Before the famous trance medium (and later co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875) Emma Hardinge Britten ever set foot on the seance stage, she worked as an actress. Born in London to British parents, Britten began performing in public while still very young. Indeed, at the tender age of eleven, still smarting from her father's recent (and untimely) death, Britten was sent to live in Paris where the professional French musician, Pierre Erard, took her under his wing. Under Erard's tutelage, the young woman began a promising career as a pianist, performing to Parisian crowds. "Endless were the great and notable personages who came to Erard's to hear the child pianist," Britten later recalled. An alleged inclination toward the supernatural, however, brought the young woman's days as a musician to an abrupt end.

(Several of her friends, as well as her mother, felt that her ability to play musical pieces while under trance was the result of "Satanic influence.") Returning to England, Britten "adopted the stage as a profession, and became an actress," performing in several of London's theaters-including the vaunted Adelphi.1

The career change seemed to suit Britten, though, in time, the young actress realized that the life of the stage could be a difficult and capricious business. "Few young girls in narrow circumstances," Britten later wrote, "leading a busy struggling life, were ever subject to more sore temptations from a vicious aristocracy than myself." For a time, she was able to navigate her "way through the Scylla arid Charybdis of London stage life," but eventually the machinations of an alleged secret enemy in the London theatrical community began to undermine her new career. From Britten's perspective,this enemy's goal was simple: encourage "theatrical entrepreneurs" who had agreed to allow the medium to perform on their stages to cancel her engagements, thereby forcing the young woman to accept her "millionaire enemy's kind protection." (One can practically taste the venom in Britten's phrasing here.)2

Leaving London, Britten eventually found herself in New York City, living the life of a footloose actress, and finding herself on the cusp of yet another change in occupation. She had been lured to New York by the optimistic predictions of her future manager, who, when she arrived, began to fill her head with "future expectations and relations" that diverged quite substantially from her own. Nevertheless, she seemed to gain the trust of her audiences, who received her "most graciously." In addition, she "became the subject of warm complimentary notices from the various New York papers."

But, the positive public acclaim Britten started to enjoy did not necessarily translate into good relations with her manager, who had the bad habit of only finding her bit parts. It  was in this context that Britten got her first taste of spiritualist ritual. Her curiosity piqued by a married couple that lived in her same.boarding house, and who talked repeatedly of contacting the dead, the young actress soon determined to visit a medium and judge for herself whether or not humans could really talk with spirits.3 The results of her first seance shocked her, and she ran headlong into the street and back home where she fell on her knees and "pray[ ed] for forgiveness for having visited such an infidel place, and been found among such infidel people." In time, however, a curious mind seemed to temper any fear of spiritualism, and she eventually agreed to visit a second medium at the urging of a friend. It was in this second seance, led by channeler Ada Foye, that spirits allegedly revealed that Britten was a medium in her own right and that they had "a mighty work to perform" through her. At first she rebelled against the notion that she had been called by supernatural agency, but soon she came around to the idea that she was, in fact, a medium. "Doubt had been annihilated," she wrote, "skepticism crushed out." She parted with Foye "no longer with indifference, but with many a loving kiss, and each with tears in our eyes.“4

So began Emma Hardinge Britten's life as a public trance lecturer. Soon she was making appointments with interested audiences, and performing as a medium in places like New York City, Philadelphia, and the upstate New York town of Troy. Then letters from people interested in hearing Britten lecture began "pouring in ... from all quarters," some trom towns and cities thousands of miles away. These written entreaties touched Britten, causing her to leave New York in order to visit other spiritualist communities around the country. She "had successfully made the leap from actress to public medium, becoming one of the nation's most popular trance lecturers. 5

If Britten's story illuminates anything, it is the strikingly thin and indistinct boundary that separated public mediums from the era's other performers. (As validation of this point, consider the fact that later in her autobiography, Britten even refers to her work as a medium using the vocabulary of acting.) Actors and mediums, for instance,both integrated many of the same skills--expert elocution, controlled gestures and movement, and the imaginative inhabiting of a role, for example-into their performances in order to draw their audiences into their respective worlds. (For actors, the goal was to convince spectators that they "were" their characters; for mediums, the objective was slightly different: they did not wish to convince audiences that they were spirits, but that spirits simply spoke through them.) Of course, not every medium started out quite as Britten did-as a performer already accustomed to the stage-but most public mediums were at least willing participants in the world of nineteenth-century show business, and looked to that world to provide them with ways of getting ahead. Indeed, public mediumship cannot be fully understood without examining it through the lens of popular performance. Like actors, mediums quickly discovered that the cultural marketplace was fiercely competitive; it pitted performers against each other in a to control and dominate the attention of the nation's populace, and ultimately get spectators into seats. Such competition made public visibility and promotion necessary for success, prompting mediums-like actors, circus performers, traveling lecturers, and other entertainers-to exploit the strategic possibilities they found in the wider culture. It was their use of print technology, as well as their utilization of systems of professional management and marketing just coming into vogue in the nineteenth century, that provided public mediums with the opportunity to connect with potential spectators, and publicly make their case for supernatural virtuosity and abilities. Popular performers seemed to lead the way in this regard, and mediums followed. (It should not surprise us, then, if it was Britten's previous experience in the world of dramatic acting that made her proficient in marketing and self-promotion, and ultimately led her to bec’me one of a handful of channelers who formed the pirinacle of the medium star system in America.) 6

