One Simple Idea (22 page)

By dwelling on the meaning of the square-and-cross, he reasoned, the reader could be constantly reminded to unite the two currents of life.

The success of
It Works
helped Jarrett attain a lifestyle that, while not extravagant, went beyond anything his laborer father could have hoped for. Jarrett and his wife retired to a sunny hacienda-style bungalow in a tidy middle-class section of Beverly Hills. But their California idyll was fated to be short-lived. Jarrett died there in 1937 at age sixty-three of leukemia. He had been diagnosed three years earlier.

Jarrett didn’t embark on his career as a writer until the final years of his life. He produced both of his books while in his fifties. His success arose not despite the lateness of his start but
because
of it. Like James
Allen and the best New Thought pioneers, this self-educated man from ordinary life devised a philosophy that had been tested by the nature of his own personal conduct and lived experience. Only then did he deem it worth sharing.

No set of figures in the New Thought tradition could seem more different than Frank B. Robinson and the husband-wife team of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore.

A Stetson-wearing pitchman, Robinson grew up as an orphaned knockabout in the American West and went on to operate his own mail-order religion during the Great Depression. The Fillmores were a solidly midwestern married couple who lived by values of thrift, accountability, religious devotion, and their own carefully honed message of Christian healing, which they spread through their Unity ministry.

Yet Robinson and the Fillmores, preaching their own distinctive versions of the New Thought gospel, pioneered the uses of mass media—including advertising, radio, and mailings—to spread a mystical message to vast numbers of people. These positive thinkers were the first media ministers of the twentieth century.

Robinson’s religion-by-mail was known by the enticingly modern name of
Psychiana
, which Robinson said came to him in a dream. It was a subscription-based faith that he began in the late 1920s from his home in Moscow, Idaho. Through national print and radio ads, Robinson sold sets of digest-sized correspondence lessons on how to use the reality-shaping powers of the mind.

“And the best thing about it,” he told a wire-service reporter, “is that we guarantee results or your money refunded. I guess it’s about the only ‘money-back’ religion in the world.” Critics scoffed, but the Psychiana movement grew so large during the Great Depression that it could have been considered the eighth-largest religion on earth.

Robinson was born in 1886 into a household in northern England
headed by an abusive Baptist minister. Frank lost his mother to pneumonia when he was eight. Six years later, when Frank was fourteen and his younger brother Sydney was twelve, their father kicked the boys out of their home. Wanting a fresh start with his new wife, the minister shipped his sons off to Canada, with no plans for their care. When they reached the door of an Ontario preacher with whom their father had supposedly made arrangements, the man turned them onto the streets.

Robinson bounced around in different jobs. He joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as the U.S. Army and Navy, but each time he was discharged for drunkenness and bad conduct. Nonetheless, the handsome Robinson showed an innate and keen grasp of religious topics; he attracted benefactors in Toronto who enrolled him in McMaster University’s Bible Training School. As a student, however, Robinson refused to accept the premise that Christianity, or any religion, had a monopoly on truth. He argued with students and teachers that all religions had the same basic structure and myths. Yet no religion, he insisted, gave man anything practical or real to hang on to. His sponsors cut him off.

The former Bible student made his way to Oregon, where he married and finally settled into steady employment as a druggist. A new job took him to Los Angeles. There, at age forty-two, Robinson returned home depressed one Sunday afternoon following a Methodist church service in Hollywood. He was disappointed with the listless service, and he felt that his personal search for a real, verifiable God had gone nowhere. He pleaded to be shown something more—and challenged God to reveal himself. “Oh, God,” he cried, “if I have to go to hell, I’ll go with the consciousness that I went there earnestly trying to find you, God.” Suddenly, Robinson felt his entire body pulsing with life; something alive and creative seemed to be coursing through him. His mood lifted, and his mind grew clear and focused.

