By the 1880s and 1890s, Spirit materialization had become a besieged practice. For example men like George Morse, the newspaper reporter caught Henry Gordon red-handed trying to trick a seance audience in Philadelphia. Reporters like Morse were often at the foreftont of the campaign to expose spirit materializers, but other skeptics-including secular magicians and ordinary people fed up with what they believed were gross violations of the public's trust-followed, adding their own unique reasons to the list of justifications for debunking spirit materialization.For journalists, the motivation to expose spirit materialization as a deceptive practice revolved around seismic changes that were reshaping the journalistic profession at the end of the nineteenth century. In their enthusiastic desire to skewer fraudulent public mediums, some journalists no doubt were driven by the simple impulse to achieve public notoriety and thereby boost their careers, but the meteoric rise of a wholly new variety of journalism in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s seemed to have had a much greater influence on the journalistic campaign to attack materialization. Steeped in this new journalism, reporters like George Morse were highly sensitized to the issue of fraud, and were always on the lookout for opportunities to smoke out deception wherever they could find it. Indeed, they believed it was their professional duty to expose unfair dealing and deceit in society-a bill materializing seances easily seemed to fit.
But why did newspaper reporters have such a burning desire to expose spirit materialization as fraudulent, without feeling a similar sort of fire for uncovering trickery in trance speaking?
Part of the answer has to do with timing; simply put, the rise of the "new journalism" corresponded chronologically with the rise of spirit materialization.But, the answer also has something to do with the nature of materialization itself. Indeed, the very thing that made the practice of materializing spirits so compelling to believers its promise to provide visual proof of life after death-also made it vulnerable to attack.
Visuality, at least in the case of spirit materialization, was a two-edged sword: it cut to the heart of what many spectators expected from seances (namely supposedly clear-cut evidence of the immortality and functionality of spirits), while also draining the lifeblood out of materialization itself by providing observers the chance to test spiritualism's claims firsthand. In effect, materialiiation sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Other forms of mediumistic performance, particularly trance speaking, were not capable of providing the same opportunities for exposing mediums-or conversely, visually "proving" the concept of life after death- that materialization did. One could use ridicule and verbal tests in order to goad trance mediums into confessing their deceitful ways, as the citizens of Lynn nearly did with Cora Hatch, but the oral and aural character of trance speaking phenomena simply could not be held up before the eyes of duped spectators as proof of fraud in the same way an exposed medium in disguise could. (Nor, alternatively, could . trance speaking provide the same quality of "evidence" of immortality that materialization supposedly could.) For nineteenth-century observers, visual evidence seemed to have an epistemological authority that aural evidence did not, but it was an authority that also proved especially susceptible to attack.
For secular magicians-or those sleight-of-hand entertainers who did not claim any link to the supernatural-the reasons they gave for attacking spirit materialization were quite different from those journalists gave. Predictably, many of them lashed out at materialization mediums because they saw them as their primary competition. The similarities in their repertoires often forced mediums and illusionists to vie for the same audiences, driving the latter to patrol their cultural and economic borders with such vigor and commitment that by the early twentieth century the practice of exposing mediums had become a central precept of secular magical practice. More fundamentally, however, the act of revealing the fraud in spirit materialization was, for conjurors, an exercise in professional discrimination. They too relied on visual phenomena to earn their bread. . But the point secular magicians were trying to make by exposing materialization seances was that their visual tricks were nothing like the unscrupulous performances mediums foisted on an unsuspecting public. Instead, they reminded their audiences, their shows were the result of specialized knowledge and hard work, not trickery dressed up in supernatural garb.
As effective as spirit materializers may have been at convincing people of their alleged supernatural power using the traditional exploitative strategies employed by other mediums and identified in previous chapters (namely autobiographical narrative, the press, sex, and visual theology), they were never successful enough at counteracting the influence of the newspaperman and his allies in convincing the public that there was not something unwholesomely deceitful about the work they did.Monopolies, con men, public hoaxes, and other social ills became literal crusades for the mostly young men who practiced the journalist's trade at the end of the nineteenth century.2
Before the 1870s, newspapers had been mainly party organs, arraying themselves on either side of the Republican-Democratic divide, taking potshots at their political enemies, and preaching loyalty to the party faithful. The ascendancy in the post-Civil War era of a new political culture that privileged a more muted party spirit and independent voting brought about a dramatic transformation in the world of journalism.
American society had changed. People now needed protection from rising government corruption and monopolistic businesses, as well as entertainment to leaven their workaday lives-needs the partisan newspaper was nowhere near equipped to satisfy.3 What is more, people now wanted unbiased, professionally-collected information, not party invective, and men like Pulitzer and Cockerill were poised to deliver it. Indeed, Cockerill's directive to the staff at the World was to entertain and inform readers, even if it meant turning to stories about crime, political scandal, and sex in order to do it.4
Their job was not just to report the news, but rather, in the words of one historian, to crusade "actively in the public interest," taking on corporate graft, tenement owners, white-slave traffickers, and corrupt politicians. No one was safe from the piercing eye of the "new school" newspaper reporter. In the final few decades of the nineteenth century, the New York World alone took on the New York Central and numerous other railroads, Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, the Louisiana lottery, the New York Police Department, and a group of city aldennen involved in a bribery scandal that eventually became known as the "Broadway Boodlers" case.6
Despite working very long hours-his workload could be as heavy as fourteen or fifteen story assignments per day-for the paltry salary of between fifteen and sixty dollars a week, the "new" reporter was often merciless in pursuing what he perceived to be in the public interest. 7 The typical reporter at century's end tended to cut his teeth onfiction writing, and when he landed ajob with a newspaper,his flair for penning colorful prose went with him into the world of journalism.8
In a particularly pointed column reprinted in the Spiritual Scientist, a newspaper correspondent seemed to articulate what many reporters were thinking and feeling. Any sensible person, wrote the column's author, who was "ever present at a dark seance, or witnessed tricks played off in a 'cabinet,' " could be "satisfied at a single glance that the whole thing was deception. In the name of common sense, are the people of the nineteenth century, under the name of Spiritualism, to be humbugged by such cheap devises [sic] as inflated masks, painted faces, and doll-babies."9 Opinions like this one gained currency until, by the 1880s, the practice of exposing materializing mediums had become a virtual cottage industry, and journalists made exposing mediums a key element of their careers. One intrepid reporter, for instance, made a name for himself by closely following the work of the Blisses, a husband-and-wife team, and discovered that the "spirits" in their seances "materialized" out of a trapdoor in the floor.
