Fight the Power: Rediscovering New Thought’s Radical Hero
By Mitch Horowitz
“The time for thinkers has come; and the time for revolutions, ecclesiastic and social, must come.” —Mary Baker Eddy, 1875
Critics of New Thought often dismiss mental metaphysics as a milquetoast philosophy that uses “happy thoughts” as a lame substitute for social action.
But New Thought grew up hand-in-hand with a tradition of radical political dissent. New Thought’s ethos of self-empowerment appealed to figures from feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Science of Getting Rich author Wallace D. Wattles, who ran for office several times on the Socialist Party ticket.
New Thought’s premise that we can simultaneously remake society and ourselves appears most strikingly in the career of a figure rarely associated with metaphysics: black-nationalist pioneer Marcus Garvey.
Garvey is best remembered as a political insurgent. Born in Jamaica in 1887, he sojourned to America in 1916 to spread his vision of a pan-African superpower, which would unite black people around the world and take its place among modern empires.
For a time, the radical leader came closer than many would have imagined, attracting tens of thousands of cheering followers to rallies and parades in the U.S., England, and the Caribbean, and assembling history’s first international black political organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
But it is impossible to fully understand Garvey’s philosophy of black empowerment without recognizing the New Thought ideas and methods that ran through it. Most mainstream historians and journalists never grasped the nature of Garvey’s references to “scientific” religion, his use of proverbs like “as man thinketh,” or his urging followers, “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery” and “mind is your only ruler.”
Garvey began his mission to bring a sense of self-determination to members of the African diaspora when he travelled as a journalist through Central America in his early twenties. The young Garvey was appalled to witness the second-class status of black laborers completing the Panama Canal.
“Where was the black man’s country?” he wondered. Garvey sought answers in Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. Washington’s philosophy of self-sufficiency hit Garvey with the force of a religious conversion.
Garvey merged Washington’s influence with his own search into the new metaphysics. This resulted in a bevy of New Thought-oriented slogans and ideas in UNIA’s newspapers and pamphlets, such as the need for a “universal business consciousness.” Garvey’s Negro Factories Corporation advertised shares of stock by declaring: “Enthusiasm Is One of the Big Keys to Success.” The front page of Garvey’s Blackman newspaper announced: “Let us Give off Success and It Will Come,” adding the perennial New Thought maxim: “As Man Thinks So Is He.”
Garvey extolled the work French mind-power theorist Emile Coué who popularized the mantra, “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” His Negro World newspaper echoed the Frenchman’s affirmation in an editorial headline: “Every Day in Every Way We See Drawing Nearer and Nearer the Coming of the Dawn for Black Men.” The paper editorialized that Marcus Garvey’s teachings provided the same “uplifting psychic influence” as Coué’s.
Sensing Garvey’s spiritual appeal, an FBI report in 1920 observed of his movement that “among the followers it is like a religion,” its leader “looked upon as a black Moses.”
One of the only books that Garvey publicly recommended was Elbert Hubbard’s Scrapbook, a collection of life lessons by Hubbard, a social-reform journalist and motivational hero within New Thought circles. Garvey’s favorite poet was Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the poet laureate of mental metaphysics and a student of New Thought pioneer Emma Curtis Hopkins. Garvey used Wilcox’s lines to conclude a 1915 UNIA rally:
Live for something, — Have a purpose
And that purpose keep in view
Drifting like an helmless vessel
Thou cans’t ne’er to self be true.
Why didn’t Garvey just come out and proclaim his New Thought sympathies? A degree of secrecy and confidentiality characterized almost all of his affairs, including those of the mind. Garvey’s suspicions of the established political order – which took every opportunity to subject him to legal harassment – led the activist to closely, and sometimes excessively, guard the sources of his ideas.
But in a speech he delivered in January 1928 in Kingston, Jamaica, Garvey articulated his spiritual approach more clearly than any other time. “Get you[rself], as the white man has done, a scientific understanding of God and religion,” he told listeners, continuing:
What marks the great deal of difference between the Negro and the White man is that the Negro does not understand God and His religion. God places you here in the world on your responsibility as men and women to take out of the world and to make out of the world what you want in keeping with the laws of the spirit. God has laid down two codes that man cannot afford to disobey: The code of Nature and the code of the Spirit. The code of Nature when you violate it makes you angry, makes you unhappy, makes you miserable, makes you sick, makes you die prematurely…Every sickness and every disease, I repeat, is a direct violation of the code of God in Nature.
Making a definite spiritual use of the term “science,” Garvey told the audience that whites “live by science. You do everything by emotion. That makes the vast difference between the two races…Get a scientific knowledge of religion, of God, of what you are; and you will create a better world for yourselves. Negroes, the world is to your making.”
Contemporary readers of Garvey could easily miss, or simply wonder at, his references to religion and science – but the signposts abounded in Garvey’s day. Both New Thought and Christian Science rested on the premise that religion was, above all, a lawful phenomenon guaranteed to produce certain results.
Garvey’s spiritual “science” also had roots – occult roots – in his Caribbean boyhood. In the West Indies, the term science was slang for mystical practices.
To Garvey’s supporters, his speeches and articles conveyed a distinctive marriage of politics and metaphysics. The spiritual and social visionary couched his ideas in language to which every aspiring person, black or white, could instantly relate.
A Science of Mind magazine columnist, Mitch Horowitz is the PEN Award-winning winning author of Occult America and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life, where he writes further about New Thought’s radical roots. Mitch is vice-president, executive editor, and director of backlist and reissues at Tarcher Perigee.
