Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [44]
The Secret of the Ages
From a psychological perspective, New Thought’s founders were shrewd observers of human nature. They intrinsically understood how to get along well in organizations and at work. Indeed, during the movement’s rise, more and more Americans were taking jobs inside large companies—where they often struggled to find their way. New Thought literature displayed an innate grasp of the can-do, upbeat attitude required to succeed in the new world of corporate America. And to many Americans—at least, measured by book sales—it came as a help.
New Thought’s popularity coincided with a time when the idea of “getting ahead” began to play on the American psyche. And if New Thought displayed one unmistakable aim in the twentieth century, it was success. Not necessarily the inner sort described by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Success,” which extolled the quiet certainty of self-determinism. However much New Thoughters liked to cite Emerson as their founding prophet, they had more worldly priorities. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, New Thought volumes—and fresh ones arrived by the bushelful—abounded, with subject headings like: “how to pray and grow rich”; “a success mind-set”; “why you cannot fail”; “your infinite power to be rich”; “the secret of getting well”; “the magic law of tithing”; and so on. Slowly and inexorably, New Thought replaced the clean-living credo of American success—early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise—with an enticing new principle: He who believes he can, can.
The metaphysical dimensions of New Thought could seem so magical, so unrestrained in their promise of limitless potential, that a 1920s best seller by publisher Robert Collier deemed New Thought The Secret of the Ages. Many of the movement’s most popular writers and sermonizers reimagined worldly acquisition as the very exercise of God’s will. In their hands, it was as if the entire object of Transcendentalism—that is, the transcendence of earthly bonds and distractions—had been turned on its head. And here New Thought’s sense of ethics and seriousness as a religious movement fell open to question: What was to finally separate this philosophy from being anything other than a tool for pursuing one’s most random drives and selfish wants? Was this the end point of American religious innovation—the vaunted “secret of the ages”?
On this question hung the dilemma of Indiana minister Wallace D. Wattles. Although his books became central to a twenty-first-century New Thought revival and served as the major influence behind the blockbuster book and movie The Secret, the social-gospel advocate had wanted the “occult powers of the soul” to serve a different end than worldly gain. It wasn’t that he eschewed New Thought’s emphasis on wealth-building—indeed, he embraced such aims in his 1910 guide, The Science of Getting Rich. But there was a critical difference in Wattles’s approach, one overlooked by those who later embraced his work: Wattles believed in using mind power to wipe away barons of industry and overthrow the prevailing social order. In The Science of Getting Rich—which a century later rode a new wave of popularity to best-seller lists—he wrote the following, with his concluding emphasis in the original:
You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has now. I am aware that there are men who get a vast amount of money by proceeding in direct opposition to the statements in the paragraph above, and may add a word of explanation here. Men of the plutocratic type, who become very rich, do so sometimes purely by their extraordinary ability on the plane of competition.… Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, et al., have been the unconscious agents of the Supreme in the necessary work of systematizing and organizing