity gospel, an alluring new phrase began circulating in New Thought circles:
Law of Attraction
. The phrase grew familiar to millions of people who otherwise had little direct knowledge of the mind-power movement. In future generations, Law of Attraction got repeated throughout
The Secret
, ultimately becoming a better-known term than New Thought.

The theory behind the Law of Attraction is that the mind is constantly
attracting circumstances to itself, and that through proper control of one’s thoughts, this ever-operative principle of attraction could be used to attain one’s desires—usually in the form of money, goods, or career advancement. As this concept caught on in the growing economy of the early twentieth century, many New Thought leaders began to place ever-greater emphasis on wealth building and individual advancement, while social concerns faded to a whisper. By the 1930s, the movement edged closer to what Charles Fillmore had once bemoaned: a spiritual school that viewed God largely as “a force of attraction.”

It wasn’t exactly that New Thought shed its liberal qualities. Sociologists Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch made a broad survey of the inspirational and success books of the first half of the twentieth century and noted: “Racism and group-superiority themes are absent from the literature.” Indeed, New Thought organizations, much like Unitarian-Universalist congregations, represented a popular alternative for seekers who rejected, or felt pushed from, mainline faiths. Artists, actors, gay and lesbian seekers, and a wide range of freethinkers were all heavily represented in the New Thought culture, and remain so.

But the movement began to emphasize a more self-involved vision. Increasingly, New Thought framed the problems of life—especially financial problems—in the same manner as it once had framed health: Every thing depends on a person’s intimate arrangements with the Divine Power within. The only reality that matters is that which the individual creates for himself.