I enjoyed this article. I will share it. This type of information about the New Thought Movement is needed, so keep it coming.
Yes, this is excellent! Thanks for shining a light on this little known history.
It’s intriguing to see how the ideas are adapted and how they get translated for new audiences. I didn’t know about the Marcus Garvey connection.
But the history of ideas only tells one part of the story. The social history of New Thought’s streams and tributaries is not a story that has been fully researched and told, as far as I know. How does a movement with radical social roots that is nurtured in progressive social circles become an ideology that supports the corporate capitalist status quo? In other words, how do you get from Emma Curtis Hopkins to Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale?
Hi Maryjane,
Mitch can say more here, but his book “One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life” is a wonderful and carefully argued read that addresses just the important question you raise here. You can also see my interview with Mitch in the September Science of Mind magazine which also addresses how New Thought moved from health and healing to being socially progressive and then incarnated as a philosophy for people chasing worldly success.
Thanks all for these stimulating comments. As Harv notes I follow the trajectory of that history in One Simple Idea — many factors colluded to bring us where we are today (including the decline of “mental healing” as the keynote of the New Thought movement; our friends in Christian Science remained in a healing ministry). In a sense the more concentrated New Thought culture has remained radical — but the more popular expressions of the philosophy have not. Though I believe that a sizable fraction of the readership of Peale, Carnegie — and Byrne — retains some of the nonconformity seen in the early days.
Harv and Mitch – great conversation! I’ve been fortunate to read both of Mitch’s books and your interview in SOM Magazine – which developed the books’ arguments further. I enjoyed Mitch’s tracing of New Thought’s main ideas and their spread. But I still think there’s a missing link – New Thought ideas originate and gain momentum in outsider groups that supported progressive politics in the later 19th C – but by mid 20th C., they become an ideology attractive to the likes of Henry Ford and Norman Vincent Peale. What was it about the social & political context that allowed this to happen? I’m a sociologist, so that’s what I’m puzzling over. Mitch – you hint at part of an answer by pointing to the continued radicalism of a core culture within NT– while commercialized NT culture is de-politicized, which actually supports the status quo. So maybe what we need to do is begin to distinguish the different groups or subcultures within the movement in order to understand the mechanism of this historic shift. As they say, “further research is necessary!”
Thanks so much Maryjane. New Thought grew — and changed with — the nation. The social changes to which New Thought responded redirected it towards the “success based” philosophy popularized by Peale, et al. I explore this in One Simple Idea in the chapters “From Poverty to Power,” “Happy Warriors,” and “The American Creed.” In essence these factors colluded:
1. American medicine underwent a dramatic leap forward in the late 19th/early 20th centuries; hence mental healers were no longer as “needed” as they had once been. (Though our friends in Christian Science maintained their ramparts).
2. Concurrent with medical breakthroughs, state legislatures began passing medical licensure laws, which made it increasingly difficult to hang out a shingle as a spiritual or mental healer.
3. Responding to the times — and to the innovative writing of figures like Prentice Mulford and Wattle D. Wattles — New Thought publications, etc, began to base their appeal more and more on “getting rich” (though, for a time, with a remaining progressive outlook).
4. The consumer economy also began to grow at this time. People moved off farms and into cities to find work; the stock market began to open people to possibilities (and mirages) of getting rich. Shop windows, department stores, restaurants began to spread across the American scene — further beckoning people to “make it big.” Hence, mental healing and, eventually, the progressive vision that ran parallel to it, got sidelined by money-attraction
5. By the time Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie hit it big in the 1930s, the term “New Thought” was more or less discarded because the new kids on the block didn’t want associations with the older mystical (or radical) subcultures. Although New Thought bravely marched on, the mega-expressions made no reference to it while at the same time enunciating its themes. When Norman Vincent Peale’s cold-war bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking hit the scene in 1952, the get-rich mentality had become aligned with defending capitalism and corporate interests.
6. In turn, the prosperity ministries of the 1970s took the cycle even further by joining an unnamed New Thought not only to capitalism but to conservative Christianity. Evangelicals didn’t even want association with the more theologically liberal Peale. So, to our generation it looks like New Thought or positive thinking is an “establishment” philosophy.
There are some byways, but that’s pretty well the trajectory. -m
Thanks for clarifying the connections. Sorry to make you write so much! Anyway – gives me more to think about . . .
Well, well. How interesting to see this man’s name even mentioned today along with Elizabeth Cady
Stanton (who incidentally had a nasty falling out with Frederick Douglas over the black right to vote
that she felt ‘darkies’ should not have been given before the white female!), Wallace D. Wattles, and others! The question to ask concerning this charismatic leader’s demise is why did it occur with such multitudinous and vociferous support and a cult like following unequaled even by Dr. King himself! Was it the J. Edgar Hoover desperate act of hiring black FBI agents in 1918 for the sole purpose of spying on this man? Was it his betrayal by ill chosen associates who in fact set him up for mail-fraud charges (one questionable $25.00 contribution used as evidence and basis for his arrest, trial, and deportation!). Or was it the inability of African descendants to muster and sustain the persistence and discipline to (as he himself said) override their emotional inclinations and tribal origins to move up to a higher level of self awareness and discipline as the descendants of the Europeans had done in the United States? Everyone must draw their own conclusions regarding this profoundly significant question.
Those who are not bored with history lessons and are interested in another of the many instances
of untaught American history, can view the several videos concerning this mystifying, iconic personality on our you-tube website where so many hidden truths of our history are revealed all
the time and available to those with the stomach who would bother to investigate such things for themselves!
Erick Dean Tippett
Retired Musician/Teacher
Chicago, Illinois