Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [51]
Several years before World War II, Robinson received a note of tribute from the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. After the start of the war, Robinson publicly responded to the ruler, urging that he “refrain from joining Hitler in his crusade of madness.” There came no reply. As war clouds thickened, Robinson—ever adaptable to the needs of the moment—reconfigured Psychiana as a spiritual army for Allied victory. Rallying his flock to what he termed “A ‘Blitzkrieg’ for God,” the Idaho prophet mailed followers buttons with Hitler’s image coupled with the vow: I am helping to bring Hitler’s defeat by repeating hourly: the power of Right (God) will bring your speedy downfall.
In 1939, Robinson cabled Finland’s Prime Minister Risto Ryti with a plan for using mental affirmations to help repel Axis forces, proposing that Psychiana members—along with the Finnish cabinet and army—spend fifteen minutes daily affirming: The power of God is superior to the powers of war, hate, and evil. The embattled premier replied that he would enact Robinson’s plan as soon as “practicable.”
In the mail, in advertisements, in the news—everywhere one looked, it seemed—there was Frank B. Robinson.
The Gathering Storm
For all the love of his followers, Robinson attracted equal invective from his critics. They called him a “religious racketeer,” a “Mail Order Messiah,” and “a doctor of Bunk.” Indeed, Robinson’s “doctorate” was from the College of Divine Metaphysics, an Indianapolis correspondence school. He claimed other diplomas but could abruptly cut off questioners who dared to ask about them. “That’s none of your business,” he told one student in the question-and-answer column of Psychiana Weekly in 1941.
On the national stage, the postmaster general hit Robinson with two unsuccessful investigations for mail fraud. The federal government even began deportation proceedings after a rival publisher accused Robinson of lying about his birthplace on a passport application. But the ensuing hearings served only to build Robinson’s reputation as a fighter. “If you want to make anyone—persecute them,” he wrote in his 1941 memoir, The Strange Autobiography of Frank B. Robinson. Indeed, with every assault from the press and pulpit, his presence seemed only to grow.
By the 1940s, Robinson turned out articles, newsletters, books, and pamphlets at an incredible pace. Between direct-mail solicitations and print advertising, his Psychiana pitches reached an estimated twelve million homes a year, roughly a third of all American households. His lectures ran on more than eighty radio stations. It was, observed religious journalist Marcus Bach, as though “a prophet had spoken in his own country.” Whether a prophet, Robinson didn’t quite have “his own country.” In fact, Robinson’s murky origins formed the basis of a deeply troubled childhood and of problems that would haunt him later in life.
A Wandering Prophet
Nothing about Robinson’s birth is quite clear, except for the agreed-upon year: 1886. He was born to a hard-drinking English minister, though whether in England or America—where his parents were traveling—is a matter of dispute. Regardless of his native land, Robinson and his three younger brothers grew up in ice-hard circumstances. At eight years old, Robinson watched his mother, Hannah, die of pneumonia in the bedroom of their row house in Halifax, England. After Hannah’s death, Robinson’s father—a Baptist firebrand with a bad temper and a taste for liquor—turned on his sons with a vengeance. Punishments were frequent and brutal. But it was when the Reverend J. H. Robinson remarried, Robinson wrote in a rare understatement, that “the real trouble began.”
The Robinson boys fought so bitterly with their stepmother that arguments exploded into physical fights. Robinson’s father decided to enlist thirteen-year-old Frank in the British Navy—a fiasco that lasted