American Messiahs Read online

  AMERICAN

  MESSIAHS

  FALSE PROPHETS OF A DAMNED NATION

  ADAM MORRIS

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A division of

  W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York | London

  FOR AARON JOSEPH

  The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.

  —KARL MARX,

  A Contribution to the Critique

  of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

  If thou art in the mood I will discourse.

  —THOMAS LAKE HARRIS,

  “Nu. VII,” White Roses for the Pall

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  Introduction: The Messianic Impulse in America

  ONE: WOMEN IN THE WILDERNESS

  1. The Person Formerly Known as Jemima Wilkinson

  2. The Universal Friends

  3. The All-Friend in the City of Brotherly Love

  4. New Jerusalem

  5. Mother Ann

  6. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing

  7. The Era of Manifestations

  TWO: THE CHOSEN VESSEL

  8. America’s Best-Known Mystic

  9. The Poughkeepsie Seer

  10. The Fox Sisters

  11. The Apostolic Circle

  12. Poet in New York

  13. The Brotherhood of the New Life

  14. Salem-on-Erie

  15. California Idyll

  16. Paradise Lost

  THREE: THE GREAT COSMIC EGG

  17. A Messianic Meeting

  18. Koresh, Shepherd of God

  19. The New Age

  20. Dr. Teed’s Benefactresses

  21. Teed Goes Mental

  22. The Koreshan Unity

  23. Messiah on the Move

  24. Another New Jerusalem

  25. A Test of Immortality

  FOUR: THE GLO-RAYS OF GOD

  26. Divine Transformations

  27. The Messenger

  28. Trouble in Paradise

  29. The Harlem Kingdom

  30. Promised Lands

  31. Heaven Trembles

  32. Righteous Government

  33. Philadelphia

  FIVE: FALL OF THE SKY GOD

  34. Jim Jones

  35. Divine Aspirations

  36. The Minister Wanders

  37. California Mystics

  38. New Directions

  39. Going Communal

  40. Peoples Temple Hits the Road

  41. Backlash

  42. Jonestown

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ADDITIONAL SOURCES

  ILLUSTRATIONS INSERT

  INDEX

  FOREWORD

  MY SECOND TRIP TO HEAVEN was more propitious than the first. I wasn’t alone this time, but accompanied by my friend Shannon, who works as a historic preservationist in Philadelphia. Shannon lent some professional credibility to our Sunday tour of Woodmont, also known as the Mount of the House of the Lord. Woodmont is an impeccably preserved nineteenth-century manor in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, situated within one of the wealthiest zip codes in the Northeast corridor. At the time of our visit, Woodmont was the residence of Sweet Angel Mother Divine, the geriatric regent of a nationwide religious movement founded by her husband, Father Divine, more than three-quarters of a century prior. The preservation of historic buildings in and around Philadelphia, a city that has hemorrhaged wealth and population since the 1960s, was a cause near to Mother Divine’s heart. For decades she managed a vast network of Victorian-era mansions and hotels across the Northeast. Stewardship of these structures had made Mother Divine a celebrated proponent of historic preservation, and the recipient of awards from the Philadelphia City Council and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in recognition of her work.

  Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, Father Divine’s followers have lived in communes known alternately as “heavens” or “extensions” of the International Peace Mission Movement. Once scattered from coast to coast and housing tens of thousands of believers, Peace Mission extensions have slowly been emptied and sold ever since Father Divine “sacrificed” his earthly body in September 1965. Woodmont is one of the last and most majestic of the Movement’s once-legendary real-estate holdings, and it is still occupied by a coterie of (mostly) elderly followers. The denizens of Peace Mission heavens used to be known as “angels,” so called because of the sanctified lifestyle they adopted. Believers in Father Divine’s divinity do not usually describe themselves this way anymore, but they still follow the same severe moral code Father Divine enforced while he was alive. The code includes celibacy, a stricture that all but guarantees the eventual demise of the movement.

  My first visit to a Peace Mission extension, a former hotel located on the corner of Broad and Catharine Streets in Center City Philadelphia, was thwarted by my own failure to abide by the International Peace Mission Modesty Code. I knew about the code, and was prepared not to swear, smoke, drink, tip, bribe, or engage in any “undue mixing of the sexes” during the Holy Communion banquet I wished to attend. I was only in town for a few days and put together the finest outfit I could assemble from my suitcase. I was turned away nonetheless, on account of my red shoes, and told to return when I was wearing my “Sunday best.” I packed accordingly for my next trip to Philly, and sent Shannon the Modesty Code before I picked her up. We turned up at Woodmont looking like frumpy substitute teachers.

  Shannon and I weren’t the only visitors to the estate. A row of sedans had completely occupied the small parking lot at the end of the long lane that leads from the road to the mansion. I stopped short of the lot and pulled in behind a black SUV parked on the edge of the lane. A film crew was threading its way across a nearby garden.