When it came to exploiting systems and forms of promotion and management, public mediums were part of a larger trend among cultural performers. In order to keep a leg up on the competition, many channelers borrowed a page from the popular lecturer’s book of tactics and hired managers to oversee the day-to-day administration of their Careers, including booking adequate performance space and finding appropriate transportation and lodging on the traveling circuit. (Alternatively, mediums who could not afford professional managers simply hoped to be hired by people who saw and responded to public notices in the papers.) Following the example of theater actors, ambitious mediums sought public endorsements from editors and other spiritualist opinion-makers or relied on advertisements in the spiritualist press to promote their services. The democratic character of the antebellum press gave traveling mediums (and a whole host of other performers) an opportunity to take advantage of the power of the printed word, and made paid advertisements, editorial notices, public endorsements, and printed requests from potential spectators the promotional pivots on which the careers of public mediums swung.

There were, of course, some behavioral and ethical boundaries that circumscribed what public mediums could and could not do to promote themselves. Like other nineteenth-century occupations, mediumship was governed by certain values that limited channelers’ behavior and defined which marketing practices they could legitimately utilize and which ones they could not. Some of the values mediums adopted came from within the channelers’ ftaternity-emerging out of the shared assumptions and ideas that bound them together. Just as important, however, were those values related to marketing and promotion that bubbled up from audiences and spiritualist critics; they also had an interest in helping define the roles and behaviors of mediums. We thus next will look at both sides of the issue together: mediums’ strategic exploitation of nineteenth-century technological and cultural forces, and the critique of that exploitation by those who believed they had an important stake in the trajectory and development of public mediumship in America.

 

Competitive Environment

In the nineteenth-century medium market, the most successful public channelers seemed to be those that effectively "sold" their personalities and talents to the widest possible audience. For them, marketing was a matter of survival. The powerful competitive ethic unleashed by the growing national market in cultural production did not escape the notice of many public mediums; they surely would have observed other itinerant performers racing each other to the "next town down the road" in order to be the first to slake the people's thirst for amusement.' They were part of the world of commercialized performance, fully implicated in its competitive swirl. Evidence gleaned from the spiritualist press shows us that mediums faced stiff competition from their own kind, as well as from other performers. By the 1 850s, just a few years after the Fox sisters allegedly experienced "spirit rapping" in their New York home, the national market for mediumistic skill was already relatively tight, and showed no signs of loosening over the next decade. Too many people were experiencing what they claimed was the spectral call to mediumship, only to rush off and join the public speaking circuit.

According to an accounting done by spiritualist editor Uriah Clark, in just four years  (1857-1860) the total number of local and itinerant trance speakers in New York, Massachusetts, and Ohio alone more than tripled, climbing from 35 to 120.8 Rivalries among mediums quickly became cutthroat, as public and private mediums alike scrambled for a piece of the shrinking pie. Spiritualist lecturer Amanda Spence observed that tighter competition bred dissatisfaction among most mediums. and caused "each one [to be] absorbed in his or her own special mission." Feeling cut off from each other, mediums often fell victim to "jealousies, prejudices and even antagonisms and hostilities, which, according to Spence, impaired their "progress and ... usefulness.“ 9 Ada L. Hoyt Coan echoed the sentiments of other public mediums when she lashed out at other

mediums, claiming that "nine-tenths of the so-called communications from spirits" produced by her competitors "were trash, and unworthy of any reliance whatever." Some of the most popular trance mediums, she claimed, tricked the public by "reading books and preparing their own minds for speaking" rather than relying solely on the revelations of the "spirits" in the seance.10 Not even the famed materialization mediums Ira and William Davenport were unaffected by the competitive aggressiveness of their fellow public channelers. In his more-or-less authorized biography of the Davenports published in 1869, Aftican-American spiritualist writer Paschal Beverly Randolph observed that the brothers encountered intense opposition "from self-styled mediums, who were either jealous and envious of their rising fame, or chagrined because they were not suffered to control and manage their affairs." According to Randolph, these rival mediums attempted to "drive a roaring trade" by getting the Davenports "to sit in their circles," and "turned the cold shoulder, and hot, envenomed tongue, against them" when the brothers chose to remain independent. Such channelers were "human ghouls," Randolph inveighed, who "constantly mouth[ed] about human charity," but were secretly delighted "when some poor devil of a medium made a false step, and fell into the straw, or disaster." 11

