Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [45]
If his more-careful readers detected a tinge of socialist language there, they were right. Wattles saw New Thought as a means to the kind of leisurely socialist utopia that enthralled readers of Edward Bellamy’s futurist novel Looking Backward. Writing in the same year in his lesser-known A New Christ, Wattles envisioned a marriage of New Thought—America’s homegrown success philosophy—and Christian socialism:
As we approach socialism, the millions of families who are now propertyless will acquire their own beautiful homes, with gardens and the land upon which to raise their food; they will own horses and carriages, automobiles and pleasure yachts; their houses will contain libraries, musical instruments, paintings and statuary, all that a man may need for the soul-growth of himself and his, he shall own and use as he will.
It was as though Karl Marx had imbibed the mother’s milk of American metaphysics. Within Wattles there existed a struggle to unite two mighty currents that were sweeping early-twentieth-century America: social radicalism and mind-power mysticism. Was it possible, as Wattles dreamed, that these movements could be united into one radical whole? Could there be a revolution by mental power?
“Do Not Talk About Poverty”
By the time he emerged as a New Thought leader, Wattles had already been forced to resign from the Methodist pastorate. He had gone too far in his social radicalism, at one point insisting that churches should refuse monetary offerings from businessmen who profited from sweatshop labor. After 1900, he became active in the more liberal environs of Quakerism. And while Wallace gained allies in mind-power circles—particularly his trailblazing publisher, Elizabeth Towne, a Massachusetts suffragist who ran his work in her New Thought magazine, Nautilus—he suffered conflict in that world too.
New Thought emphasized the idea of action from within and discouraged emphasis on politics or the travails of outer life. Too much notice of tragedy, poverty, or injustice, so went the New Thought gospel, served only to perpetuate such things. Hence, Wattles could sound at war with himself. In one stroke he urged readers, “Do not talk about poverty; do not investigate it, or concern yourself with it,” and at other times he spoke passionately before audiences of the squalor of Chicago tenements and the hopelessness of immigrant children living there. He admiringly quoted from the social-reform journalism of Elbert Hubbard, who had exposed child-labor abuses in turn-of-the-century cotton mills. Hubbard, as it happened, was another success prophet with a taste for social protest.
Hubbard was famous for his 1899 motivational essay, “A Message to Garcia,” in which he extolled the can-do heroics of a U.S. soldier during the Spanish–American War. Business leaders loved it. Yet Hubbard lost his life while hoping to end another war. In 1915, Hubbard and his wife, Alice, a suffragist and New Thought enthusiast, died with nearly 1,200 civilians when a German U-boat torpedoed the passenger ship Lusitania in the waters off Ireland. Hubbard had boarded the ship in New York on a self-styled peace mission to Europe, where he had declared plans to interview the German kaiser and inveigh against the carnage of the Great War. “Big business is to blame for this thing,” wrote the motivational hero before he left, “let it not escape this truth—that no longer shall individuals be allowed to thrive through supplying murder machines to the mob.”
Even the most popular New Thought prophet of the day, Ralph Waldo Trine, harbored a passion to unite mysticism and social reform. Trine gained a legion of followers through his 1897 mind-power book, In Tune with the Infinite. It was the book that every New Thought minister and writer seemed to have read and borrowed