Leigh E. Schmidt, PhD, delivered the following
address during his Sept. 3 installation ceremony as the Edward Mallinckrodt
Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the
Faculty of Arts & Sciences, presided over the installation ceremony, which was held in Holmes Lounge, Ridgley Hall.
“Mystics, Cranks, and William James”
Where to begin with the thank yous? Thank you, first of all, to Chancellor Mark Wrighton and Dean Barbara Schaal—for their leadership, including for their leading roles in the ceremonies today and tomorrow. Thank you as well to Shelly Milligan, Kelly Sartorius, Jennifer Gibbs, Deborah Stine, and Debra Kennard for all they have done to put this solemn liturgy together. I study ritual for a living; I know events like this do not happen effortlessly. Thank you also to my dear colleagues and friends from around the country who have taken time out of their busy schedules to be part of these proceedings: Mark Valeri, Eric Gregory, Sally Promey, Paul Gutjahr, Anthea Butler, Sally Gordon, Chris Garces, and Robert Wuthnow. Thank you to my colleagues closer at hand at the Danforth Center, which has become in a mere two years quite a thriving community: Darren Dochuk, Mark Jordan, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Rachel Lindsey, Anne Blankenship, Lerone Martin, Rachel Gross, Emily Johnson, Hannah Hofheinz, and, of course, Marie Griffith. You all, orchestrating an event like this, being part of an event like this, really have bested my abilities at self-deflection. I owe thanks especially to the Mallinckrodt family whose generous support of Washington University and Harvard University is well known throughout the academy. One of the Edward Mallinckrodt chairs at Harvard was long held by the distinguished scholar of religion Gordon Kaufman, and I feel especially honored to be the occasion for having that field of study likewise recognized here at Washington University.
The rubrics for these ceremonial events call for the inductee to speak for 15-20 minutes about his or her scholarship. I have taken for my title “Mystics, Cranks, and William James,” which plays off a passage from George Santayana’s lecture on “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” a lecture that he delivered at UC Berkeley in 1911. Therein Santayana mused on the peculiar gifts of his Harvard mentor and colleague William James for unsettling the habits of mind that hemmed in so many of his compatriots. So, what was it that set James—“a genuine and vigorous romanticist,” as Santayana saw him—apart from most of his peers? “For one thing,” Santayana remarked, “William James kept his mind and heart wide open to all that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and impostors—for it is hard to draw the line, and James was not willing to draw it prematurely. He thought, with his usual modesty, that any of these might have something to teach him. The lame, the halt, the blind, and those speaking with tongues could come to him with the certainty of finding sympathy.” James served, in Santayana’s view, as the envoy before the learned world of all those “half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry individuals of which America is full.”
I was reminded of Santayana’s reflections on James a couple of years into the research for my last book Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (2010). The prompting came from reading Robert D. Richardson’s formidable biography William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006). The irony seems rich now at some remove: I had been nudged to look up Santayana’s essay commending James for taking unheralded religious eccentrics seriously by a biographer justly esteemed for attending to a grand triumvirate of American luminaries: William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Richardson’s nonconformists are all of a high order, indeed; James’s intimacy with mystics and cranks had clearly not distracted Richardson himself from the canon of big biographical subjects. Still, at the time, having followed out Richardson’s citation, I took some solace in Santayana’s remarks on James. Perhaps, I surmised, it was not a fool’s errand to be absorbed with an obscure figure like Craddock—a visionary whose very obscurity was exactly what her chief antagonist, Anthony Comstock, had plotted for her. The implicit politics of the choice seemed beautifully subversive—a gesture worthy somehow of James’s own destabilizing preoccupations. If biography is an art designed originally to ratify the singular influence and importance of great men—say, Franklin, Jefferson, and Lincoln—then what better feat of democratic leveling could a scholar perform than to turn the genre over to a midwife, a slave-woman, a drifter, or a backwoods prophet?
Taking another look now at Santayana’s lecture, I find less consolation in the philosopher’s remarks on a fellow philosopher. For one thing, Santayana did not think it necessary to name any of the spiritualists and mystics whom James had engaged; they were as anonymous as ever. In taking notice of them, Santayana suggested, James had become their comforter and narrator, their dignity and voice. That such “a famous professor”—Santayana’s phrase—would take seriously these homegrown sibyls redounded entirely to James’s credit. It brightened the aura of his own creativity and originality; it imparted a romantic glow to his philosophical work. Even as he praised James for his quirky curiosity, Santayana knew who really deserved the scholar’s attention. Like Richardson, Santayana kept his eyes riveted on the leading lights: William James and Walt Whitman especially. He had not a word of recollection for the specific metaphysical adventurers whom James had shown favor—say, Lenora Piper, Sarah Farmer, Swami Vivekananda, Ralph Waldo Trine, or Richard Maurice Bucke. Perversely enough, James’s sympathies felt, as Santayana depicted them, almost vampirish rather than subversive. The honor roll of worthies seemed remarkably self-sustaining: James is James, and the bit players—the mystics and cranks—well, it looked like they had interchangeable parts in a sideshow.