The growing scarcity of economic resources available to nineteenth-century channelers and the bitter rivalries that divided them were not solely responsible for fostering the aggressively competitive atmosphere in which public mediums operated; other traveling performers also threatened to draw spectators (and their dollars) away from public seances, or worse yet, discredit mediums. Touring circuses, acrobatic troupes, lecturers, preachers, and the like all competed with spiritualist performers for the attention of the nation's audiences. Of particular interest to public mediums were the activities of magicians (or illusionists, as they were sometimes called), sleight-of-hand performers, and traveling conjurors. Because their tricks often resembled (and sometimes were inspired by) seance routines, these artists of prestidigitation posed a serious threat to the economic success of itinerant channeling. By promising to debunk  spiritualist trickery, conjurors found themselves in a position to lure audience members away from public seances. Skillful magicians, like Harry Kellar (who actually assisted the Davenports early in life), set attendance records across the country for their exposes of seance performance "tricks." In Philadelphia alone, Kellar's show was so popu1ar it lingered for 323 consecutive nights in Masonic Hall.12

Other sleight-of-hand artists were less consistently successful in exposing mediums. One such performer-the self-styled "Fakir of Delhi"-caught up with Ira and William Davenport in 1863 after a clergyman from Princeton, Illinois, invited him to rid his little town of the mediums. According to a report in the Banner of Light, the Davenports had come to Princeton at the request of "a large number of [the town's] citizens," and had filled the courthouse (which cou1d accommodate "four to five hundred persons") nearly to capacity. The Banner's correspondent described the Davenports' manifestations in glowing terms: "The demonstrations were of the most convincing and satisfactory character, and created the most intense excitement. Many different tests were given by the mediums, which could not fail of convincing the most stubborn skeptic of the reality of the phenomena." The brothers were shackled in order to prevent any

deception, and "held a handful of wheat flour in each hand, thereby precluding the possibility of using their hands in making any manifestations, without spilling or scattering the flour." Yet, the writer exclaimed, they still caused "at least half a dozen hands and arms of the most beautiful shape and different sizes" to appear out of apertures in their spirit cabinet, most of which were "made visible to the whole audience, under the full glare of gas light.“13

Eager to reveal these mediumistic demonstrations as exercises in artful trickery, the fakir boasted that he too would be willing to produce the same manifestations in a show of his own, using sleight-of-hand techniques-a challenge that seemed to imply the channelers' demonstrations were nothing more than conjurors tricks. When the day of his show arrived, many of the same people who witnessed the Davenports' performance pushed and elbowed their way into the courthouse until it was again "densely crowded."

The fakir took the stage to scattered applause, and allowed "the same skeptical committee" who tied the mediums to bind him to a chair, apparently in an attempt to imitate in every detail the setting of the Davenports' public seance. However, things did not work out quite as the magician had planned. According to the Banner, "before [the committee] had finished tying him, he complained of the manner of tying, and said that no living person could extricate himself tied in that manner. The committee assured the audience that he was tied precisely as they had tied the mediums, only not as securely around the wrists." The fakir worked for nearly a half-hour to ftee himself, but eventually admitted defeat and was hooted off the stage. According to the Banner's correspondent in Princeton, even the magician's "own mends deserted him," and labeled him a ftaud. His reputation in shambles, the conjuror bravely tried to recoup his losses with a promise to appear again in public, but his humiliation eventually became too much for him and he slunk quietly out of town. 14

It is important to note, though, that for every "Fakir of Delhi" there were dozens of other performers who posed truly viable threats to public medium shows. Nineteenth century magicians, in particular, challenged the status of channelers as the sole producers of bizarre, mysterious, or uncanny phenomena. Indeed, the ways in which this type of secular magic performance resembled the public cabinet shows popularized by the Eddy family of Vermont and the Davenport siblings was astonishing. By expertly imitating medium shows, large numbers of the period's conjurors offered spectators a feasible alternative to attending public seances, and often tempted away the very people who would otherwise have gone to see touring channelers perform; virtual cultural cousins, magicians and mediums were known to perform the same "tricks" and draw from the same pool of potential spectators. An article in Buchanan's Journal of Man, a progressive monthly periodical edited by mesmerist and phrenologist Joseph R. Buchanan, hit the nail on the head when it declared that "there are many professors of 'magic' ... who can achieve withal as wonderful feats without assistance from machinery and the usual theatrical appliances" as practitioners of the so-called supernatural arts. To substanuate this claim, the author of the piece cited his own encounter with a popular street magician on a crowded thoroughfare in New Orleans. While strolling along St. Charles Street one evening, the author recollected, "we observed a crowd of persons assembled around a rather striking and original-looking individual" whose long hair, black eyes, and high cheekbones gave him the exotic appearance "of an Indian." Perched high on his trunk, the conjuror seemed to exercise an almost mesmeric control over his audience; passersby who stopped to watch him could barely muster the "half-whispered, half-whistled labial sound" that signaled their bewilderment. Their rapt attention intrigued the correspondent and his companion; apparently fascinated as much by the audience's unusual response to the magician, as they were by the man himself, the two strollers paused just long enough to witness a number of "very singular" performances.

