One Simple Idea (20 page)

Clark’s first camps attracted a wide range of Christians, along with some Jews and nonreligious campers. AA cofounder Bob Smith attended retreats at Camps Farthest Out and spoke of Clark as one of his favorite authors. Clark also maintained ties in the New Thought world, delivering talks at conventions of the International New Thought Alliance.

Clark believed in the power of prayer to cure illness, manage addictions, improve relationships—and even end war. That last conviction figured into a troubling aspect of his career. During World War II, Clark tended toward a myopic view of using prayer and thought-power to compel Hitler to halt his Blitzkrieg. While this approach was hardly troubling in itself, Clark believed in it so completely that his political outlook verged on appeasement. Clark was convinced that his prayer groups had slowed Hitler’s march into Poland in 1939 (rather than the recent signing of the Polish-British Common Defense Pact). Even after the war, Clark believed in Hitler’s transparently propagandistic demand that Poland could have settled matters “peacefully” by handing over the Danzig Corridor to the Third Reich. “What he [Hitler] asked for,” Clark wrote, “merely the Danzig Corridor and a little more, was a fraction of what, when provoked to war, he finally did take. In other words, all he
asked for were territories which many neutral authorities thought it only just for Germany to have. Think what this offer meant!” Such convictions were tempered by neither time nor perspective—Clark wrote this following the war in 1949, seven years before his death.

Writing in 1940, Clark described having a spiritual vision of Mussolini bending his head and lowering into a devout kneel “until his forehead touches the ground.” Soon after Clark said that, he received a newspaper clipping from his Boston publisher, Little Brown, reporting that Mussolini had written to the company to purchase Clark’s book,
The Soul’s Sincere Desire
, and had paid for it with “his
personal
check.”

One wants to believe Clark when he wrote in the same piece: “I do not believe in appeasement or compromise of any sort” toward the Axis. And in his heart he meant this. But Clark went beyond endorsing the uses of prayer and thoughts of love to influence Hitler; he made concrete and ardently felt policy prescriptions that amounted to the very thing he claimed to be set against. The spiritual visionary was so desperate to see the light that he was blinded to darker realities.

Other New Thought leaders, who will soon be met, raised their voices against fascism before the war and held rallies for Allied victory. Bill Wilson tried (and was deemed too old) to register for military service at the start of the conflict. Christian Scientists sent chaplains and service members to the front lines. In the positive-thinking culture Clark was a political outlier. Nonetheless, the question stands: Was Clark’s blindness endemic to the positive-thinking philosophies? The final chapter will more fully consider how New Thought and positive thinking responded to evil, or, as in Clark’s case, failed to.

Ernest Holmes was a Maine Yankee who remade himself as a California mystic—and became one of New Thought’s greatest shapers and popularizers. While never widely known, Holmes stood at the center of Hollywood’s mystical scene in the first half of the twentieth century, attracting
admirers from Cecil B. DeMille to Elvis Presley. If New Thought had an ambassador, Holmes was it.

Born in a dingy Maine farmhouse in 1887 and never formally educated, the young Ernest devoured works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Baker Eddy, Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond, and British judge Thomas Troward, who published an ambitious series of lectures on the logic behind creative-mind principles.

Ernest grew especially fond of Transcendentalism, particularly as expressed in Emerson’s classic “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s most famous essay was also his least understood. While critics saw “Self-Reliance” as a paean to go-it-alone individualism, Ernest perceived its deeper truth: We all have within us a true self, free of conformity and conditioning; to live from this personal core is what alone makes a man great. It set Ernest’s mind on fire.

At the start of World War I, Ernest relocated from New England to Venice, California, where his older brother, Fenwicke, was already settled. Fenwicke shared his brother’s interests and became Ernest’s intellectual partner. The two began filling lecture halls as early as 1916 with their metaphysical talks. Roundish and twinkle-eyed, Ernest shined before audiences. He exuded an unlikely charisma—as well as a shrewd command of different spiritual philosophies and religious systems. He spoke with clarity and total confidence, rarely using notes. His philosophy held that the images in our mind constantly out-picture into reality; we can direct the mind’s forces and achieve our ideals, or we can passively be pulled along by an undisciplined rush of thoughts; either way we are in the gravitational tug of our ideas.