What Robinson discovered that afternoon, he said, is that the power of God pulses through the human mind, waiting to do man’s will. “The creative God-law of the universe … is all around you and in existence for the fulfilling of your every right desire,” he wrote.

Though his conclusions radically differed from Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson’s, Robinson, like Wilson, described what William James had termed a “conversion experience.” Wilson and Robinson depicted it in parallel terms. Yet while Bill Wilson saw God as a source of refuge and help for recovery, Robinson believed that his spiritual realization revealed to him a universal “God Law.” This metaphysical law meant, in short, that
the imagination of man is God
. While religionists had been seeking God on crosses or in the heavens, Robinson said, the “God Law” was really one and the same as the human mind. He had finally discovered “a workable, useable God.”

With ideas bursting in his head, Robinson moved with his wife and young son to the small town of Moscow, Idaho—for the sole purpose of accepting a job at a pharmacy that closed at 6 p.m. Leaving work early allowed the druggist to begin writing the lessons that would become the basis for his “new psychological religion.”

One Saturday in 1928, Robinson sat down at a borrowed typewriter for thirty-six hours, laying out the lessons that would deliver his “God Law” into the hands of ordinary people. His written work completed, Robinson pulled together four hundred dollars and began taking out ads in newspapers, detective pulps, romance magazines, and on matchbook covers. Robinson’s sales pitches were as audacious as the man himself. “I TALKED WITH GOD,” his ads read. “Yes I Did—Actually and Literally … You too may experience that strange mystical power which comes from talking with God.” Twenty dollars bought twenty lesson pamphlets on how to use the applied power of thought to bring success, money, jobs, and anything that was needed. People replied, first by the thousands and soon tens of thousands, and a new religious movement was born.

Though disparaged in the press as a “mail-order prophet,” Robinson provided something of a lifeline to his subscribers, who sent him thousands of grateful letters. The standard religious institutions were paying no attention to their psychological despair. Robinson, on the other hand, thundered against the dithering of mainline churches and urged his followers
to shift their mind-sets, open themselves to fresh ideas, and believe in the promise within themselves.

Charges of charlatanry inevitably swirled around Robinson, yet surviving financial records show that the “Miracle Man of Moscow” profited to no unusual degree from Psychiana. He and his wife, son, and daughter lived in a comfortable if ordinary upper-middle-class house in the Idaho town, where his printing and mail-order businesses became the largest local employer outside the University of Idaho during the Great Depression. Robinson drew a standard white-collar salary, while continually putting money back into his business, which required constant advertising to stay afloat.

In the 1940s, Robinson struck up a friendship with Science of Mind founder Ernest Holmes. At a time when many American churches were segregated, Holmes and Robinson conducted a series of racially integrated prayer crusades in Los Angeles. At the September 1941 meetings, the two metaphysical teachers delivered rousing calls for racial equality and led prayers for the victory of democracy on the eve of America’s entry into World War II. During the war Robinson cabled Finland’s president and urged him to fortify his embattled nation’s military defenses with a daily affirmation to be recited by the Finnish army, cabinet ministers, and Psychiana members in America:
The power of God is superior to the powers of war, hate, and evil
. Finland’s president, probably with tongue in cheek, wired back that he would act on Robinson’s idea as soon as “practicable.”

Though powerfully built and energetic, Robinson had a weak heart. The mail-order prophet died of heart failure on October 19, 1948. Sacks of cards and telegrams poured into the Psychiana offices—distraught followers wondered, who would replace the man who talked with God? The helm briefly went to Robinson’s son, Alfred, a thoughtful and earnest Stanford graduate who had served as a fighter pilot in World War II. But Alfred acknowledged lacking his father’s passion. With debts mounting, the Robinson family in 1952 shut down Psychiana—its once-busy print shops quiet and its remaining brochures, magazines, pamphlets, and lesson plans carted away.

