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Unlike figures such as Ernest Holmes and Wallace D. Wattles, Robinson had self-published all his own books and pamphlets. Hence, no outside organization stood to benefit from the sale and maintenance of his written work after he was gone.

And the last factor is perhaps the most important: Robinson succeeded to the extent that other, larger religious movements copied his outreach methods and self-help message and eclipsed his one-man operation. “It was no longer a sin,” journalist Marcus Bach observed, “to personalize the faith and make it serve the needs and wants of man.” In the end, the times had caught up with the “Miracle Man of Moscow.”

Robinson, perhaps more than any other figure of his day, understood that mainstream Christian churches either had to address the problems of daily existence or risk irrelevance. Sounding a lot like Robinson, ministers and religious commentators of the late 1940s and early 1950s began to discuss the possibilities of advertising and the importance of serving the everyday needs of congregants. In 1946, Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman published the first religious–therapeutic classic of the postwar era, Peace of Mind. Within a few years arrived Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Where Robinson had called for “a workable, usable God,” Peale wrote, “Christianity is a practical, usable way of life.…” And the trend was set. The American pulpit was now expected to address workaday concerns. Indeed, the books and sermons emanating from the twenty-first century’s “megachurches” abound in the how-to appeal that marked the Robinson approach. Life coaching, prosperity lessons, marriage counseling, and even weight-loss programs are standard fare in the nation’s largest congregations.

In his revolutionary use of radio, print, and mail-order marketing to spread a religious idea, Robinson was arguably the first media evangelist of the twentieth century. But he was more than just that. He was, perhaps, a figure possible only at a certain moment in American history—someone with a deeply held conviction, a few hundred dollars in ad money, and a fresh vision of spiritual life that spoke to a vast, neglected flock. Robinson believed—and lived out—his message, rising from decrepitude to achievement, providing not just a set of ideas but a personage in whom people from all walks of life could vest their hopes.

Writing in 1963, at a point by which Robinson’s name had already faded, historian Charles S. Braden captured the heart of the mail-order prophet’s work:

He used to advertise in the most unlikely places—on match covers, for example, which might be found in a saloon, or a brothel even. And many a man and woman found some new hope when they answered the ad of the man who had “talked with God.” He more nearly followed the injunction of Jesus to “go out into the highways and hedges and bring them in” than probably any other man on the contemporary scene.

CHAPTER SIX

GO TELL PHARAOH

The Rise of Magic in Afro–America

They came to Marah, but they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter.… And the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?” So he cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a piece of wood; he threw it in the water and the water became sweet.

—EXODUS 15:23–25

Frederick Douglass had no use for fantasies or folklore. Born a slave, he was separated as a young child from his mother—a woman who walked miles from another plantation for the rare occasion of rocking him to sleep or giving him a handmade ginger cake. He grew to be a self-educated teenager determined not to play the role of whipped dog to a cruel overseer. But in January 1834, on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, Douglass found himself delivered into the hands of the worst of them, a Mr. Covey—known as “the breaker of Negroes.”

A few years earlier, Douglass had been a domestic servant in Baltimore. There the burdens of slavery—the hunger, the beatings, the daily humiliations—were at least tempered by the surface civilities of city life. Indeed, his Baltimore mistress