Other mediums, particularly in the South, regularly wound up arrested and imprisoned, some presumably betrayed by newspaper reporters. 10
Returning briefly to the story of George Morse's scuffle with Henry Gordon, one can detect the influence that the ideals of new journalism had on Morse's approach to investigating mediums. The reporter's public investigation of the medium was a premeditated, well-coordinated stunt. That Morse had taken time to think about how he would expose Gordon is obvious ftom the false identity he created in order to mask his true identity. Going by the assumed name "George Mason," Morse constructed not only a new identity for himself, but invented one for William Henderson, the Pinkerton agent, as well. The pseudonym must have worked because Morse was eventually able to gain Gordon's confidence. Indeed, after his first visit, the medium invited him back, even giving him a tree ticket to his next seance, which Morse attended (though he claimed he did not accept the medium's gift and chose instead to pay for his ticket).ll
George Morse, approached the task of exposing Gordon with a dogged determination to see the materializer clapped in chains and convicted as a con artist; in all, the reporter attended at least five of Gordon's seances, paying each time he went. At the last seance-the fateful one for Gordon and Kerr-Morse and Henderson (both still working undercover) were given a pair of highly coveted seats on the front row. Little did the medium or his manager know that as they were showing the two men to their places, Morse was carrying a warrant, signed by a local magistrate, accusing Gordon and Kerr of "obtaining money under false and fraudulent representations with intent to cheat and defraud, and conspiracy.“12 Later it became clear that reporters from other papers were also working on the story, racing Morse to be the first to expose Gordon's fraudulent behavior. Under such pressure, Morse easily could have chosen to jump the gun, but instead he went about his investigation carefully and deliberately, and, it appears, legally. By the standards of the new journalism, the newspaperman did everything by the book.13
Morse sometimes walked a thin line between professionalism and personal distaste for people like Gordon. Like other practitioners of the new journalism, Morse pulled few punches when it came to describing the materialization medium and his associate in the pages of the Press, sometimes even descending to personal attack to make his point. He wrote that Gordon was a "most peculiar looking old fraud" and Kerr was a "stupid-looking, horny-handed clerical sort of a person." The reporter even insinuated that the medium had strong feminine tendencies, a clear shot across the bow of any man steeped in the nineteenth-century code of male honor. "Mentally," argued Morse, "he has all the characteristics of a woman, and acts like. an old maid aping a miss of 16." What is more, Gordon apparently liked to wear women's clothing. After he had tackled and subdued the medium and began an inventory of his voluminous wardrobe, holding each item up "one by one for Gordon's inspection," Morse suggestively wrotethat the materializer was a little too quick to claim one of the pieces of clothing as his "masquerading dress." 14
Nevertheless, Morsels general charges against Gordon and Kerr tended to be accurate. He was right that Gordon had "swindled people by pretending to exhibit the forms of their deceased friends." He laid bare the medium's modus operandi in clear, journalistic prose. At the root of the materialization hoax, the newspaperman wrote, were the medium's questionable infonnation-collecting abilities and shrewd talent for disguising himself. Gordon gathered infonnation through trickery. "Without the subject being aware that he had given any infonnation," Morse claimed, "he [Gordon] could get a good general idea of the person's past life and present surroundings." In Morse's case, the medium was able to get him to say that he once had loved a woman named Ellen who had died "on the eve of marriage" (a fact the reporter deliberately fabricated for the occasion).
"She says she could not come tonight, but will come again to see you," Gordon assured the supposedly lovesick, distraught newspapennan. Sure enough, at the very next séance a "beautiful female figure," calling herself Ellen, appeared. She spoke softly, assured Morse that "she still loved him and had been ever faithful," and even touched him with her "lily finger," but for the reporter there was no doubt as to who was really talking to him. When the "spirit" bent near him to bid him good-bye, Morse recognized "her" as Gordon by the reek of the mutton stew the medium had dined on earlier that night. This experience," Morse wrote, "is related to show his [Gordon's] mode of working. In this case he was given a wrong clue [the thoroughly invented name of Ellen]. Ifit had been done to one ready to believe, and the right hint had been given, he [the believing spectator] would have thought it a remarkable test." 15
For Morse, all of this boiled down to a lust for money on the part of Gordon and Kerr, a point the newspaperman drove home over and over again. Again, there was a little edge to the way Morse talked about the issue of money in medhimship, but rightly so. The medium and his associate were mercenary men who bilked IImoney out of those who are willing or desirous of being deceived and filled their pockets with gain" by claiming lito summon the inhabitants of the vaults, the graveyards, and the tombs.“16
Theirs was a conspiracy of two designed to maximize profits through their specious claims to supernatural greatness. As the reporter put it: IIThere are usually twelve to twenty persons present, who pay $1 each, making a round little sum for an evening's theatrical performance." 17
Other reporters were as driven as Morse was by the precepts of the new journalism, and pursued materialization mediums hoping to reveal their deceptions. As was already stated earlier in this chapter, reporters from other Philadelphia newspapers were making plans to expose Henry Gordon in public, even as George Morse was moving into the final phase of his investigation of the medium. According to a letter written to the Press by William Pike of the city's Occult Science Association, at least one other local reporter, this one from a rival paper, was working behind the scenes to out Gordon as a fake. Ironically, wrote Pike, the members of the club "came by this knowledge accidentally when relating and exposing the methods used by another medium." (This presumably meant that the members of the Occult Science Association had been working with this other, unnamed newspaperman to uncover a second medium's shady work.) Yet, instead of chastising Morse for getting to Gordon first, Pike congratulated him and the staff of the Press, promising to "aid you in any manner whatever." 18
An article from the Cleveland Leader, published nearly a decade before Morse's confrontation with Henry Gordon and Hugh Kerr, provides us with yet another perspective of how the precepts of the new journalism affected the way late-nineteenth century newspaper reporters viewed and interacted with mediums. Unfortunately, like the newspaperman in William Pike's letter, we are unable to recover the identity of the Cleveland reporter, but he definitely conforms to the stereotype of the new journalist as pugnacious and completely dedicated to the practice of investigative reporting.
According to his account of what happened, someone-presumably the materialization medium C. H Read or his manager-had invited the reporter to the seance, so "he was on hand ready to witness the performance." He was clearly not convinced by what he saw.
"The manner in which the whole thing was conducted showed that it was more of a fraud than anything else," he wrote, though he challenged readers to make up their own minds after reviewing the evidence of deception he had been able to collect. First, he was denied a place on the committee deputized to bind the medium, a fact he seemed to interpret as a deliberate ploy to keep him from discovering the truth. Then, he pointed out, the medium insisted on keeping the room dark, thereby creating astoundingly ideal conditions for deceitful activity. Confederates, under cover of darkness, could secretly aid the medium and trick his audience by producing sham spirit manifestations. But that was not all, the reporter warned. Read also insisted on being "tied according as he should dictate." For the reporter, this meant Read could use trick knots to get out of ropes that only appeared to hold him fast.
In the end, a committee selected by none other than Read's manager-who the newspaperman ridiculed in print as "the chief cook and bottle washer"-tied the medium up Itaccording to [Read's own] programme," rather than the audience's. When an apparently independent-minded committee member proposed to put a few "additional touches" of his own on the knots, the "privilege was peremptorily refused." In the reporter's mind, this constituted irrefutable evidence of a conspiracy between medium and manager to defraud the audience. The bulk of the spectators who attended the seance seemed to think so too, and "nearly all voted him a fraud.“19
The Cleveland Leader story exhibits many of the key features of the new journalism. The reporter literally writes himself into the story, probably in order to increase the suspense and drama of his narrative. (In the article, he refers to himself in the third person as "the LEADER reporter. ") The newspapennan is also careful to hammer away at the conditions that would most easily allow the mediums to defraud his audience-the dark room, the "stacked" committee, and their foolish adherence to Read's stipulations about being tied. To emphasize this last point, the reporter points to Read's complaint that he was not able to do "all he advertised to do" because "his hands had been so tightly bound together." Here, the writer seems to be asking his readers to imagine how much more fraud could have been prevented if the committee had done things their own way instead of using Read's "special" knots. For the reporter, the questions left unanswered by the perfonnance were just too great to let Read off the hook. "Why," he wrote, had he been "kept off of the committee, especially after the manager had made arrangements to have him act? Why were all these things done in utter darkness, why will not spirits work as well in light as in darkness, and why did Read stipulate the manner in which he should be tied? When these questions are answered it will be time enough to put some faith in the demonstrations of this C. H. Read." What the Cleveland reporter seemed to be inferring was that the time would never come-Read was a deceiver that could never be trusted.20
Magicians in the World of Spirits
If, in actively seeking to expose materializing mediums as frauds, reporters were responding to a new professional imperative, in a way so too were the secular magicians of the late nineteenth century. In the words of one historian of stage magic, this new breed of magici was a sleight-of-hand artist who claimed to inhabit and perform in a disenchanted world, and who relied principally on the "technically produced magic of conjuring shows and special effects." Manual dexterity rather than otherworldly agency powered their tricks. Yet, the period's conjurors had to struggle mightily to set themselves apart and win a modicum of respectability for their profession, in part because they still suffered, particularly in the public mind, from lingering associations with supernaturalism. In a fundamental way, secular magic's collision with spirit materialization can be attributed to this issue. It was a war between cousins, an internecine brawl between remarkably similar forms of performance that disagreed fervently about the source of their power. Secular illusionists saw any association with otherworldliness as a threat to their desires for respectability and professional status, and believed that any conflation of the secular and the supernatural in the public mind promised to plunge magic back into the gloomy world of superstition. With this menace always dangling over their heads, illusionists simply could not allow those headstrong advocates of nineteenth-century supernaturalism-the spirit materializers-to go without a passionate challenge.
