ED: I’m Ed Ayers, the 19th century guy.
BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh, 20th century history guy. With Halloween in the air, we’re spending the hour looking at how previous generations of Americans have contended with the spirit world. In the first segment, we heard the story of the Fox sisters, the two girls from upstate New York who may or may not have really channeled the death, but who undoubtedly kicked off the spiritualist movement that flourished in the second half of the 19th century.
PETER: We also touched briefly on the way spiritualism dovetailed very nicely with the particularly American impulse to go it alone, to live one’s life without the interference of authorities from the church or any other institution. Well, at the very same time that spiritualism was coming on the scene, another group of Americans was also starting to challenge established systems of authority.
ANN BRAUDE: The first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York occurred just down the road from the first spirit rappings right about the same time and a lot of the same people were involved. A lot of the people who attended the first Seneca Falls convention were also going to séances with the Fox sisters and seeking spirit communication.
PETER: That’s Ann Braude, a historian at the Harvard Divinity School who’s written about the intersection between spiritualism and radical politics and those radical politics weren’t limited to feminism. In fact, Ann told me it was a small group of very active abolitionists who first took the Fox sisters seriously and helped organize the girls’ first public séances.
ANN BRAUDE: Now, why would abolitionists and reformers care about spiritualism? This is the big question.
PETER: One answer, says Ann Braude, is that many of those abolitionists were also Quakers. Like spiritualists, Quakers didn’t have much use for religious authorities and also like spiritualists, they were very much into the individual soul. Quakers believed in the inner light, that there was something of God in each person and so the possibility of communicating directly with departed souls was, to Quakers, kind of like, well, talking to God, but then there was also that issue of authority.
ANN BRAUDE: What the radical abolitionists believed was that slaveholders were usurping the place of God by asserting their authority over one of God’s creation. Now, once this issue of slavery raised this question about human authority over other human beings, that issue got applied in all kind of other areas and that’s where we start to see the women’s rights movement emerging out of the abolition movement. Spiritualists saw that when a husband exercised authority over a wife, that was also usurping the place of God, so spiritualists really pushed this idea of self-sovereignty and they really understood it also as extending to the marriage relations and this is where spiritualists get involved with free love.
Now, when we hear the term free love, we think about a kind of libertarian sexual license. That’s not what they meant. Often, free love, for spiritualists, could result in a much more restrictive approach to sexuality because they believed that each of us has a spiritual affinity and that that’s foreordained by God and that if we are married to someone who is not our true affinity, that’s not a real marriage, so if you’ve found yourself married, as I believe many people in America have, to someone who is not your true spiritual affinity, they would condemn sexual contact within that marriage and see it as only something that could occur in these very special circumstances.
PETER: So, Ann, here’s another example of what would in Victorian America be seen as a transgressive dangerous attitude that’s become pretty much standard in modern America, that is, the belief in at least the fantasy of romantic love and that spiritual affinity is pretty much mainstream.
ANN BRAUDE: I think you’re right. That has become a very mainstream idea. Spiritualists are not the only ones who contributed to the notion of romantic love. Many strains of Protestantism did move in that direction in the 19th century, but spiritualists did push it to an extreme position which is not that different from what we see today.
PETER: In some ways, if spiritualists were challenging prevailing values, particularly in the Calvinist establishment, at the same time they were emphasizing family values because spirit communication was overwhelmingly with family members, so in some ways, they were ultra-conventional in the emphasis on family values. I wonder if you could tease out that paradox.
ANN BRAUDE: You’re absolutely right. In many ways, spirit mediums and spiritualism pushed to its logical extreme, the direction that 19th century America was moving in, of rejecting separation of families at death and we see that in the rural cemetery movement where cemeteries are starting to look a lot like the suburbs with family plots and beautiful green gardens in cemeteries where people can go to maintain those connections with their loved ones who are no longer with them, spiritualism says if we can keep those connections after death as many Protestants acknowledged at this point, then why can’t we communicate, why can’t we speak to them?
PETER So, in many ways, when we think back to the spiritualists, there’s a kind of a shock of recognition in their positions. On the one hand, they’re at the margins, they’re radical free spirits. On the other hand, we can identify with them as their audiences could, large audiences could, in the 19th century.
ANN BRAUDE: That’s right. I think that in some ways it’s easier for us to identify with spiritualists than it was for people in the 19th century because the ideas of Calvinism, the ideas of infant damnation, the idea that one member of your family might go to heaven and another might go to hell and that your immortal souls would be separated for eternity, those are much less familiar ideas today than they were at the time when spiritualists were challenging them.
I think the large crowds drawn by spiritualists in the 19th century also reflected the time they were living in. There was no television. There wasn’t a lot of excitement. When the spirit medium came to town, that was something to see and people did, whether they believed in it or not, they went out to see this and many people reported that that was the first time that they had seen a woman speak in public and many of them were very surprised by what they saw and even if only a few of those people were converted to spiritualism, with spirit mediums traveling throughout the country, that amounted to a significant movement.
PETER: That’s Ann Braude, Director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. She’s the author of Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in 19thCentury America. [music]