Spiritualism

SPIRITUALISM. The general term given to the widespread social and theological movement of the mid-nineteenth century, spiritualism also consolidated and expressed the Utopian, pre-Marxist phase of U.S. radicalism. An important factor in the breakup of the First International’s U.S. section, it retained an influence within the native-born Left into the early twentieth century.

Spiritualism had deep historical roots. Utopian socialism, or communitarianism, by far the predominant form and ideology of U.S. socialism until the 1870s, continued the Reformation’s dual pursuit of true egalitarianism and untainted holiness. Many communitarian ideas (and a number of leading activists, such as Robert Dale Owen) passed directly from Utopian experiments into the spiritualist movement, which sprang up with a rash of séance-like spirit “appearances” in 1848–1850. Over the next decade, more than a hundred periodicals devoted to spiritualism spread the word, intellectuals (including an occasional congressman) declared their adherence, and spiritualist congregations approached the overall size of a respectable Protestant denomination. Contemporary reform movements such as women’s rights, abolitionism, temperance, and peace (and, more quietly, free love) shared constituencies with spiritualism.

Very quickly, a particularly leftward trend within the movement pronounced its version “philosophical spiritualism” (as differentiated from mere seance-oriented “phenomenal spiritualism”). Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), perhaps the leading American devotee of Emanuel Swedenborg, advocated in many of his volumes drastic reforms to restrain financial manipulation and return democracy to the mass of citizens. “The Pantarch,” Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–1886), became the practicing metaphysical theorist—and perhaps political ghostwriter—for Victoria Woodhull. Through Woodhull and her paper, Woodhull and Claflin’s, spiritualism reached even into the First International (Marx and his U.S. supporters scoffed at the belief, but other European-based officials adopted a more tolerant view). Woodhull, president of the American Spiritualist Association, served as public symbol for the potential synthesis of the two doctrines. Other spiritualist figures—journalistic spokespersons, practitioners, and poetry or fiction writers, often the same individuals—continued to affirm the centrality of radical reform or socialism to spiritualist expectations of a New World ahead. As late as 1879, a less controversial president of the American Spiritualist Association asserted, in the semiofficial Banner of Light, that “if spiritualism has been under a cloud because of its connection with freeloveism, it is destined to pass under a still darker cloud—but that one has a golden lining. This cloud is called SOCIALISM;” furthermore, “spiritualism … will spring up unbidden in the very center of the socialistic camp.”

Philosophical spiritualism, in all, offered a philosophy or cosmology akin to the untheoretical socialism of native-born Americans unable to act comfortably within the immigrant-dominated Socialist Labor Party of the later nineteenth century. Spiritualist newspapers from the 1850s to the 1880s argued for women’s equality, better treatment of blacks and Native Americans, abolition of capital punishment, and the long-range enactment of a cooperative order. At a deeper level yet, spiritualists suggested a psychic ecology—the oneness of all matter, living and formerly living—in a grand scheme. Universal consciousness would in this view eclipse class society and racial or gender discrimination. In many subtle ways, such spiritualist doctrines would find their way into the native-born ranks of the Socialist Party, through elders active in movements since the 1840s and through the indirect influence of familiar doctrines.

In general, the spreading faith in materialistic science (and the exposure of numerous individual seance frauds) diminished the appeal of spiritualism in the final decades of the century. In an odd way, however, resistance against this public confidence in bourgeois society prompted a radical-mystical turn of mind within reform-minded sections of the Yankee middle classes in the 1880s–1890s. Andrew Jackson Davis’s writings were widely reprinted in the Coming ‘Nation, the most popular socialist paper of the day.

Bellamy Nationalists set out their actual cooperative colonizing in league with radical Theosophists. Even in the ferociously orthodox Socialist Labor Party, the leading lecturer on the “Bible question,” Peter E. Burrowes (who had sojourned through nearly a dozen religions, and at the time of his death set about creating a chess game that would illustrate the workings of the universe), proclaimed in his “Gospel of the Cosmos” a great mystic vision of socialism as climax to mankind’s age-old spiritual yearning.

The Kautskyan scientific emphasis of Second International doctrine militated against any formal association of the new Socialist Party with the spiritualist heritage. Yet in the pages of a number of popular publications—the Comrade, Horace Traubel’s the Conservator, and the Socialist Spirit among others—variants of spiritualism found a new home. A sprinkling of homespun, especially elderly women Yankee radicals continued to argue their doctrines in Socialist Party ranks. In Iowa, for instance, “New Thought” believers (mostly aged Yankee reformers) who published the leading state Socialist newspaper claimed to make spiritual contact with others of the same inclination. But spiritualism’s greatest impact was upon socialist literature. Jack London, whose mother was a medium, wrote spiritualist (“mind-travel”) fiction, and other science-fiction authors, including the highly popular George Allen England and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nephew, Julian Hawthorne, gave their cosmic adventures a socialistic-spiritualist twist. The First World War, virtually destroying the entire milieu for spiritualistic socialism, also produced a last apotheosis of pronouncements of faith’s ultimate victory over the gore and cruelty of battle. Anticipating his own death (it would occur in 1919), Traubel—known as the “Socialist Walt Whitman”—depicted his spirit watching over the transformation, and added words of praise and condemnation, in his lyric “I’ll Hear It All from Somewhere.”

The next radical generation’s disapproval of theistic beliefs largely eradicated the memory of their importance and restricted spiritualistic doctrine for decades into personal credos such as Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio (1930). Henry Wallace, the marked exception, carried a Christian reform sentiment toward a more visionary, cosmic view of global religions as reflecting a unitary human hope. His spiritualist views were widely ridiculed after he was replaced as Vice President for the Democratic ticket of 1944 and became a severe critic of the impending Cold War.

Christian-based pacifism and social reformism never disappeared, even in the repressive atmosphere of anticommunism. But only in the later 1960s and after, with a return of utopianism, feminist theology, and a nature-centered religiosity, did the themes of spiritualism find sympathetic listeners around the Left. In the hippie movement, for instance, a reverence for Native American wisdom (epitomizing a nature religion) returned from nineteenth-century obscurity into a phenomenon of mass culture. New Left campus and community activists tended to ignore such developments, despite widespread admiration for the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s religious commitments. After the collapse of the New Left, the themes of radical spirituality seemed to grow still stronger for a time. Ultimately, prophetic public intellectuals such as Cornel West would present a religious side to socialistic reformism, but without the mystical edge.

By the 1980s, meanwhile, a sometimes radical Jungian feminism became a major topic of well-selling religious studies. Scholarship and a wide popular following concerning the archeological discoveries of goddess artifacts in vanished societies developed rapidly. While closer to ecofeminism than to the formal Left, the proliferating literature about matriarchal societies, seminar-retreats, and “goddess tours” revived discussion of a possible prehistoric age devoid of class and social strife. Recalling the enormously popular Frau und der Sozialismus by August Bebel, this trend offered promises of redemption of the global capitalist debauch evident at the end of the twentieth century and beyond. More ecologically-based, cooperative visions of a different future, growing popular amid the crisis of global warming and species die-offs, seem scientific rather than spiritual.

Cook, Vaneesa. Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Cox, Robert. Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017.

Moore, R. Lawrence. In Search of White Crows. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Stern, Madeleine. The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.