Prior to the nineteenth century, supernatural magical practice and secular illusionism (or what scholars have labeled the "old" and "new" magics) had often become entangled in the minds of spectators. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that magic was fundamentally redefined and placed, more or less permanently, on the secular side of the ledger; it was now accurate to think of magic as pure illusionism, rather than to think of it as supernatural in nature. Linguistic changes back this conclusion up. As Jackson Lears has suggested, in nineteenth-century America the word "magic" had begun to function more as a "rhetorical device" that connoted "sleight-of hand showmanship," than as a reference to "participation in a coherently animistic cosmos.“21
There was still the possibility, of course, that audiences would misunderstand his shift, as evidenced by an example from the 1800s which points up the harsh difficulties some sleight-of-hand artists--caught between public accusations of trickery and lingering associations with the mystical-experienced. In his memoir Fifty Years in the Magic Circle (1872), Signor Antonio Blitz (1810-1877), a British magician who performed in Europe and the United States, recalled being hassled in the 1820s by religious authorities on the one hand and by people looking for supernatural help on the other. Charged with criminal conduct by the Bishop of Exeter and skewered by a clergyman in Manchester, Blitz was also importuned by a group of miners from Cornwall who were looking for supernatural knowledge. 22
This continued confusion about where magic actually "fit" motivated illusionists, to redouble their efforts at shedding lingering associations with supernaturalism and persuaded them to continue working to refashion their performances into respectable forms of secular entertainment. "Disenchantment, wrote one historian, became their raison d'etre in the post-Enlightenment world.“23
This cultural distancing was particularly apparent in conjurors' campaigns to smoke out those in their cohort who still claimed they possessed preternatural powers. In these cases, concerned magicians who
worried over the future of the conjuring profession became "wizard[ s] arrayed against, wizardry" and exposers of "supernatural humbugs.“24 They jettisoned, en masse, any claims to supernatural ability they still harbored, and redefined themselves as instruments of rationality and skepticism. Respectable audiences, eager to bring magical entertainments into the bourgeois fold, were accepting the change. Gradually, illusionism was undergoing the birth pangs of secularization and professionalization. In New York City in the 1830s, it had become almost impossible lito find any performer... who did not explicitly claim disenchantment as the goal and function of magical entertainment.
Audiences, too, were backing away from supernaturalism. Antonio Blitz recalled that as early as 1835, "large and fashionable audiences" were attending his performances, where "there was, with a very slight exception, a total absence of an approach to the superstitious character" among spectators.25 Magic was becoming an increasingly important part of the commercial complex of show business. Indeed, by the middle of the century, magic had assumed many of the trappings of a bona fide profession: a burgeoning market for tricks (which some illusionists considered to be such important assets that they sold them only when they retired or desperately needed money); specialized knowledge, cultivated through apprenticeship and incessant practice; hired managers; and modem marketing campaigns. What is more, for many of America's illusionists success also depended heavily on a working understanding of a variety of mechanical "magical" apparatuses, superb physical dexterity, flawless showmanship, a keen interest in innovation, and enough expertise to fool the audience's collective eye.
Such markers of professionalism caught the attention of the middle class and won a new aura of respectability for conjurors. Illusionists like David Prince Miller (ca. 1820-1 873) once had been forced to wander the countryside, playing in "inns, small halls, and barracks," often interrupting their conjuring work with stints "as ... fairground barker[ s] and managers[ s] of freak shows." Now they were performing alongside other reputable acts in such centers of fashionable bourgeois entertainment as Niblo's Gardens, the Philadelphia Museum, Barnum's American Museum, and New York's Society Library.
More and more, illusionism was becoming a middle-class entertainment and magicians were becoming thoroughly middle-class entertainers.26
Through all of these transformations, the nation's materialization mediums almost to a person-continued to claim they were aided by otherworldly forces, even as fewer and fewer magicians expressed a willingness to make similar claims. (There were some exceptions, including Ira and William Davenport, who adopted a policy of not explicitly professing to having a special relationship with the spirits, preferring instead to leave the matter up to their audiences to decide. Such exceptions, however, were few and far between.) These changes spelled trouble for spirit materializers, whose seances were beginning to look more and more like burlesques of secular magical performances. In one 1876 seance, for example, the spirits supposedly materialized flowers and a live dove from thin air, while in another, a medium produced a large black-and-white rabbit from underneath a spectator's partially unbuttoned waistcoat. Even the illustrious Cora Hatch (who now possessed the new surname, Tappan) eventually turned in the 1870s to materializing flowers. And there were of course the floating bodies, disappearing people, and disembodied arms and legs that both magicians and mediums were showing on stage. Such phenomena threatened to halt the secular, respectable advance of magical entertainment and undo everything modern magicians had been working for, if only because the public could easily mistake materialization, with its continuing claim to supernatural status, for illusionism. In such a confusing environment, conjurors fretted about how best to distinguish themselves from spiritualist mediums.27
Believing that such circumstances call for drastic measures, troubled illusionists were quick to act. Across the Atlantic, in England, watchmaker and amateur magician John Nevil Maskelyne (1839-1917) began taking on the deceptive activities of materializing mediums with a vengeance. In 1865, he had gone to a materialization seance performed by the Davenports and came away thoroughly convinced it was a fraud; he had witnessed, fIrsthand, Ira Davenport handling a bell inside the brothers' spirit cabinet that supposedly had been rung by disembodied spirits. Enlisting the help of a cabinetmaker friend, George Alfred Cooke, Maskelyne copied the Davenports' seance down to their supposed spirit cabinet-with the intention of showing that the act was nothing more than a clever illusion. After touring for some time with their copycat seance, the conjuror and cabinetmaker eventually settled into a permanent home at London's Egyptian Hall, and Maskelyne began work on Modern Spiritualism (1875), his highly provocative expose of the misleading craft of mediumship. At the book's heart was the assumption that all mediums-whether of the trance, writing, healing, or materialization variety-were engaged in a cunning conspiracy to dupe the public. One of the first mediums Maskelyne exposed was Annie (also known as Anna) Eva Fay, a medium from Louisville, Kentucky, who relied on confederates to "create" spirit phenomena. The magician was quick to fInd the deception in Fay's performance, pointing to the fact that the ringing of a bell in the middle of a dark seance was not accomplished by materialized spirits at all, but by Fay's husband, Henry. When a group of spectators bent on preventing deception held his hands, Henry ingeniously used his mouth to take the bell from his wife, and shook it "as a terrier does a rat.“28
Robert Heller (ca. 1826-1878), another British illusionist who toured the United States extensively, was also heavily invested in outing materialization mediums as part of his magical work. Born William Henry Palmer, in Canterbury, England, Heller initially entered show business as a concert pianist, but he soon turned to magic, drawn to it after seeing Robert-Houdin, the famous French conjuror, perform. Young Heller was so taken by Robert-Houdin's performance that his first magical act was based almost solely on the older man's tricks. He took the act to New York City in 1852, and then traveled from there throughout the United States. By 1865, he was doing a "cabinet show" based on the
Davenports' materialization act. A report submitted to the Banner of Light from a St.Louis correspondent indicates that Heller perfectly mimicked nearly every process the mediums normally went through in their show, even deputizing a committee from the audience and then having them bind his assistant in a cabinet like the one the Davenports used. The correspondent, a believing spiritualist, was not convinced by Heller's act, but others presumably found his expose compelling,29
American illusionists were not far behind Maskelyne and Heller in their efforts to expose spirit materializers. Oscar Eliason (1869-1899), the world famous magician who was accidentally gunned down in 1899 while on an Australian kangaroo hunt, was an assiduous exposer of fraudulent mediums. Born in Salt Lake City to immigrant parents, Eliason began his career as a secular conjuror by performing in Mormon meetinghouses, a fact that won him the moniker "Mormon Wizard." His performances were usually well attended, likely due to his conjuring expertise. According to one report, audiences left his shows "thunderstruck" at his ability to turn ink into water, hatch "real birds from eggs," produce goldfish from thin air, create "umbrella heaps of flowers," and make people disappear. This was all standard magical fare. What really seemed to get the public's attention, however, were Eliason's public exposes of materialization mediums.
