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Although he would claim his ideas were wholly original, he stood on the shoulders of an already well-established spiritual philosophy: American-style New Thought. While freshly articulated, Robinson’s techniques were the same as those that had been attracting American seekers to the philosophy of affirmative thinking since the late nineteenth century. And, like New Thought, Psychiana had difficulty providing ethical depth.

“If just any need can be met,” asked the historian Braden, “does not that open the way to selfishness, which is the antithesis of the Christian ideal?” Indeed, Robinson tended to dodge most moral questions, insisting that if someone is in touch with the “God Power,” that person will naturally do what is good. Yet Robinson never defined his concept of the good life, at least not beyond Sunday-school injunctions toward “clean living” and general fair play. In so doing, he often sounded much like the mainstream religionists he had vowed to overthrow.

Of Money and Spirit

At times, Robinson’s own life begged questions of not only his ethics but of his ability to understand how critics saw him. In his autobiography, Robinson launched into a gleeful description of how he once snookered a drugstore client into purchasing gallons of useless mineral oil. He had related the same story several years earlier to a Time magazine reporter. The lack of moral embarrassment with which Robinson reported this petty con job could only leave a reader to wonder.

In the final analysis, did Robinson really believe in “the power of the Living God,” or was he, as the evangelical Bible Banner charged in 1941, “a pious fraud” out “to sell the gift of God for money?” There is no question of Robinson’s love for things material. Heavyset and more than six feet tall, he cut a dramatic figure on the streets of Moscow, Idaho, in mink coats, fancy suits, broad-brimmed Stetson hats, a chain watch, and a pipe. He proudly posed for photographs standing beside the latest-model cars. But surviving financial records reveal a subtler story than most critics understood.

Psychiana never made millions. Most of its receipts (which were in the hundreds of thousands annually) flowed back into the business for the constant postage and print and radio advertising needed to keep the operation afloat. While financial documents show bountiful growth early on, Psychiana sustained a cycle of boom-and-bust years and was losing money toward the end. Time magazine reported in 1938 that Robinson’s operation had amassed record sales of $400,000 in 1934—more than doubling receipts from two years earlier, according to records archived at the University of Idaho. But by the end of that decade, sales had dipped to about one quarter of their high mark. A 1939 profit-and-loss statement reproduced in The Sunday Oregonian showed receipts dropping to a modest $46,331 for the first seven months of that year, exceeded by expenses, mostly in advertising, of $54,556.

Robinson himself never collected more than a good white-collar salary. Records show that his compensation rose significantly between 1932 and 1939, when it climbed from $500 to $750 a month. For 1939, the last year that partial figures are available, his annual pay would have amounted to $9,000, the equivalent of $130,000 today. By contrast, many times that amount flowed yearly to another religious controversialist and quasimystical figurehead named Arthur Bell, known to followers in the 1930s as “The Voice.” Bell founded the California-based Mankind United, a prosperity cult and conspiracy club that foretold the rise of a social–spiritual utopia in which all chosen men and women—Mankind United members—would live in material comfort and bliss. Bell told of being directed by a council of unseen “Sponsors,” who secretly waged war against “Money Changers” and “Hidden Rulers,” who would enslave humanity. Thousands of lonely, directionless, and often elderly folk took his bait and plied Bell with membership fees, life savings, and often free labor in his roster of businesses. In the process,