One trick that involved a dime jumping from a spectator's hand into the conjuror's pocket at the sound of a whistle delighted the author. Even more astounding was a second stunt, in which a walking stick "involuntarily performed a polka" to the performer's whistled tune. According to the column's writer, the dancing cane trick was especially surprising because it simply "could not have been caused by magnetism, for there was no metallic or magnetizable substance in the cane; nor by collusion, for we were too close not to detect any effort of that nature; nor by any of the ordinary means which are employed.“15

 

Performances

Ferocious competition within their own ranks, coupled with the intense popularity of secular magic and other cultural performances, then, encouraged individual public mediums to make the same choice many of the era's other professional performers did, and set to work promoting their own skills and abilities in the hopes of attracting the attention of what they characterized as a fickle American public. The strategies a given public medium might employ in order to accomplish this task varied and often depended on his or her place within the stratified world of public mediumship. Like actors in the nation's theatrical companies, nineteenth-century channelers were a part of what we might call a "star system." In acting culture, the star system was a quasi-formal arrangement of caste-like distinctions that separated "stars" fi'om utility actors (or "bit players," in today's parlance) and supernumeraries (the nineteenth-century equivalents of today's "extras"). Since its development as part of the early theatrical stock company structure in the 1810s with British actor George Frederick Cooke's successful visit to the United States, the system remained somewhat fluid and occasionally allowed utility actors and supernumeraries to achieve stardom, but it nevertheless preserved and protected a semi-permanent upper tier of American actors and provided those players with the sought-after prerogatives of economic success, social recognition, and top billing. Over time, some stars became so powerful that they were able to demand  difficult concessions from theater managers, including near impossible shares of each night's receipts and ever more sumptuous accommodations.16

The system oftecognizing the best or most popular performers as "stars" was not limited to acting culture alone. Star imagery cut across occupational categories. In Nineteenth-century America, one could find a host of "star" preachers, dancers, artists, and musicians-to name only a few key occupations. For example, minstrel T. D. "Daddy" Rice (not to be confused with the later performer, Dan Rice-nee McLaren who appropriated both the earlier man's name and his style) achieved almost unprecedented fame for his ability to ape "black" fashion in song and dance. (He, of course, was not really performing wholly authentic African-American songs and dances, but was twisting elements of black culture to suit the racial assumptions of his white spectators.)l7 Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Beecher, also was granted something akin to star status among the nation's clerics, thanks, at least in part, to his confident ability to communicate elements of liberal Protestant theology effectively to a mass audience.18

Significant external forces-especially improved modes of transportation and new opportunities for increased profits for managers and performers-contributed greatly to the rise and persistence of the American star system. The use of steam-powered transportation, one observer argued, fed the system by allowing stars in high demand to travel quickly and comfortably between cities. Stars, the observer commented, felt they "could annihilate time and space by the use of steam vessels"-and when they got where they wanted to go, they stood to make a killing. The fact that stars could come away with more money from one night's performance than a normal stock player would be able to make in a week's time motivated even mediocre actors to try and make the great leap to stardom, though most were destined to remain virtually anonymous. It was not just actors who profited from the star system, though; managers generally were able to generate buzz and increased ticket sales by bringing in at least one star to play in their productions. 19

In the end it was the audience that had the final say about who ultimately would become a star on America's stages. Without the public's acquiescence, no one could enter into the hallowed halls of stardom. At least part of what drove people's preoccupation with stars was their own growing interest in celebrity. While scholars have tended to see "the celebrity" as primary a twentieth-century construct (driven by the "other directedness" of urbanized mass society), the roots of celebrity reach back at least to the nineteenth century and the notion of stardom. People increasingly seemed to want to see a particular performer, rather than a performance, a point actress Olive Logan reinforced by observing that "Americans care much more for the actors than the merits of the play itself." Indeed, audiences developed strong attachments to certain charismatic performers. In the eyes of his audience, historian Morse Peckham claimed, the performing star became a "source ofunimagined splendor, order, power, and beauty.“20