Loyal fans who had been unable to attend an 1894 anti-medium show clamored for him "to repeat the performance." The Salt Lake Tribune, which reported the story, indicated that he agreed to do the same show later that week, and that, as an added bonus to his devoted admirers, he promised to include "a number of other 'spiritualistic phenomena‘that could not be included in the previous performance.30
Eliason started his anti-spiritualist career by revealing the tricks of mediums who stopped in Salt Lake on their way between California and the East. (The first to feel his wrath appears to have been none other than Annie Eva Fay, the same Kentucky medium who John Nevil Maskelyne outed in Modern Spiritualism.) Eventually, though, the magician outgrew his hometown and decided to take his act on the road, though he returned to Utah often. One newspaper article from 1894 has him touring the "interior Utah towns." Later that year he was in Aspen, Colorado, where a cabal of the state's spiritualists attempted to "expose the exposer," claiming Eliason was himself a fraud.
The illusionist's response to the spiritualists' challenge was ingenious: according to a newspaper report, he "exposed himself, showing just how he performed the manifestations.“31 Such forthrightness apparently won Eliason rapid fame, ultimately making national and international tours possible. At the time of his death, he had received invitations to perform in such far-flung places as Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.32
The most instructive encounter between Eliason and a public materialization medium, happened when the magician took a short break from touring in 1894 and returned to Utah. A written challenge had just appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune under the title "Open Letter to Oscar Eliason," inviting the conjuror to levitate a table (a standard part of most mediums' repertoires). The letter, written by the medium Harry H. Waite, seethed with unbridled anger toward Eliason; the medium intimated that the magician had brought this rhetorical attack on himself by bad, mouthing Waite's father, who also happened to be a medium. In a culture that prized personal honor, Waite's reputation, as well as his father's, was on the line, and it shows in his letter. But Waite's disgust for Eliason flowed even deeper. In his mind, the illusionist was also part of a conspiracy to prevent any medium from performing in Utah's capital city. "I have been refused the Salt Lake Theater Sunday nights," Waite complained, "but you seem to get it. I have had the rent raised upon me to keep me out, and there is not a place in this city where I can challenge you to meet me in open contest. This puts me to a great disadvantage, but I am honorable enough to meet your bluffs the best way I can through this paper at so much a line." Eliason was an untested neophyte, Waite continued, who would prove unable to raise the table, even with a two hundred dollar wager on it, put up by the medium himself. But that was only part of Waite's challenge.
He also called on Eliason to "let me come on your stage at your so-called expose. In fair contest; if you duplicate my spirit manifestations as they are produced, before an honest committee, you stand acquitted. If not, you stand convicted as an impostor, and the winner takes the gate receipts.“33
What followed from Waite's letter was a lacerating epistolary melee between the medium and the magician. The next day's Tribune carried Eliason's response to his attacker. Referring to Waite as "Medium-by-the-Gift-of-Gall" (a parody of the medium's self-imposed nickname, "Medium by the Gift of God"), Eliason fired back, declaring that he had deposited $200 with his manager to be paid to a local charity if he could not move the table. Supposing he could easily shred what he believed were the medium's outlandish claims to supernatural assistance, he then he upped the ante, pledging another $200 if he could not "reproduce, duplicate or expose, without the aid of angel, spirit or devil .. . [Waite's] so-called spirit manifestations after I have seen them performed three times. " Warning Waite that he would not like the dire results of public exposure, Eliason also informed local spiritualists that they "must not blame me if I shatter their delusions. I will so completely expose the sham, hwnbuggery, and duplicity of all mediwns and spirit manifestations that a belief in their,supernatural power ... cannot find lodgment in any sensible and logical mind." Writing that he had "never before attempted to lay bare all [of spiritualism's] shams, simply confmingmyselfto a few of the most difficult tests performed by Miss [Annie Eva] Fay," Eliason intimated that he had decided to declare all-out war on spiritualist phenomena. "Now I will spare nothing," he promised, "but will expose all mediwns." He signed the letter "Mediwn-by-the-aid-of Tricks" and "Mediwn-by-the-aid-of-Legerdemain," no doubt in an effort both to poke fun at Waite and, at the same time, clarify the very un-supernatural power he believed lurked behind each and every materialization seance.34
This tit-for-tat exchange continued over the next few days, with Waite declaring that Eliason was a liar, a "consummate fraud," and a "deliberate impostor," and that none of the illusionist's "bluff and talk" had damaged the "confidence" believers had "in spiritualism." The conjuror had nothing more than a few "Jim-dinkey tricks" up his
sleeve, culled from "book[s] of magic," the medium crowed. Waite also put Eliason on notice that his reputation as a mediwn was above reproach. A few days later, the magician responded, declaring that he did not need to "resort to billingsgate .,. to defend my position in this community." Trying to cut off the newspaper exchange, Eliason declared the medium would "next hear from me Sunday night." But Waite still had a little invective left in him, writing in a final letter that Eliason was a "coward.“35
When the illusionist finally took the stage at the Salt Lake Theater a few nights later, he did so without Waite, despite the latter man's insistence that he let him "put up [his] cabinet alongside of yours." The magician wanted complete control over the stage.
Yet, whatever his apparent concerns about actually appearing with Waite, his performance was a resounding success, at least according to the local press. Reminding readers that Eliason had bested Annie Eva Fay only the year before, "duplicating in sleight-of-hand" everything the medium did, the Salt Lake Tribune pointed out that the magician now "took the work palmed off as 'spiritualism,' and duplicated it on the Theater stage showing to the audience how each trick was done." The performance had attracted an enormous crowd. "The lobby," read the Tribune article, "was a compressed cake of humanity, the wide and high flight of steps together with the platform was a crush, and the sidewalk overflowed into the street with people. The attaches of the Theater said they had never seen such a sight." What this large mass of spectators got that night was a behind-the-scenes look at the stunts mediums used to humbug their audiences. Beginning with a short talk on the history of spiritualism, Eliason hammered home the point that some mediums were so effective when it came to defrauding the public that when he replicated their shows, spiritualists believed him to be a medium himself. Then, one by one, Eliason ran through his repertoire of tricks, showing how each one was done, and eventually ending with a mock materialization seance. In this final act, he called up from the audience a committee of representatives from the local papers, along with his assistant H. A. Fyler, and allowed the committee to bind Fyler. Within seconds the assistant was free of his ropes, thanks to a trick knot attributed to Harry Kellar, the illustrious illusionist. The committee tied Fyler again, hand and foot, but this time they threw him into a cabinet where he immediately fell into a fake trance. Then the committee added a few twists of their own, placing coins between his fingers in order to detect even slight movements, and filling his mouth with water to prevent him from playing the horns and other instruments that Eliason had placed around the cabinet. Again, Fyler slipped his bonds, and proceeded to dance around the cabinet, playing the instruments by blowing air through his nose. From this performance, spectators were able to see just how easy it would have been for mediums to dress up and behave like "spirits" in a seance. The expose ended in a rousing round of applause, and the audience, tongue planted firmly in cheek, voted Eliason Ita 'medium' of equal ability to any that have ever visited this city.“36
More than anything, Eliason's performance drew his spectators' attention to the fact that nearly anyone-even his assistant-could replicate materialization phenomena using simple sleight-of-hand tricks. His shows, and others like them, promised to rip open the shadowy world of spiritualist mediumship and lay it bare to public scrutiny. Eliason furnished audiences with a compelling, alternate interpretation of how "spirit phenomena" (including, of course, materialization) were produced-an interpretation that clearly departed significantly from the explanation spiritualists offered.