  There was no indication of where visitors should begin the tour, so Shannon and I made straight for the mansion’s porte cochere. Beneath it, the front door was thrown wide open. We showed ourselves in. Just as we crossed the threshold into a lavishly wood-paneled interior, the sound of voices, singing or chanting in unison, suddenly reverberated in the adjacent room. From where we stood in the mansion’s grand two-story foyer, Shannon and I could see through an archway into the dining room, where the Divinites appeared to be gathered around the table for worship over an elaborate meal: a tradition known in the Peace Mission as Holy Communion. Two silver-haired butlers in pale-blue tuxedo jackets and gloves wavered in the archway to the dining room but did not appear disposed to greet us. We ducked back out.

  The film crew was eating lunch near one of the outbuildings when we approached. They were gathering footage for a documentary, and today, we learned, was a special day to do it: without realizing it, Shannon and I were visiting the annual feast held to mark Mother and Father Divine’s wedding anniversary. Mother Divine and the resident followers were hosting a full table, the crew explained; otherwise, we’d have been invited to sit down. After I mentioned that we’d called ahead to confirm our tour, members of the crew encouraged us to go back and request one from someone at the banquet.

  We hovered in the mansion’s lobby while Father Divine’s voice crackled on recordings playing in the next room. Occasionally the sermon elicited a unified response from those assembled. None of the worshipers at the table who saw us enter made the slightest move to alert anyone else of our presence. Eventually, one of the guests emerged from the dining room to use the bathroom and sent for our tour guide. Miss Sibyl Child entered the hall wearing a knee-length navy-blue skirt, a white blouse, and a red blazer with a white V for “victory” embroidered on the breast. I recognized her attire as the patriotic uniform of the Rosebuds, an elite corps of angels Father Divine had organized in the 1940s. Miss Sibyl was, to my eyes, a black woman in her golden years. But in the Peace Mission, which denies racial categories, she was merely considered dark-complected, whereas Shannon and I happened to be light-complected.

  Our tour began in the foyer, under a nearly life-size portrait of Father and Mother Divine. I knew the spot from old photos I’d seen of one of the first wedding banquets. After we introduced ourselves as admirers of historic architecture, Shannon stepped forward with knowledgeable questions about Woodmont’s construction and maintenance as we proceeded through several rooms on the ground floor. One of these was Father Divine’s office, which is kept exactly as he left it in 1965. Miss Sibyl spoke to Father as though he were seated at his desk.

  As we meandered, Miss Sibyl narrated the history of the Peace Mission, starting with Father Divine’s appearance in New York in the 1920s. Beginning in this manner, with the man fully formed, prompted Shannon to ask an obvious question: where was Father Divine originally from? Miss Sibyl said she didn’t know, nobody did. Her reply was crisp, delivered in the manner of someone who’s answered the question many times before.

  As I’d feared, the dining room proved to be the most awkward segment of the tour. The followers and their guests were still eating when we entered. But after pointing out the room’s architectural features, Miss Sibyl insisted we take a turn about the room to inspect it more closely. An enormous table occupied almost the entire chamber. Thirty-odd diners of varied complexions filled all but one place at the table. Shannon and I squeezed behind the chairs of the faithful, moving along the edges of the room as silver clatt
ered against china. Conversation was kept to a minimum while Father Divine’s voice continued over the loudspeaker. Mother Divine, in her nineties, was seated by herself at the end of the table. She was wearing a white wedding dress.

  Miss Sibyl then guided us outdoors, around a small outbuilding called the Brothers’ Quarters, and across the mansion’s handsome grounds. We stopped for a while in a garden on the edge of the property, where the ridge dropped to the Schuylkill River valley below. The tour inevitably led to a mausoleum on the edge of the estate, a structure known as the Shrine to Life. Here was where Father Divine’s earthly remains lay entombed. Miss Sibyl explained that although he had decided to abandon the body in which he’d conducted his marvelous career, Father Divine was by no means dead. This is because she, like the angels who came before her, believed Father Divine to be God.

  AMERICAN MESSIAHS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE MESSIANIC IMPULSE IN AMERICA

  FATHER DIVINE was far from the first American to be worshiped by his followers as the embodiment of the living God returned to Earth. Over the course of two and a half centuries, numerous Americans have laid stakes to the claim of a divinely ordained salvational mission.

  Among them was the holy family of the Walla Walla Jesus, known to terrestrial authorities as Arthur Davies. This American messiah did not take up the mantle for himself, but was proclaimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus of Nazareth by his father, William W. Davies. The elder Davies was a Welsh convert to Mormonism who emigrated in 1855 to join his people’s exodus to Utah. After arriving in Mormon territory, he became disenchanted with the authoritarian bent of Mormon society under the leadership of the church’s new president, Brigham Young. Davies was particularly dismayed by the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which revealed the violent means to which the church would resort to preserve its control of the region. In this 1857 tragedy, a Utah militia murdered more than 100 Arkansas migrants whose wagon train had stopped to camp in Mountain Meadows en route to California. The caravan had only stopped for rest, but tensions between the Mormons and the federal government had reached the point of armed insurrection, and the militiamen alleged the Arkansans were part of a federal plot to overthrow Brigham Young and impose martial law on the territory.