The young metaphysician’s following grew as he performed “treatments”—or prayer and mind-power healings—on visitors to the office where he worked as a purchasing agent for the city of Venice. After travels to New York and other cities, where he road-tested his message among different listeners, Ernest molded his ideas into the philosophy called “Science of Mind” or “Religious Science.” His movement developed into a thriving network of positivity-based churches:
the United Church of Religious Science. This proved an ill-fated choice of words, which in later decades served to confuse his movement with the more visible and entirely unrelated Church of Scientology. (In 2011 the Holmes congregations reorganized under the new name Centers for Spiritual Living.)

Ernest Holmes’s comprehensive grasp of Scripture and world religious traditions, and his serious yet personable style, seemed, at least in his person, to nudge New Thought into a territory of intellectual and ethical solidity. His brother and collaborator Fenwicke presented a shakier history.

In 1929, Fenwicke, then a Congregationalist clergyman and Divine Science minister, came under investigation from the New York state attorney general for a stock-peddling scheme. Fenwicke purportedly pushed worthless mining stocks on congregants at his Divine Science congregation in New York as an adjunct to his prosperity teachings. The attorney general got an injunction barring Fenwicke and another Holmes sibling, William, from selling securities pending trial.

Watson S. Washburn and Edmund S. De Long, investigators for the attorney general, wrote about the Fenwicke Holmes affair in their 1932 book,
High and Low Financiers:

The authors may have been exercising a certain degree of prosecutorial zeal. They worked for the man who pursued Fenwicke, New York State Attorney General Hamilton Ward, to whom they dedicated their book. Washburn and De Long were likely settling a score on a case that never made it through the courts. A trial had been scheduled for May 1930
but apparently never happened. State and federal court records show no decisions with Fenwicke’s name attached. The likelihood is that a plea deal was struck, probably with Ward’s successor, as Ward’s term ended that same year.

Fenwicke managed to escape the legal cloud. He became a formidable force in spreading the positive-thinking gospel, including to Japan, where it spawned a popular counterpart to the Science of Mind movement:
Seicho-No-Ie
, or Home of Infinite Life, Truth, and Abundance. He also made a decisive impact on the influential mythologist Joseph Campbell, who attended Fenwicke’s lectures in New York in the late 1920s. Fenwicke gave the young seeker an exercise to discover what he really wanted out of life: “One should jot down notes for a period of four or five weeks on the things that interest one. It will be found that all the interests tend in a certain direction.” Campbell used this technique to reach his decision to become a scholar of myth. Fenwicke’s advice seemed to echo in Campbell’s famous maxim: “Follow your bliss.”

Ernest Holmes narrowly eluded the vortex of his brother’s legal problems. Investigators Washburn and De Long maintained that while Ernest was living in Venice Beach around 1917 he “was already engaged in a small way in the lucrative business of selling questionable stocks.” They offered no evidence for the assertion and Ernest’s name appeared in none of the news coverage that dogged Fenwicke. In fact, the younger brother had stopped working with Fenwicke in 1925—the reasons were never publicly discussed. They reunited in 1958, two years before Ernest’s death, to collaborate on an epic poem,
The Voice Celestial
.

Ernest lived long enough to see his Science of Mind churches spread across the nation, encompassing more than 100,000 congregants. But his final years also saw his movement riven by a factional split. In a dispute over whether the churches would be self-governed, a cluster of ministries broke away in 1957 to form their own organization. The rift was bridged in 2011 when the two Holmes-based ministries, the United Church of Religious Science and the smaller Religous Science International, formally reunited.