Other students of modem illusionism turned to the publishing world as a way to disclose mediums' deceptions. In 1869, the illusionist George Smith-Buck (1836-1904) published an especially influential written expose of materialization performance under the pseudonym "Herr Dobler," a moniker he borrowed from an early pioneer of stage magic named Ludwig Dobler (1801-1864). Of particular interest to Buck were the simple ruses that mediums used in order to create the illusion of authenticity in their shows. He found the way mediums manipulated rope to be an especially effective way to mislead seancegoers. Rope tricks, he wrote, did not need much explanation, as they are "so simple that anyone might perform the feat by merely trying, it being far more difficult for an inexperienced person to secure another with ropes than it would be for that person to release himself after having been tied." All one needed to do was flex one's muscles while being bound, putting "an imperceptible strain" on the rope just as it was being pulled tight; the result would be that the rope would remain loose enough to wiggle out of once the time came to produce "spirit" manifestations. This tactic was especially important when one's hands were being tied. One only needed to "turn [his] wrists sideways," wrote Buck, "and while the rope is being crossed round, strain them gently one from the other; this will, when the wrists are placed close together, make the rope loose enough to allow the hand to come out without much trouble." "Of course," he continued, "when the hands are free the operation of untying the rest of the body is very simple indeed.“37 Buck was also interested in the flour ruse, where mediums allowed spectators to put flour in their hands as a way of "preventing" their use to produce séance phenomena. His explanation of the trick was simple. "When flour is placed in the palm of the hand," he wrote, "with very little practice the three fingers may be placed so as to entire confme it, leaving the thumb and forefinger quite at liberty." This was how the Davenports did it, he declared.38
The explanations magicians offered the public regarding spirit materialization phenomena apparently reached and energized some people, including even some spiritualists. Soon observers of materialization were also talking about the ways mediums gulled audiences. One reader of the Spiritual Scientist wrote that "all the material for bogus mediums" needed to create fake spirit manifestations "can be so concealed about the person that the most rigid search may fail to find it." (Though it was a paper that appealed to a spiritualist audience, the Spiritual Scientist was at least willing to entertain a variety of opinions regarding phenomena like spirit materialization.)
Mediums concealed things like handkerchiefs, tissue paper, and thread-which they used to trick spectators-"in the lining of [their] pants, vest, and coat, with threads so arranged as to deceive the eye, and in a moment's time they can be taken out and replaced. Those who have never investigated this matter would be astonished at the small space required for the articles necessary to materialize a first-class spirit.“39
For all the mud that was slung between magicians and materializers in the final few decades of the nineteenth century, it is ironic to note that many of the nation's best magicians actually dabbled in the world of public mediumship before launching their careers as secular illusionists, though this twn of events-probably more than anything else-actually contributed most to the magical fraternity's ability to expose spirit materialization as fraudulent. As apprentices or assistants to high-profile spirit materializers, they were in a unique position to learn the tricks materializers used in their seances, and then turn those same tricks back against their creators. As a result of this infiltration, illusionists became extremely effective weapons in the cultural crusade against spirit materialization. In support of this claim, consider the career of Harry Kellar (1849-1922). Born to German immigrant parents, Kellar left his hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, to seek his fortune while still a teenager. After working a succession of dead-end jobs, the young magician-to-be turned to show business in order to put food on the table, falling in first with the "Fakir of Ava" (the stage name of the English magician, Isaiah Harris Hughes) and then, briefly, with conjuror John Henry Anderson. Neither apprenticeship brought Kellar much in the way of success, driving him finally to apply for a job with the ever-popular spirit materializers Ira and William Davenports, and their partner William Melville Fay. Rising quickly from the position of stage assistant to advance agent to business manager for the mediums, Kellar stayed on with the Davenports for some time, traveling with them across the United States, as well as to Europe and Russia. Eventually, however, the brothers and their young manager had a falling out, causing Kellar, accompanied by Fay, to strike out on his own. Thanks to their long, intimate association with the Davenport brothers, Kellar and Fay were extremely well equipped to copy the mediums' act, and by all accounts, they were pretty successful at it. "Their burlesque of the Davenport seance," commented one observer, quoted in Kellar's autobiography, was "clever" and "their imitations were well done." Eventually, Fay rejoined the Davenports, but Kellar continued his work of replicating and exposing the work of public materialization mediums. Like Oscar Eliason, he declared that he could "do all the tricks performed by spiri~ mediums... after haviIig witnessed them three times." By his career's end, Kellar had perfected the mock cabinet seance, and had motivated a new generation of magicians to take up the torch of anti-medium expos. 40
One of the young illusionists Harry Kellar inspired-and one who also flirted with mediumship-was Harry Houdini (1874-1926). Born in Budapest, Hungary, to a Jewish rabbi and his second wife, Houdini (whose birth name was Ehrich Weiss) became a scourge to many of the nation's public mediums in the early twentieth century. Like Kellar, Houdini had also been blessed with the good fortune of developing a friendship with Ira Davenport (William had since passed away), which allowed him to observe closely the medium's tricks. According to the magician's later record, Davenport invited him in 1910 to his home in Mayville, a tiny western New York village that lay just a few miles from Lily Dale, a bustling colony established in 1879 by spiritualist mediums. Houdini, who, according to his biographer, thought of Davenport as his "artistic'father" raced to meet him. At Ira's feet, the young illusionist liStened intently (taking copious nd careful notes) as the older man related the story of his career as a medium. But Davenport went a step beyond simply talking about his days on the road, recalled Houdini, speaking "openly" about his perfonnances and not "hesitat[ingJ to tell me the secrets of his feats." As Houdini later interpreted the events of the Mayville visit, the older man candidly confessed his fraud. "We discussed and analyzed the statements made in his letters to me," wrote Houdini, "and he frankly admitted that the work of the Davenport Brothers was accomplished by perfectly natural means and belonged to that class of feats commonly credited to 'physical dexterity.' Not once was there even a hint that Spiritualism was of any concern to him, instead, discussing his work as straightforward showmanship." According to Houdini, so candid was the old medium that he even showed the younger man the secret of the "Davenport tie," or the trick knot that had allowed the brothers to slip in and out of their restraints at will during materialization seances. "Though many attempts were made to imitate it," declared Houdini, "no one, not even the magical fraternity, was ever able to detect the method used in these famous rope tricks, the secret being guarded so carefully that Ira Davenport's children did not know it.“ 41 Houdini also met with other materialization mediums, including Annie Eva Fay, who apparently followed Ira Davenport's lead and admitted to gulling her audience with sleight-of-hand tricks. Anned with this knowledge, Houdini embarked on a blistering campaign to expose the country's mediums, a campaign that finally culminated in the publication of A Magician Among the Spirits in 1924.42
The inside knowledge many magicians possessed was key to uncovering deception in the materialization seance. Not only could conjurors deduce certain things about how mediums produced visual "spirit" phenomena simply from what they observed at seances, but many illusionists had at one time actually been part of the mediums' fraternity, and likely had done the very tricks they saw on stage. They wielded this first hand knowledge skillfully in their efforts to protect their cultural turf and increasingly professional status. As such, they were a truly viable threat to the supernatural claims of spirit materializers. The risk they posed, however, was compounded exponentially by the often violent actions of dissatisfied spectators across the nation. Fed by the work of journalists and magicians, the power of the people in the seance gallery eventually dwarfed that of journalist and conjuror alike.
By the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, materialization seance audiences had turned fairly hostile toward mediums. Of course, not all observers of materialization phenomena were ready to attack spiritualist mediums in public, much less in private; there were many spectators who still bought into spiritualism's supernatural claims.