Biography as a genre is peculiarly encumbered with this question of worthiness. (Its very advent in seventeenth-century Britain centered on relating the lives of English “worthies.”) I never resolved the issue in working on Craddock: No matter what sleights I performed she was not going to be a Jonathan Edwards or an Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but I nonetheless found myself wanting to make the case for her importance in rather conventional terms. Had not Emma Goldman recalled Craddock as “one of the bravest champions of women’s emancipation,” placing her among a small cadre of heroes and pioneers who presaged the activism of Margaret Sanger and Goldman herself? Had not the Free Speech League, a precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union, been inaugurated out of indignation over Craddock’s arrest, trial, conviction, and imprisonment in 1902? Had not the circumstances of her death later that year thrown Comstock completely off his game and put his anti-vice campaign against obscene literature under portentous strain? Craddock deserved the attention of historians, I often liked to think, precisely because of the tangible impact of her life, work, and death. She was a worthy, after all.
I also found myself, though, drawn to her very marginality—the politics of her exclusion and inconsequence. Craddock’s insignificance was forced upon her. She struggled for several years to compel the University of Pennsylvania to admit women into its undergraduate college; she passed the entrance exams, won a narrow faculty vote of approval, only to have the trustees slam the door on her. Despite those thwarted ambitions, she continued to imagine herself as a scholar of comparative religion and mythology, writing on an anthropological subject—“Sex Worship”—that absorbed many erudite Victorian ethnologists and folklorists. She produced a 350-page-plus manuscript on the topic, self-consciously placing herself in a long-running conversation about religion’s sexual history that had unfolded in the Enlightenment’s wake. Her manuscript had no chance of getting published. The combined politics of gender, sexuality, obscenity, and academic professionalization made that a foregone conclusion, even though Craddock often wanted nothing quite so much as to occupy an intellectual place akin to the scholars who were then pioneering the scientific study of religion in European and American universities. It was the subterranean, suppressed qualities of Craddock’s life that drew me to her story. It was not her historical consequence then, but her losing struggle against inconsequence that mattered. Worthiness be damned—Craddock was a spiritualist outlier, a would-be scholar who became a psychically tormented medium with a celestial bridegroom, a marriage advisor who could not circulate her guidebooks for fear of arrest and who was thus left with a clandestine ministry to the religiously and sexually bewildered. Hers was a shadowy and idiosyncratic life—a mystic and a crank who had the misfortune of being embraced not by William James but by Theodore Schroeder, one of America’s earliest and most devoted Freudians.
I never resolved the worthiness question when working on Heaven’s Bride—other than to try to have it both ways. There were many other knots left untangled, of course. Working on a lone mystic and crank ran at a slant to my prior commitments to social and cultural history. Social history might talk in the singular about the man or woman in the street, but its chief concern is with aggregates—with classes, households, political parties, or religious movements. Cultural history might make much of the quotidian and the popular, but its sights are regularly set on collective rituals and social dramas—on parades, street festivals, and carnivals. Religious history, drawing on rich traditions of hagiography and individual spiritual narratives, is more immediately at home with biography—as if the exemplary life is exactly what history is, at the end of the day, all about. Indeed, if anything, religious history (especially of the Protestant variety) is likely all too comfortable with the notion that the distinct experiences of a single saint or sinner will get us to the heart of the matter. Social and cultural historians are far less likely to find that proposition serviceable. Since I see myself as taking my methodological bearings primarily from cultural history, I wanted to construct a biographical narrative that was recognizably part of what we used to call (a couple of decades or so ago) the “new cultural history.”
I decided that meant the story could not be told chronologically, that in order for it to be credible as a cultural biography it would have to be strongly thematic. Craddock was, after all, a shape-shifter. She tried out different personas—liberal freethinker, amateur scholar, spiritualist medium, yoga-instructing pastor, marriage reformer, sexologist, and civil-liberties activist. And other identities she had foisted upon her: theomaniac, erotomaniac, nymphomaniac, Freudian analysand. In attending carefully to these shifting roles—their social construction and cultural performance—I hoped to efface the very expectations of a coherent life story and to offer instead an appropriately protean cultural history. Of what exactly? The study of religion in its amateur and professional phases, the multiple affinities between religious and secular liberalism, the legal machinery surrounding blasphemy and obscenity, the duress of Protestant Christian America in the face of its post-Christian dissolution, and the impact of psychology and psychoanalysis on modern understandings of mysticism. That’s to make a partial catalog.