All of these factors-improved technology, opportunities for profit, star charisma, and spectators' desires-no doubt also played a role in the birth and growth of the spiritualist star system, though there were slight differences in how "star" mediums operated. Public mediums, for instance, rarely became involved with theatrical conglomerates. Instead, they either opted to use agents or managers to book their performances, or chose to handle their own affairs and hired themselves out as "free  agents" to interested spectators. Nevertheless, as opportunities for increased success presented themselves to theatrical stars, the door was also flung open to the development of a recognizable star system among mediums. Most mediums (and many non-mediums as well) recognized the pecking order that separated wildly popular star mediums like Cora Hatch, Emma Hardinge Britten, or Lizzie Doten from less-popular channelers. The author of a letter to trance speaker Achsa Sprague clearly recognized the distinctions that existed among public mediums, and even used a theatrical metaphor to summarize her thoughts. Writing under the cryptic pseudonym "J. A. C.," the letter's author laid out for Sprague the qualities that made fellow medium Rosa Amedy, "a Star quite above the Stock." Not only was Amedy able to deliver "very good, pious lecture[ s]," full of a "good deal of humanity and kindness," but her performances were "well acted and expressed" too. She and other talented mediums were able to cultivate successfully the personal and financial capital to rent the largest lecture halls and win free publicity from spiritualist editors and other movement "gatekeepers."21

Conversely, some obscure mediums often had a difficult time making themselves known. Consider the experience of Abraham Pierce. An oversupply of mediums from his hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts, kept him from standing out at home, while the indignity of having his name misspelled in a national directory of mediums in 1860 suggests that he did not stand out abroad either-this despite the fact that he traveled tirelessly through the Northeast and visited Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Providence as often as he could. 22 Some observers thought these mediums could improve their situation simply by working harder. In a series of letters to Achsa Sprague, Benjamin Starbuck, the corresponding secretary and chairman of the lecture committee for a spiritualist association in Troy, New York, naively insinuated that the most popular trance lecturers succeeded simply because they were willing to try a little harder to improve their shows.23

Of course, not everything was gloom and doom for the nation's cadre of lesser known channelers. Occasionally they packed auditoriums like their more fortunate "brothers" and "sisters" did. For nearly a week in June 1858, the virtually unknown Ella E. Gibson filled a concert hall in Augusta, Maine, to capacity. A correspondent to the Banner of Light wrote that Gibson spoke each night to a "surprised and delighted audience, a third part of whom ... were Spiritualists.,,24 On the whole, however, Gibson, Pierce and their kind were forced to accept offers to speak in the nation's backwaters in order to make ends meet. The size and financial means of audiences tended to structure the market for mediums, putting channelers at the mercy of the spectator's purse. The "best" adepts-or those with the most popular shows-were able to follow the money and stop in the biggest cities where larger audiences meant greater profits, or they eventually secured permanent lectureships among organized spiritualists in places like Buffalo, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. As Ann Braude has already shown, audiences in smaller cities, like Manchester, New Hampshire, were at a distinct disadvantage in this system and often lost their best channelers to more lucrative circuits in states like Massachusetts. For many mediums, the situation was dire; hundreds of them worked the country's regional and national circuits, spreading the hopeful message of spiritualism, without much hope of achieving either public renown or true financial security.25

But all was not lost. Even obscure public mediums had the potential to compete in the market of supernatural skill by tapping into what we might call a "science of publicity," that relied heavily on the growing cultural importance of print in nineteenth century America. The fact that many public mediums were game enough to experiment with print promotion had as much to do with the tremendous cultural and technological shifts that were reshaping America in the mid-nineteenth century, as it did their own opportunism. Mediums' capacities to exploit the printed word owed a lot to innovations in printing that made access to newspapers, broadsides, and other printed material an inexpensive, common reality for most Americans. (It should be noted that the use of the printed word as a marketing tool enjoyed a long history that reached all the way back to premodern Europe where the practice of promoting human oddities and animal menageries, jugglers, puppeteers, minstrels, rope-walkers, acrobats, and magicians on broadsides and posters became commonplace, and that public mediums and other performers reworked and embellished such tactics centuries later for a New Wodd public.) Consider, for example, the use of broadsides by American entertainers in the nineteenth century. No doubt European visitors to the United States had encountered the use of broadsides in their own homelands for years, but they seemed genuinely surprised by the American knack for turning the broadside into a truly imposing form of publicity.

In 1834, for instance, Scotsman David Wilkie confessed to seeing just such a piece of advertising-or as he put it, an "excellent specimen of Yankee puffing"-hanging on a tavern wall in upstate New York. The "specimen," it turns out, was a gigantic poster for an animal menagerie "which being too long to stretch its length between the ceiling and the floor, had been separated in the middle, and the pieces placed side by side." On it were "portraits of every ill-shaped brute which the caravan contained... with descriptions below each of the most wonder-working sort. There were to be seen lions
that had swallowed whole bullocks, and monkeys twice as big as the human form ...royal Bengal tigers, and pelicans of the wilderness, that were represented feeding their young with their own heart's blood." Such a monstrosity caused the apparently stunned Scotsman to conclude that "no nation in the world understands the science of puffing more profoundly than the American." 26