Robinson’s story is more than one of fame found and quickly lost. At a time when traditional congregations were shrinking, Robinson pointed the way to reaching people by speaking to their most practical concerns, and doing so through methods of national advertising. Even while declaring Robinson a “religious racketeer,” mainline congregations copied his outreach methods. Today, Robinson’s techniques—including national ads, broadcasts, direct-response mailings—are standard fare, particularly among evangelical ministries.

But that influence does not wholly capture Frank B. Robinson. Robinson was a classic American religious discontent—a man who built his own path to higher realization when the existing ones didn’t work for him. He never sought to appeal to the churches for respectability. He wanted to create a faith that was entirely free of them. After the Psychiana founder’s death, his friend and chronicler Marcus Bach eulogized him:

Charles Fillmore died the same year as Frank B. Robinson, in 1948. Fillmore’s wife and close collaborator, Myrtle, had passed away years earlier, in 1931. Eschewing Robinson’s personal flamboyance and magical tone, the Fillmores built their Unity movement on a similar campaign of national media, as well as an innovative distance-prayer ministry. The Fillmores perfected the media methods that Robinson had only begun.
Unlike the flameout of Psychiana, Unity grew into a long-reigning force on the national scene, and remains so today.

The Fillmores had an extraordinary personal rise. Charles Fillmore was born in 1854 on a Chippewa reservation near St. Cloud, Minnesota. His father, Henry, was a trader with the Native Americans and lived in close proximity to the Chippewa and the Sioux. There were periods of tension. When Charles was two, he was seized from his home by a Sioux band, probably in a business dispute. Henry managed to secure his return. Henry cared little for education, and Charles and his young brother spent only a few terms at a rural schoolhouse. For Charles, life was given over to trapping, hunting, storing up supplies, and wandering the range.

At age ten, Charles suffered a serious injury to his hip while ice-skating. His mother, Mary, could find little medical care, and the injury never properly healed. Charles struggled with years of pain and discomfort, and by adulthood his right leg was about four and a half inches shorter than his left. He had to walk with an iron leg brace. A childhood virus had left him deaf in his right ear.

As a teenager, Charles, not unlike other people dwelling on the prairie, took an interest in Spiritualism, or talking to the dead, which in the years of mourning following the Civil War was sweeping the nation. Charles also expressed interest in “Hermetic philosophy,” by which he meant mail-order occult courses. The teenage Charles found work with a printer, and at age twenty-two in 1876 he was employed as a railroad clerk in east Texas, an area growing with the addition of new rail lines. There Charles joined local reading clubs and discussion groups, at which he met Myrtle Page. A teacher at a private school, Myrtle was ten years older than he. Charles followed her back to her home in Clinton, Missouri, where they married in early 1881. Myrtle was an intellectually vibrant woman who had spent a year at Oberlin College. But, like Charles, she had suffered childhood illnesses that trailed her into adulthood.

“It was a strange combination,” wrote historian James W. Teener. “Charles, twenty-six years of age, small of body and slightly stooped,
with a decided limp because of his shortened leg, suffering from curvature of the spine and deafness in the right ear; Myrtle, ten years his senior, and, according to her claims already a victim of tuberculosis.”

Charles discovered a talent for real estate and began prospering in the Missouri market. In 1884 the couple again moved, now with two sons, to Kansas City. The western city had doubled in population in the previous decade and was in the midst of a real-estate boom. Charles and Myrtle financially thrived, but their physical health deteriorated. Charles was experiencing discomfort from his iron brace, and he discovered that the sight in his right eye was failing. Myrtle, already in tenuous health, was diagnosed with malaria. Nothing seemed to help her. Then in the spring of 1886 the Fillmores learned of a mental-healer coming to the city, Eugene B. Weeks. Like many early mind-healing figures, Weeks called himself a Christian Scientist, but he adhered to the New Thought philosophy taught by Emma Curtis Hopkins. Weeks gave Myrtle an afformation that began her journey back to health: “I am a child of God and therefore I do not inherit sickness.” Myrtle ardently repeated these words until they struck her with the force of a conversion.