That listing suggests awkward hesitancy as much as it does overwrought ambition. It implies ambivalence about the very notion of taking so much interest in a lone mystic and crank; it suggests that for James’s sympathies for the personal, odd, and visionary to matter for the historian of American religion and culture—to scholars of religion across the board—that they have to contribute to more encompassing forms of academic work. Aren’t scholars ultimately after a bigger picture than any single figure will allow?
Yet I am drawn back to the cranks and outsiders even now—and away from the stately and authoritative grand narrative, from big history. I am ostensibly working these days on a sweeping history of irreligion from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century blasphemers right on through the worlds of Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow, all before marching forward to the new atheists and the growing number of Americans who profess no religious affiliation at all. In my loftier and more inflated moments I imagine that I am writing the impious counterpart to Sydney Ahlstrom’s Religious History of the American People, Mark Noll’s America’s God, or Brooks Holifield’s Theology in America. The history, so imagined, is vast and compendious; it has heft; the word magisterial unavoidably leaps to mind. There are many reasons it exists so far more as a fancy than a realization, but certainly one of them is the disturbing attraction of another oddball and eccentric.
Ever uneasy about the question of worthiness, I wish I could say that the distracting figure was Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Robert Ingersoll, or Mark Twain. As back-up, I would take Frances Wright, Hubert Harrison, Sinclair Lewis, or Perry Miller. I wish I could say that it was someone you have heard of, but it isn’t. Instead, it is an incorrigible, poor, half-educated, spiritually disinherited artist named Watson Heston, a village atheist from Carthage, Missouri, who (despite having no formal training) wound up providing the visual iconography of the American secular movement in its salad days of the 1880s and 1890s. I have catalogued by now more than 1000 of his cartoons. I have hundreds of letters to the editor commenting on them, why they made a correspondent laugh, why they seemed distasteful or uncivil, why they were just the thing to spite clerics and revivalists. I have tracked any number of episodes in which his images have shown up as provocation—from the blasphemy trial of C. B. Reynolds to the battle over the Sunday opening of Chicago World’s Fair to the research Cecil B. DeMille conducted for his film The Godless Girl. I know the places of Heston’s itinerancy across the Midwest out to California and back again to Tennessee and Missouri. I know the arguments he had with his Christian neighbors and those he had with his fellow freethinkers. I know his intense prejudices and animosities, his fantasies of unfettered mental liberty and a secular golden age in which science had wholly vanquished religion. I know the impoverished circumstances of his death. I know, in short, far too much about Watson Heston, “the artist-hero of [secular] Liberalism.”
It is not, of course, that I hope now to write a biography of Heston any more than I wanted to write a biography of Craddock. For this latest preoccupation to make any sense at all, Heston and his images would have to be taken as a composite, exquisite in all they compact and convey about the emergent culture of unbelief. Somehow something like the whole story of American irreligion would have to be discernible through the close reading of Heston’s minority report—a village atheist’s view of Christian America. He and his pictures would have to make manifest far more than his own angular vision of dissent. Barbed, coarse, glinting with hope and indignation, his cartoons would have to make visible the very contours of liberal secularism, the lineaments of an atheism gone public. “Seeing heaven in a grain of sand is not a trick only poets can accomplish,” the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote famously in one of his essays in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). The same “methodological problem” that Geertz faced with fieldwork—how to get from “a collection of ethnographic miniatures” to “wall-sized culturescapes of the nation, the epoch, the continent, or the civilization”—is much the same one that the cultural historian faces with close-up studies of mystics and cranks. As Geertz reminded those who might forget that an “obsessively fine-combed field study” was not an end unto itself, “Small facts speak to large issues, winks to epistemology, sheep raids to revolution, because they are made to.”
Though I very much share James’s sympathies for the “extremer cases”—in religion (and now irreligion)—I take the measure of my work more from Geertz’s cultural anthropology than James’s romantic psychology. The historian who tracks maverick visionaries and small-town freethinkers confronts, to paraphrase Geertz, the “same grand realities” that scholars of Jefferson or Lincoln, Emerson or Whitman, do: “Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, Passion, Authority, Beauty, Violence, Love, Prestige.” The difference is this: Lives like Craddock’s and Heston’s are sufficiently obscure, as Geertz said of the Moroccan villagers he studied, “to take the capital letters off” such abstruse terms. It is exactly in lowercase instances like these that the cultural historian requires the ethnographer’s knack for turning the mundane, particular, and negligible from miniature to panorama. Whether scholarly projects focused on singular mystics and cranks are worth doing, whether they can ever hope to match wits with more comprehensive projects, comes down to the mastery of this interpretive art. Ida Craddock, Watson Heston, Sarah Farmer, Anna Jarvis, Thomas Kelly, Andrew Croswell, James McGready, Max Ehrmann, Huston Smith—it’s been a long train of wayfarers I have traveled with during my career—a lot of passionate, hungry, and restless souls. This far into the journey I am still counting on those of us in the humanities to accomplish the poet’s trick.