More and more, though, spirit materializers were forced to grapple with dissatisfied spectators angered by what they perceived to be mediums' deceptive practices. Their response was at least partly driven by the same localism that motivated people across the nation to challenge trance speakers, but it was also due, more simply, to people's anger at being humbugged by fake visual manifestations. Again, the double-edged sword of spirit materialization cut both ways: it had the potential to draw spectators into stances and encourage them to believe the otherworldly assertions of spiritualism, yet it also provided skeptical spectators with the easy evidence they would need to expose spirit materialization as fraudulent. Often the public declarations of other skeptics-including newspaper reporters and magicians-provided the spark that ignited the ire of audiences. Yet, even when audience behavior did degenerate into physical displays of aggression, spectators still tended to operate within a complex framework of moral assumptions and customs that demarcated acceptable audience reactions and defined legitimate medium performance.43
Ironically, the late nineteenth century seemed to be a time of pacified audiences, when rioting no longer functioned as a viable mechanism for exhibiting spectatorial dissatisfaction. Historians point to the riot at New York's Astor Place Opera House as an effective end to the cultural conditions that encouraged violent crowd actions at theatrical performances. Evolving out of a personal dispute between British actor William Charles Macready and his American rival Edwin Forrest (who was famous both for his intense nationalism and working-class origins) the riot turned into a conflict over class and culture. After the supposedly aristocratic British actor William Charles Macready took the stage at the Astor Place Opera House in 1849, angry spectators drove him out. He returned for a second night at the urging of some of the city's most influential citizens; police kept order inside, amid jeers from the audience, while workingmen unleashed fusillade after fusillade of paving stones on the building outside-a clearly symbolic attack on the apparently aristocratic and pro-British leanings of the Astor Place management. When the rioters attempted to charge the door, militiamen fired on them at point blank range. At least twenty-two people were killed as a result of the riot, and more than one hundred and fifty were wounded.44
The Astor Place Riot clearly sent theater managers and owners scurrying for ways to protect themselves and their investments against unruly crowds, but the assumption some scholars have made that the passing of traditional spectatorial prerogatives including rioting-following the violence of Astor Place signaled the wholesale pacification of American audiences is not entirely accurate. Certainly, theater and lecture hall managers feared that another terrible crowd action of equal proportions could be just around the comer, causing them to cozy up to the upper classes and demand respectable behavior from audiences. It is also clear that in the wake of the Astor Place Riot entertainers changed the way they viewed their relationship with the audience; instead of seeing themselves as they traditionally had-that is- as servants of a sovereign publicthey began asserting their own authority as autonomous, professional artists.45
Evidence from spiritualist sources suggests, however- that among spectators at materialization seances the audience's historical prerogatives were alive and well. More often than not, rather than retreating before the apparently growing power of performers and managers- spectators in public seances challenged mediums over the meaning and trajectory of the seance performance. Trying to beat public mediums at their own game, audiences insisted that channelers produce precisely what they promised-namely, authentic supernatural phenomena-often taking it upon themselves to design the most rigid experimental controls possible for ferreting out fraud. They saw their relationship as foremost a contractual one, a fee-for-service arrangement that even mediums and other spiritualist gatekeepers were obligated to recognize. Thomas Robinson Hazard stipulated that the exchange of money and ticket signaled that an agreement was "entered into between the parties, by the terms of which [the medium] agrees to exhibit some specimens of the phenomena named on the ticket of admission." For a medium to renege on the "mutual obligations" of the contract would be to invite dissatisfaction, or even resistance- from the audience. Audiences expected authenticity; if mediums were going to promise supernatural phenomena, spectators reasoned, then they should deliver on it.46
Seance audiences had turned a comer. No longer motivated simply by a healthy skepticism or suspicion, they were now fueled by something much more visceral. The restraint many spectators showed at trance seances seemed to be less present in materialization seances. The visual phenomena of spirit materialization had effectively raised the stakes of seance performance and pushed disbelieving spectators far further than trance speaking did-even to the point of violence. Compared to what many materialization mediums experienced, trance speakers seemed to get off rather lightly.
Consider, for example, the civil, if still tense, negotiations in 1858 between trance medium Emma Hardinge Britten's and a Cincinnati audience. The historical record reveals that the audience-elected committee charged with monitoring the seance intended to test Britten's alleged powers by demanding, of all things, that she give them a spirit guided lesson on the anatomy of the human brain. Knowing that she could not deliver the lesson, Britten simply refused to perform. "Your speaker declines the subject," she
stated flatly. "She comes not here to give you a test, but to teach [you] how to live and how to die." The object of her appearance, she continued, was to give a lecture that would "meet the minds of the many, not to satisfy the one, and send away the hundreds hungry." Britten did offer a way, though, to avoid the seemingly unavoidable impasse between herself and her audience. Why not let the entire crowd decide the seance topic?
A negotiated settlement between the entire body of spectators and the performer would be far better than a cancelled performance. Speaking for the "spirits," Britten declared: "We submit to this audience, whether your speaker shall give the subject adapted to them, or whether another committee shall choose for her." Outmaneuvered by Britten's direct appeal to the audience, members of the seance committee retorted that the medium owed her audience some kind of evidence of her supposed supernatural power, and appealed to the audience themselves, asking the crowd whether or not the "lady had fulfilled the promise set forth in the notice of this meeting." The.response from the auditorium was mixed, opening the door for a second, more conciliatory proposal from the committee.
Would the medium be willing to speak in general terms about the human soul? Knowing her negotiating power had its limits, Britten quickly decided to accept the second offer and avoid the audience backlash. The negotiations were a success, and Britten delivered what the Banner of Light characterized, in its traditional overstated way, as a "deep and philosophical" lecture that "commanded the individual attention of every hearer, and apparently gave great satisfaction.“47
No doubt one could find similar moments of restraint and negotiation in materialization seances, though the available sources (which admittedly were mostly written by mediums or their sympathizers) seem to indicate that the experiences of spirit materializers in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s tended to be much more grim.
Materialization seance audiences seemed to be more fully aware of what one theater scholar has called their "publicly sanctioned right to riot.“48 Maybe it was that materialization mediums were poor negotiators, but stories of gang violence directed against spirit materializers abound in spiritualist newspapers, memoirs, and autobiographies. From their perspective, popular materialization mediums were perennial targets of mob action and probably felt unfairly singled out by anti-spiritualist crowds. Consider, for example, the story of Henry Gordon's near victimization at the hands.ofNew England mob. According to historical sources, Gordon had been spending a few days in the southern New England town of Norwalk, Connecticut, when "a mob of ruffians" surrounded the house he was staying in, demanded he leave town immediately, and threatened him with violence if he ignored their threats. . Personal fondness for Gordon lathered staunch spiritualists like editor Apollos Munn into a froth of hyperbolic rage when they heard about what had happened in Norwalk: the Connecticut mob, Munn vented, was full of the "foul blood-spirit" that "once controlled the movements of the [Roman] Inquisition." Munn's own words indicate, however, that the crowd, after delivering its ultimatum, "dispersed, without doing any injury." While the mob did hint at the potentially violent consequences of ignoring their demand, they reined themselves in before violence overran them. It is very likely that they were more interested in simply cleansing their town of spiritualist influence by persuading Gordon to leave; than engaging in purposeless violence.49
Other materialization mediums, including Ira and William Davenport, were not always so lucky, at least if their biographers are to be believed. As if to soften what he saw as the harsh reality of the Davenports' existence, Thomas Low Nichols, a biographer sympathetic to the siblings and a respected spiritualist figure in his own right, claimed it was only in the "smaller" towns, and "among [the] ruder communities" that the brothers "were ... assailed with violence." Evidence suggests, however, that the Davenports may have been regular victims of frenzied mobs. One particularly violent episode appears to have occurred in Orland, Maine, during one of the Davenports' tours of New England.
According to biographical accounts, Orland's town hall, where the brothers had chosen to perform, "became the scene of a desperate fight" when a "rabble of drunken sailors and fishermen" forced their way inside and began having their destructive way with the building's interior. (Rumor had it that an overzealous Methodist had paid them to disrupt the Davenports' performance.) "Benches were torn up," wrote Nichols, "windows smashed, women screamed or fainted, and all hands went for a rough and tumble 'scrimmage' at the expense of many broken heads, black eyes, and bloody noses.“50
In the case of the Norwalk and Orland riots, angry religious figures and toughs from off the street formed the mob's core. In other places, journalists were key figures in convincing spectators to confront mediums. The personal appearances of newspapermen at materialization seances seemed to have an electrifying effect on spectators. At the seance where George Morse outed Henry Gordon, one audience member-a Mrs. Knight-was deeply affected by the reporter's actions. "I see now that the whole thing was a fraud," Morse quoted her as saying, "although when I stepped up to [Gordon's spirit] cabinet and saw the faces it seemed to me that I recognized them as those of relatives. The illusion, however, is now dispelled, thanks to you gentlemen.“51 In another example, this one drawn from the pages of the American Spiritualist, a newspaper sympathetic to mediums, a Milwaukee editor challenged Ira and William Davenport when he insisted that they be tied with thin twine, presumably to make the knots that bound them to their chairs more secure. According to the spiritualist newspaper, he "lashed himself into fearfui wrath" when the Davenports ignored him, "denouncing them as cheats and humbugs." His behavior appears to have sent the audience into an anti-medium frenzy. According to the American Spiritualist, "excitement ran wild for a quarter of an hour," until the police appeared and restored order. 52
Seance audiences, however, were not just unruly mobs to be led along by newspaper reporters or provocateurs. A sort of collective decision-making tended to propel audiences in their work to dismantle spirit materialization. When mediums did not deliver what they expected, spectators often joined forces to challenge them openly.