  After this slaughter of innocent pioneers, Davies and other disillusioned converts broke away from the church under the leadership of James Morris, an apostate who began to receive communications directly from God around the time of the massacre. One of the most exotic revelations he received concerned the doctrine of reincarnation, and the corresponding disclosure that Morris possessed the gift of identifying the prior identities of disaffected Mormons, who presumably learned of their glamorous past lives through him.

  This was already an absurd heresy against Mormon theology, but it was not the revelation that church authorities found to be the most offensive. Morris claimed that although Brigham Young was indeed the legitimate political successor to Joseph Smith, he was not Smith’s prophetic heir: this, God instructed through his newly minted prophet, was none other than James Morris himself.

  The Mormon Church based its legitimacy on the claims of latter-day prophets, so Morris saw no reason why he should not mention that God had made this revelation unto him. Brigham Young was of a much different opinion, and desired for the heretic to be executed. He sent a sheriff to apprehend Morris, who had led several hundred of his followers out of Mormonism and into the wilderness. When the Mormon posse arrived at the apostate camp, they found the heretics armed and prepared to defend their new faith. The sheriff thought it wise to tire them out with a siege. But after three days produced no surrender, it was the sheriff who became impatient. Unfortunately for the besieged encampment, an item of light artillery had arrived on the scene, and the sheriff considered it the most expedient way to end the standoff. An exploding shell killed numerous Morrisites, and the prophet was shot and killed in the melee that ensued.

  Satisfied with the bloody end of James Morris, Mormon authorities allowed his deluded converts to disperse without another massacre. Davies was among the surviving apostates, and he prudently escaped to Idaho. He later relocated to Montana, where he experienced mystic visions he would later recount in sworn court testimony. The Montana revelations led him to Washington territory, where he led approximately forty of the followers he’d gathered in the meantime. In 1867, the faithful settled near the municipality of Mill Creek, in Walla Walla County, on land that Davies declared the Kingdom of Heaven.

  The following February 11, Davies’s wife gave birth to Arthur Davies, who was announced to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. After a second son was born on September 28, 1869, he was declared to contain the spirit of God the Father. The residents of the kingdom worshiped accordingly. Not long after the second holy birth, the elder Davies revealed a final secret: that his own body carried the Holy Spirit.

  Like other small and embattled religious minorities, the Daviesites lived communally, emulating the example set by Christ’s apostles and recorded in the Book of Acts. In addition to managing communal affairs, Davies administered a stern moral policy that allowed for no impropriety or insobriety. The kingdom’s subjects fluctuated in number between 40 and 70 souls over the course of the next decade. The commune was never self-sufficient, but missionaries dispatched by the Holy Spirit to Portland and San Francisco yielded new converts, who arrived with their liquidated assets and kept the kingdom in the black.

  In the fall of 1879, Mrs. Davies suddenly died, posing an inconvenience to the community’s belief that Davies could work miracles, one of which was the banishment of death and disease from their ranks. A worse calamity befell them in February 1880, when diphtheria reached the Kingdom of Heaven. The disease killed God the Father, age ten, on February 15. The same epidemic claimed the life of Jesus, age twelve, less than one week later.

  As the kingdom mourned, some of its denizens began murmuring their discontent. Obviously the death of two-thirds of the Trinity was not an auspicious sign for the community. Nor did it augur well for the Holy Spirit. Finally, three of Heaven’s residents filed suit against Davies after he declined to refund their contributions to the colony. The case went to trial in January 1881, when the Holy Spirit took the stand to testify that the spirit of God that descended into his body had authorized his sole control of the kingdom’s financial affairs. Numerous witnesses confirmed Davies’s testimony that everyone who entered Heaven’s domain agreed to the practice of communal living. The plaintiffs emphatically disagreed, and the court, disliking the whole arrangement, ordered they be paid $3,200. The Holy Ghost could not produce this sum, having spent most of the community’s cash on land, expensive missionary trips, and the construction of homes, a church, and a school. The judge instructed the sheriff to sell the kingdom’s belongings in order to award the judgment, which effectively wiped Heaven off the map.

  Davies’s career as a holy messenger came to an abrupt halt when he and his followers became homeless. Most of them disbanded, and Davies later ended up in San Francisco, married to a follower named Miss Perkins. The Holy Spirit justified his remarriage on the grounds that Miss Perkins was the reincarnation of the first Mrs. Davies. This injured the sensibilities of those followers who remained, and the movement drifted into obscurity.1

  . . .

  UNLIKE THE PEACE MISSION, the Walla Walla Kingdom of Heaven did not influence the history of American religion in a meaningful way. Nor was it influential, or even original, to the history of American messianism. But as a case study, it is instructive for the number of characteristics it shares with previous and subsequent American messianic movements. Reincarnation, for example, is one of the very un-Christian teachings these movements often teach; it reappears in Father Divine’s Peace Mission, whose followers believe Mother Divine to be the reincarnation of Father Divine’s first wife. Yet although some American messianic movements eschew reincarnation in favor of a dispensational framework wherein each civilizational age will have its own unique savior, another feature unites American messianic sects with near universality: the practice of communal living derived from biblical accounts of the apostolic church.