For popular mediums who recognized that a carefully cultivated and marketed image could lead to celebrity status and even a modicum of financial success. The diversification of nineteenth-century American print culture promised respectable economic and cultural dividends for what must have seemed a rather modest investment of time and money. Of course broadsides, business cards. and pamphlets could never hope to reach the number of readers an advertisement in a widely-circulated periodical could, but they were reliable methods of promotion nonetheless. And they had stood the test of time. Unfortunately, very little of this ephemeral matter still exists- though a few examples of this type of promotional artifact have survived and deserve some analysis. A trade card saved by channeler Augustus Merrick (whose story we told in part 3) advertised the services of an unnamed Boston medium. (It is likely Merrick picked it up during a visit to the city.) The layout of the card is rather uninteresting and replicates the abrupt structure and syntax of a short newspaper ad. though the card does offer the reader a glimpse into the medium's pricing structure: "Rapping and Test Medium. 54 Hudson Street. Boston. Hours-9 to 12-2 to 5-7 to 9 PM. Public Sittings 50 cents each person. Private... $1.00." (The dollar that it took to enter the private seance would have been a substantial outlay for most people: nearly a day's wages in 1850 for the average working class man in New York City.26

A second, more intriguing, example of this traditional type of advertising is a poster that publicized the. performance ofD. Webster Eddy, younger sibling of Vermont's famous team of mediums, Horatio and William Eddy. Even at the height of his brothers' runaway fame, the younger Eddy was able to make a name for himself thanks to his self proclaimed "ability" to levitate with the help of the spirits. According to Henry Olcott's account of his visit to the family's Vermont homestead, Eddy's so-called spectral assistants supposedly carried him out windows and over the tops of houses before depositing him in distant comers of the Vermont countryside. The public's positive response to such alleged feats must have motivated Eddy to take his performance on the road, for soon he was touring New England, presumably with a stack of broadsides under his arm. The posters were fairly standard for the time and advertised his show in large,loud letters. But Eddy also incorporated a touch of flexibility into their design. Below the exclamatory heading "Spirit Manifestations!" he intentionally left an empty space that could be filled in each day with the time and place of his performance. This device allowed the medium to travel freely without worrying about making it to pre-printed appointments. At the bottom of the sheet, he enumerated his prices: admission to his public seances was fifty cents, while private test seances cost a dollar each. 28

The circulation and posting of cards and bills as public advertisements was quite common in nineteenth-century America. Cards and circulars were a familiar means of advertising and tended to pass with remarkable ease in public. Trade cards were extremely cheap to print, making them the promotional method of choice for most of the period's merchants and craftsmen. While there was no standard trade card design, most cards from early in the century contained only the name and trade of the advertising merchant or craftsman. By the 1830s, however, people wanting to advertise their services began to add important details like prices and contact information to their cards-a trend Merrick's card seems to reflect. Posters and broadsides, on the other hand, relied more on eye-catching graphics and bold typefaces, though they also developed a sort of cluttered look over time. If placed effectively, however, they could be viewed by hundreds (if not thousands) of prospective spectators. No doubt public mediums found these "free-floating texts," as one historian has called them, to be especially useful because, unlike fixed signs, they did not require owning or renting the property where they were placed, nor did the medium who posted them have to assume much responsibility for what they said. Channelers could put them almost anywhere, including the exterior walls of buildings, fences, windows, and even trees. What is more, they became cheaper to print with each passing year.29

Of the promotional methods available to public mediums, none was quite so innovative or powerful as the newspaper advertisement. As early as the eighteentcentury, colonial businessmen occasionaUy gave notice of their services and products in newssheets, but the proliferation.ofperiodicals, thanks to significant technological advances, and the intensification of their publication schedules in the following century turned the American newspaper into an indispensable modern marketing tool. David Napier's invention of the cylinder press in 1819, followed by the development of the ten cylinder press in the 1840s, literally revolutionized the printing industry. This invention, which used revolving type and printed 20,000 sheets per hour, eventually drove the price of printing newspapers down so low that it fostered the creation of the so-called "penny press." Through newspaper columns, mediums could now literally reach thousands of potential consumers quickly and cheaply thanks to climbing circulation rates. Cheap daily newspapers were particularly successful in this regard. Between 1830 and 1840, the average circulation for dailies in the United States increased dramatically until it reached a daily total of nearly 300,000 readers; single issues of some papers were even known to reach nearly 340,000 copies read.