Democratic principles tended to rule in the public medium show, with each spectator adding his voice to the larger deliberations about how the performance would proceed. Audiences felt free to debate and vote on the topics to be covered in public seances of all varieties, and were not above militant action when they felt conditions warranted it, particularly when they suspected a medium was defrauding them. On one such occasion-a public materialization seance in Cleveland where the "spirit" of a dead Abenaki Indian appeared-the audience floated the idea that the man they had chosen to represent them on stage might actually have been the medium's accomplice. "It was demanded from all parts of the house that some one else be placed in the cabinet," wrote an observer. and after some deliberation the audience settled on William Heisley, a local solicitor, to be their new delegate. The medium had no other choice but to acquiesce, and Heisley took his seat in the cabinet. 53
The relatively democratic nature of the materialization performance gave even non-elites the chance to exercise some power over what happened in the seance. Now anyone could take matters into their own hands. In an 1863 seance in Richmond, Indiana, for instance, a spurned audience turned against the Davenports, eventually forcing the siblings off the stage. According to Paschal Beverly Randolph (a second Davenport biographer who eventually renounced spiritualism), critics of spiritualism had managed to maneuver themselves onto the ad hoc spectator committee that had the charge of preventing fraud in the seance. Marshalling the audience behind them, the Davenports' victorious opponents ascended the stage with an assortment of physical restraints, including leg chains, handcuffs, rope, and wire, and demanded that the mediums allow themselves to be bound. Their backs to the proverbial wall, the Davenports submitted and were securely restrained, though they supposedly were still able to produce their trademark "spirit sounds" in their enclosed spirit cabinet. The result was a shocked crowd that demanded either their money back from the brothers or "the heart's blood" of their agent. Drawing knives, guns, and bludgeons, members of the now wild audience rushed the mediums and proceeded to tear apart the cabinet, bit by bit. Not willing to abandon their property to the mob, the Davenports counterattacked and, with the help of their father, eventually managed to drive the "ruffians" back. When police finally arrived, they rallied around the beleaguered performers and briskly escorted them out of the hall into hiding. Within a few hours, however, the crowd, now fortified by alcohol, had tracked the unlucky pair of siblings to their refuge and were making urgent plans to tar and feather them-arrangements that had to be cut short when the brothers again managed to flee. But, they did not escape completely; constables, apparently swayed by the crowd's demands, switched sides and arrested the Davenports, dragging them into court the following day on charges of swindling. Forced to engage in a troubling legal battle, in the end the brothers were left saddled with exorbitant attorney's fees and a somewhat tarnished image. 54
It is hard to tell just how much credence to give this story. At the time, Randolph's sympathies lay squarely with the Davenports, suggesting that the details of the account were probably embellished. Still, we can expect that at least the core facts of the story were probably true, and we can feel secure concluding that spectators were willing to resort to occasional violence when they felt they were being tricked.
Conversely, so were mediums and their supporters. Details from another seance (this one apparently took place in Boston in 1875) seem to support this conclusion. A female medium by the name of Seaver had materialized several "spirits" as part of a séance performance, one of which purported to be the ghost of an infant. According to the Spiritual Scientist, which reported on the seance, "a woman in the audience immediately recognized" the child as "a little one whom she had lost some months before." That was too much for one skeptical young man in the gallery, who apparently rushed the stage, and grabbed for the supposed spirit baby. What he discovered was that the "spirit child" was "nothing but a rag doll." Not surprisingly, this discovery threw the seance into an uproar. The "conductor" of the show-probably Seaver's manager-boxed the young cynic on the ear, which brought more angry spectators to their feet, no doubt threatening the manager with his own ear-boxing. In the end, only the calling of an officer of the law could calm the "general scene of confusion that ensued." The crowd had uncovered and substantiated Seaver's fraud, effectively shutting her work down in Boston.55
In these cases, the spectators were responding directly to the visual phenomena of spirit materialization, a point proven by the targets they chose: the Davenports' spirit cabinet and the "spirits" in the Seaver seance. Before, when trance mediums would deliver messages from the spirit world while under supernatural "control." the evidence they gave of the spirit world-words-were impossible for spectators to touch, investigate, and, most importantly, test. Words are neither visible nor tangible. In a way, our words remain (at least in some sense) a part of our interior life. Hearers can hear them, scoff at them, and even reject them, but they cannot test them in order to prove or disprove the existence of a world beyond our own. Visual phenomena (like materialized spirits) are quite different, and audiences understood that. Materialization tended to require special physical paraphernalia, like wooden cabinets, that people could touch and carefully inspect. It also produced a visible, sometimes even tangible, "spirit body" that spectators could grab, pinch, slap, leap on, and wrestle to the ground in order to detect whether it was "real", or just someone playing "dress up." With the advent of materialization, members of seance audiences could-literally, as well as figuratively take charge and test the claims of spirit materializers. This is precisely what the doubters in the Seaver seance did. Similarly, the mob's destruction of the Davenports' cabinet was a symbolic attack centered on the claims that surrounded spirits materialization. By dismantling the physical vehicle through which spirits supposedly passed from their world into this one, the people in the crowd were sending the message that they heartily rejected the mediums' claims about materializing ghosts.
Some collective actions by seance audiences even involved advanced planning, such as the one described in 1857 in the Cleveland Leader. According to the Leader, a group of "boys about town," motivated by "a spirit of investigation" and hoping to expose what they believed was the fraudulent performance of the Davenports, brought a shuttered lantern to one of the brothers' Cleveland performances. Their relatively simple plan was to wait until the act reached its climax and then open the lantern, catching the mediums red-handed manipulating the musical instruments that were supposedly being played by the "spirits." Their plan almost worked. After smuggling the lantern into the seance, the would-be exposers patiently bided their time until the first strains of music began to waft from the Davenports' spirit cabinet, and instruments began hurtling through the air. It was then that the young men threw open the lantern, casting a "broad glare of light... about the room." Unfortunately for them, things instantly grew quiet, the flying banjos and tambourines disappeared, and the meeting disintegrated, leaving the "boys" without the evidence they needed to skewer the Davenports. They went away agreeing that "if they were humbugged, it was most cleverly and scientifically done.“56
The Davenports confronted similar plans elsewhere. In 1870, someone caused a sensation by "igniting some fierce combustible" in a performance in San Francisco and lighting up the entire auditorium. According to the Banner of Light, the stunt revealed nothing untoward in the seance, though the article admitted that a "few in the audience affirmed, that at the moment the light was introduced" they saw the mediums throwing around the musical instruments that supposedly were floating through the air due to spirit intervention. But, the Banner warned defensively, "such was not the general observation or belief. The plan for discovery was well laid and the combustible was well chosen, but... it failed of its purpose, and gave additional interest to the exhibition.“57
For audiences, then, a complex assemblage of cultural forces had formed to create a unique historical moment of anti-materialization feeling. In addition to the sometinies heated fulminations of journalists both in print and in seances, there were also the traditional prerogatives audiences relied on to resist performances they did not like.
While on the wane, these assumed prerogatives had not completely died out. And there was, of course, always the sne8king feeling many spectators had that they were being tricked. Skillfully turning the zeitgeist of the period against the nation's materialization mediums, seance spectators finally discovered their power.
1 Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, A History: 1690-1960, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 434; Ted Curtis Smythe, The Gilded Age Press, 1865-1900 (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003), 82; and Karen Roggenkamp, Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late-NineteenthCentury American Newspapers and Fiction (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005), xii, xv, 28.