Holmes’s chief legacy was less as a congregational organizer than as a public voice. A formidable figure in the spiritual culture of Southern California, he attracted acolytes from Cary Grant to Peggy Lee to Cecil B. DeMille. His key text,
The Science of Mind
, became a favorite of Elvis Presley’s and is found today in the library of George Lucas. As will be seen, Holmes made a major impact on Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. More recently, his books were named as an influence by major-league pitcher Barry Zito and by Martin Luther King Jr.’s eldest daughter, Yolanda, who called Science of Mind her core religious commitment shortly before her death in 2007.

While Ernest Holmes was never as well known as some of those who drank from his ideas, he was the closest New Thought had to an ambassador of the positive.

While displaying a serene demeanor and a relentlessly upbeat tone, Christian D. Larson pursued a dual existence as both a visionary writer who shaped the language of self-help, and a businessman who pushed ethical boundaries in his publishing empire.

Born to Norwegian immigrant parents in the near-wilderness of northern Iowa in 1874, Larson had planned on a career as a Lutheran minister. But after a year at a Lutheran seminary in Minneapolis in 1894, he grew interested in Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and the new mind-power philosophies. In 1898 Larson moved to Cincinnati, where he began writing and publishing New Thought tracts—and soon became a prolific and dynamic author.

Some of his earliest works featured phrases that became widely known, though rarely credited back to Larson. They include “live the simple life,” “make yourself over,” “live in the present only,” and “attitude of gratitude”—the last made famous by Oprah Winfrey. Larson also coined the term “be all that you can be” generations before it became
the advertising slogan of the U.S. Army. His work “Promise Yourself”—a verse meditation on the power of determined cheerfulness—gained worldwide notice in 1922 when it was adopted as the credo of Optimist International, a philanthropic club similar to the Jaycees or Rotarians. The verse work became known ever after as “The Optimist Creed.”

For a time, Larson was also enormously successful at publishing his own widely read books and magazines at his Chicago-based Progress Company. His magazine,
Eternal Progress
, which he launched in 1901, grew by the end of the decade into a beautifully produced, socially progressive journal that combined the ideals of mind-power metaphysics with articles and photographs highlighting the growth of the nation.

Alongside articles heralding New Thought’s emergence as “a universal religion,”
Eternal Progress
abounded with reportage and illustrated spreads on great dams, railroads, skyscrapers, and other engineering marvels that were bringing optimism about the future in the early twentieth century. In a typical issue,
Eternal Progress
chronicled the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 fire and earthquake, and the beauty and growing economy of the Pacific Northwest, with its logging and fishing enterprises. Larson also ran articles calling for universal suffrage and the establishment of programs to educate and reform prisoners.

Even more than Elizabeth Towne’s
Nautilus
, and probably unlike any other magazine in American history,
Eternal Progress
captured all the hallmarks of the Progressive Era: bounding commerce, scientific advances, working-class struggles, social reforms, and the appeal of the new mental therapeutics. This zeitgeist of unlimited potential was captured in Larson’s March 1909 issue in the poem “Eternal Progress” by Townsend Allen:

To broaden the magazine’s appeal beyond the metaphysical, Larson shortened its name to
Progress
in June of that year.

For all of Larson’s ideals, the visionary writer had a checkered business history. On July 25, 1911, the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois declared Larson’s Progress Company in “involuntary bankruptcy” following complaints from creditors who were owed $300,000. The court ordered a receiver to take control of the company’s plants and holdings, and suspended publication of Larson’s 250,000-circulation magazine. By August Larson had left town for Los Angeles. He later told an interviewer that his Chicago printing plant had burned down and, rather than rebuild, he decided to follow the country’s momentum and move west. At the time of the Progress Company’s receivership in 1911, however, creditors estimated that the company continued to hold plant and printing assets of about $100,000—a surprisingly robust sum for a business that Larson said was lost in a fire. Closer to the truth may be that Larson, facing a mountainous debt and with creditors at his heels, decided to act on his principle to “make yourself over” and left his liabilities behind to “reinvent” himself in Southern California.