Yet, even with augmented circulation rates, few newspapers were able to survive on subscriptions alone; what they needed were advertisers' dollars. In 1836, for instance, the editors of the New York Transcript informed their readers that the paper relied almost solely on advertising income because it made next to nothing on subscriptions. The newspapermen's need for advertising money translated into a unique opportunity for nineteenth-century American businessmen-including, of course, showmen and performers-who generally saw newspaper advertising asa cheap and effective road to commercial success. Itinerant lecturers were especially quick to use papers as promotional instruments. In an apparent ploy to prove they had the American public's endorsement, lecturers and their agents often emphasized the size and eagerness of their audiences in their ads. Other showmen and entertainers also found advertising in papers to be quite useful, and often included public and personal endorsements in their inventory of promotional strategies. P. T. Barnum's masterful ability to manipulate and exploit the press, for example, made his public exhibition of the ex-slave Joice Heth between August 1835 and her death in February 1836 a popular success. His promotional campaign in the New York penny press rested on the placement of hundred of ads that emphasized Heth's various "attractions," including her grotesque appearance (woodcuts that accentuated her taut skin and talon-like fingernails encouraged spectators to see her as animal-like), her supposed connections to the family of George Washington (Barnum claimed she was the President's boyhood nurse), and her mysterious longevity (she was reputed to be upwards of one hundred and sixty-one years old). When rumors began to circulate that Heth was an automaton composed entirely of gears and India rubber, Barnum (or more likely his confederate, Levi Lyman) apparently sent out a volley of anonymous letters and notices to newspapers supporting both sides of the controversy, no doubt in the hopes of sparking  a second round of speculation about -and visits to-his human exhibit. Barnwn seemed to believe that his announcements in the press did the trick; in his 1855 autobiography he observed that "audiences again... increased" following his newspap- campaign.30

It is easy to understand, then, why mediwns looked to the press as an especially valuable way to promote themselves. Newspapers became a startlingly effective means for mediwns of all ranks and types to publicize their performances and correspond with potential spectators.31 Indeed, the spiritualist press provided public channelers with a ready-made communication network that linked the nation's scattered spiritualist communities and provided isolated pockets of adherents with news about what was happening to believers elsewhere. Not every spiritualist periodical, however, was equally useful in this regard, and a large percentage went under shortly after beginning publication. According to Ann Braude, only about thirty-one (or approximately 15 percent) of the 206 periodicals she identified as having spiritualist editors or that contained spiritualist content survived for at least five years, while only twelve lasted for  ten years or longer; only five made it to their twentieth year.32 But those publications that did survive for relativelylong periods of time-like the Banner of Light (1857-1907) and the Religio-Phi/osophical Journal (1865-1907)-became extremely influential in helping shape the nineteenth-century spiritualist movement.

The high-to-moderate circulation rates of many of these papers meant that the spiritualist press enjoyed a rather sizable community of readers. Even short-lived serials like the Spiritual Clarion (a monthly published in Auburn, New York, and edited by Uriah and Eliza Clark) and the Spiritual Telegraph (a New York weekly put out by Samuel Byron Brittan and Charles Partridge) were able to generate respectable circulation levels. Remarkably, the Clarion had been able to build up a readership that numbered in the thousands in its first year of existence, while the Telegraph ended its five-year run with more than five thousand subscribers. Of course, these numbers were minuscule compared to the astronomical sales rates of the popular non-spiritualist periodicals describedabove. Even ordinary papers distributed by the nation's religious denominations generally fared as well, or better, than spiritualist periodicals, at least when it came to circulation numbers. To compare spiritualist papers to better-funded serials in the secular and denominational sectors, however, seems slightly unfair. For the limited resources spiritualist editors possessed, they reached a fair number ofreaders.33

There were several ways the spiritualist press helped public mediums publicize their shows and secure appointments to perform. First, there were the annuanistings in the Spiritualist Register that gave potential spectators a sense of who was actively itinerating as a medium. The Register, however, provided only minimal contact information for people interested in booking a performance in their town.34 Much more useful, at least for channelers, were the traditionally free notices that detailed the activities and engagements of selected mediums. Often editors listed these announcements under headings like "Movements of Speakers" or "Of Writers and Speakers." Naturally, mediums hoped readers would spot the notices and make plans to hire them or at least attend one of their scheduled shows. The May 14, 1857, issue of the Banner of Light hinted that "those who are desirous of investigating the new phenomena [of spiritualism] should not fail to be present" at a trance lecture the following Sunday in Boston's Melodeon Hall. According to the paper, the medium engaged to perform-a Mrs. Henderson-would adopt the traditional trance speaker's practice of lecturing on topics of the audience's choosing. Further down the same newspaper column, a second announcement publicized Charles H. Crowell's intent to deliver a trance lecture in Quincy, Massachusetts, the same Sunday. The Herald of Progress, a weekly paper edited by the in p. 2 mentioned  spiritualist thinker Andrew Jackson Davis, also made similar announcements. The December 1, 1860, issue of the publication, for example, provided its readers with a wealth of information about the current and future activities of a number of channelers, ranging from obscure ones like Charlie Holt and Mrs. S. E. Collins to prominent ones like Laura de Force (later Gordon) and Emma Hardinge Britten.