2 Mott, American Journalism, 436-437.
3 Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), chap. 5; Jeffi'ey B. Rutenbeck, "The Rhetoric ofIndependence and Boosterism in Late-Nineteenth Century California Journalism," American Journalism 13 (1996): 456-474; and Smythe, Gilded Age Press, 72. Along with McGerr's book, one of the best accounts of the shift away trom hard partisanship in the Gilded Age is Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 217251. For more on the rise of the partisan press and the political uses of antebellum newspapers (and thus, before the period dealt with in this chapter) see Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties. 1790s-1840s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 16,75, 122-123, 324-325.
4 Smythe, Gilded Age Press, 88-89; Mott, American Journalism, 434; and Robert A. Rutland, The Newsmongers: Journalism in the Life of the Nation, 1690-1972 (New York: Dial Press, 1972),242-243. Stephen A. Banning provides a counterpoint to the received wisdom about the birth of professional journalism, arguing that professional journalistic education pre-dated Pulitzer and goes back at least to the 1830s. See Banning "The Professionalization ofJournaHsm: A Nineteenth-Century Beginning," Journalism History 24 (1998-99),157-163. On the place of sensationalism in late-nineteenth-century American journalism, see Randall S. Sumpter, "Sensation and the Century: How Four New York Dailies Covered the End of the Nineteenth Century," American Journalism 18 (2001), 81-100.
5 Roggenkamp, Narrating the News, 31-39; Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992),95; Mott, American Journalism, 437; and Jean Marie Lutes, "Into the Madhouse with Nellie Bly: Girl Stunt Reporting in Late-NineteenthCentury America," American Quarterly 54 (2002): 217-253.
6 Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture. ]880-]940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xv; Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretative History of Journalism, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962),354-355, 381; and Mott, American Journalism, 437-438.
7 Roggenkamp, Narrating the News, 50-51
8 Ibid., xv.
9 Spiritual Scientist (Boston), 13 April 1876. The Spiritual Scientist will hereafter be referred to asSS
10 Philadelphia Press, 19 March 1884; Banner of Light (Boston), 12 March and 28 May 1870. The Banner of Light will hereafter be referred to as BL and the Philadelphia Press will hereafter be referred to as PP.
11 Ibid. On the culture of male honor in nineteenth-century America, see Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), esp. 142-144; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Richard L. Bushman, The 12Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfted A. Knopf, 1992),379-380; and Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860 (Oxford: Oxfotd University Press, 2000), esp. 11-12.
12 PP, 19 March 1884
13Henry C. Gordon and Thomas R. HazMd, Autobiography of Henry C. Gordon: And Some of the WonderfUl Manifestations Through a Medium Perseeutedfrom Childhood to Old Age (Ottumwa, Iowa: Publishing House of the Spiritual Offering, 188-?), 7.
14 Ibid. On the culture of male honor in nineteenth-century America, see Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), esp. 142-144; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfted A. Knopf, 1992),379-380; and Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860 (Oxford: Oxfotd University Press, 2000), esp. 11-12.
15 PP, 19 March 1884.
16 Ibid., 19 and 20 March 1884.
17 Ibid., 19 March 1884.
18 Ibid., 20 March 1884.
19 Cleveland Leader, 4 January 1875. The Cleveland Leader will hereafter be referred to as CL.
20 Ibid.
21 Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994),42-43. Anthony Aveni has argued for a slightly earlier periodization of the final separation and disenchantment of magic, dating it to the Renaissance and the Cartesian notion of a mechanical universe, though he sees spiritualism as a sort of renascence of older conceptions of magic. See Anthony Aveni, Beyond the Crystal Ball: Magic, Science and the Occultfrom Antiquity through the New Age, revised ed (Boulder: UniversitY Press of Colorado, 2002), 122-127.
22 Signor (Antonio) Blitz, Fifty Years in the Magic Circle: Being an Account of the Author's Professional Life; His Wonderful Tricks and Feats; With Laughable Incidents and Adventures as a Magician, Necromancer, and Ventriloquist (Hartford: Belknap and Bliss, 1872), 114; quoted in James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001),180.
23 Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 98; and Cook, Arts, 179-180.
24 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things; Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 155.
25 Cook, Arts, 180; Blitz, Magic Circle, 114; quoted in Cook, Arts, 181.
26 During, Enchantments, 98, 107-134; Cook, Arts, 180-181.
27 SS, 10 February 1876,26 August 1875, and 20 May 1875. See also Milbourne Christopher and Maurine Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (New York: Carroll and GrafPublishers, 2006).
28 During, Enchantments, 156-171; James Randi, Conjuring (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 60-67; Christopher and Christopher, Illustrated History, 155-177; Fred Nadis, "Facing the Divide: Turn of the Century Stage Magicians' Presentations of Rationalism and the Occult," Journal of Millennia I Studies 2 (Winter 2000) [online journal]: 1-8; and John Nevil Maskelyne, Modern Spiritualism: A Short Account of Its Rise and Progress, With Some Exposures of So-Called Spirit Media (London: Frederick Warne and Company, 1876; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1976), 122 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
29 Randi, Conjuring, 98; Christopher and Christopher, Illustrated History, 211-212; Carl Waldman and Joe Layden, The Art of Magic (Los Angeles: General Publishing Groups, 1997), 79; and BL, 6 January 1865.
30 Salt Lake Tribune, 8 April 1895 and 1 May 1894. See also 24 October 1894. The Salt Lake Tribune will hereafter be referred to as SLT.
31 Ibid., 18 May 1894 and 18 December 1894.
32 Kent Blackmore, Oscar Eliason: The Original "Dante the Great": His Life and. Travels in Australia and New Zealand, 1898-1899, rev ed. (Sydney, Australia: K. Blackmore, 1987).
33 SLT, 23 April 1894.
34 Ibid., 24 April 1894.
35 Ibid., 26 April 1894, 29 April 1894.
36 Ibid., 30 April 1894.
38 Dobler, Expose, 24.
39 SS, 30 March 1876.
40 Harry Kellar, A Magician's Tour, Up and Down and Around the Earth, Being the Life and Adventures of the American Nostradamus (Chicago: Donohue, Henneberry, 1896),20,95-96. See also Cook, Arts, 206-208. According to Kenneth Silverman, Kellar even appeared before the Seybert Commission, a private panel convened to investigate spiritual phenomena, where he was able to produce supposedly spiritualist phenomena. See Silvemian, Houdini!!!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 307.
41 Silverman. Houdini!!!, 169-170; Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924),
42 Silverman, Houdini!!!, 308-309. On the history of Lily Dale, see Christine Wicker, Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead (San Francisco: Harper, 2003).
43 Historians of eigbteenth-century Great Britain and Europe have laid the seminal foundations for current work on "the crowd." See George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); and E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Cultw"e (New York: New Press, 1991), esp. chaps. 4 and 5. Work on the history of the crowd in the United States has gradually followed. See especially Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
44 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988),63-69; and John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990),222-228.
45 Levine, Highbrow, chap. 1; Kasson, Rudeness, chap. 7; and Butsch, American Audiences, chaps.3 and 4
46 Gordon and Hazard, Autobiography of Henry Gordon, 22.
47 BL, 25 December 1858
48 Bruce A. McConachie, "PacifYing American Theatrical Audiences, 1820-1900," in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption, ed. Richard Butsch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990),48.
49 Spirit Messenger (Springfield, Massachusetts), 7 December 1850
50 Thomas Low Nichols, A Biography of the Brothers Davenport (London: Saunders, Ottey and Company, 1861), 109-110.
51 Gordon and Hazard, Autobiography of Henry Gordon, 22; PP, 28 March 1884.
52 American Spiritualist (Cleveland), 30 July 1870.
53 BL, 22 January 1859; CL, 11 November 1875.
54 [Paschal Beverly Randolph), The Davenport Brothers, The World-Renowned Spiritual Mediums: Their Biography, and Adventures in Europe and America (Boston, William White and Company, 1869),277-285; and BL, 19 September 1863. According to Randolph, who had very little good to say about the people of Richmond, Indiana, "a minister might as well attempt to preach in hell, as for any spiritualist to ply his vocation" there (278).
55 SS, 8 July 1875
56 CL, 23 March 1857.
57 BL, 12 March 1870.