According to the notice, de Force was looking for calls to lecture in the southern states and could be reached in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Britten, on the other hand, had just finished booking a series of performances in the western states that would run through March 1861. Readers interested in contacting her during her tour could write her at one of the four listed addresses (in Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago and New York).34

In all fairness, to call these notices "free" may be stretching the truth a bit. Channelers sometimes were expected to do tasks that settled agents of the movement press could not do, in exchange for getting their names in print. The editors of theSpiritual Age, for instance, pointed out there were some strings attached to having one's name and goings-on included in their paper's public announcements. The disclaimer included in the notices told the full story: "All persons announced under this head are requested to use their influence in favor of procuring subscribers for, and extending the circulation of, the Age [sic].“36 In effect, editors expected traveling mediums to do two jobs: they hoped that public channelers, in addition to promoting their own shows, would act as roving agents for the spiritualist press. The policy devised by Age editors Alonzo E. Newton and Samuel Byron Brittan, however, did not seem to be much of a hardship for traveling mediums. More than twenty-seven channelers and regular lecturers alone apparently agreed to the editors' conditions and were listed in the paper's October 15, 1859, issue.37

Publishing free (or nearly free) announcements was only one way the spiritualist press helped public channelers promote their mediumistic labor: traveling mediums also purchased advertisements outright in spiritualist newspapers. Unfortunately, we know little about the process mediums followed to get their ads into print, though there is some evidence that suggests individual mediums or their agents had the enviable opportunity of cutting independent deals with spiritualist editors. The editors of the Banner of Light, for instance, did not announce a standard fee for advertisements, opting instead to assure mediums that their ads would be "inserted on the most favorable terms.“38 No doubt this was a boon to cash-strapped channelers. But, there was a downside to advertising in nineteenth-century newspapers. Ads in the press were often confined to small, uniform type and generally included only minimal amounts of information such as the advertising medium's name, address, and his or her category of mediums hip (test, trance, materialization, etc.). Relatively few channelers used the techniques that pioneering ad men employed to get around what David Henkin calls the "visual homogeneity" of the nineteenth-century newspaper. Public mediums rarely manipulated the type in their ads to create larger shapes, icons, or characters, while still fewer used iteration copy, a new promotional tactic in which the same message appeared over and over again for an entire column.39 Public channelers' advertisements, however, still tried to make the most of the early newspaper's monotonous rectilinear grid; what they sacrificed in terms of visual display they tried to compensate for with economical prose and capitalized letters. An advertisement that publicized the work and temporary lodgings of Ada Coan was extremely spare, yet declarative: "ADA L. COAN-RAPPING AND WRITING TEST MEDIUM, is giving sittings daily, for the investigation of Spirittialism, at 15 Tremont Row, nearly opposite Hanover street. Room No.4." Other mediums' advertisements, on the other hand, were much more assertive, and dared the public to test their claims of supernatural virtuosity. "Investigate and believe!" one ad dared readers. "Is the soul of man immortal? Do the Spirits of the Dead commune with and influence the living? Hundreds of persons who have visited the Rooms of Mrs. Seabring, 477 Broadway, as obstinate skeptics, now frankly answer the above questions in the affirmative. Hours 10 A. M. to 12,2 to 5 P. M., and 7 to 10 P. M.“4o

Public mediums, as well as their managers and friends, also placed advertisements in secular newspapers, though these ads, like the paid promotional pieces in the spiritualist press, tended to steer clear of typographical innovations. It is important to note, though, that they did not lack imagination. An ad in the Cleveland Leader that publicized Cora Scott's visit to Ohio in 1856, for instance, was characteristically plain, yet it presented Scott (who took her husband's surname and became known as Cora Hatch when she married) much as a showman would have promoted a public exhibition of human curiosities. For a public enamored with the so-called freak show, the text would have seemed familiar. The piece began with a mildly inflammatory headline-"Is the Soul Immortal?"-after which it launched into a short description of Scott's exceptional nature. She was still so young ("between fifteen and sixteen years of age"), and had obtained so little education, the advertisement argued, that her extraordinary abilities could only be explained as supernatural in origin: her powers simply "transcend[ ed] those ordinarily possessed by human beings." At the bottom of the advertisement, the "thinking part" of Cleveland's population was "invited to attend" Scott's display of trance speaking skill. Admission, the ad assured readers, was free.41

An examination of some of the promotional pieces agents of nineteenth-century novelty and curiosity acts used in marketing their exhibitions reveals that the Leader ad fits easily into a category of aggrandized advertising used by this sort of showman. The playbills, broadsides, and pamphlets that publicized eccentric or odd entertainments, like sword-swallowing, mind-reading, strongmen, and prodigies of every kind, tended to follow closely the pattern of introducing an inflammatory or overstated headline and then following it with a description of exceptional ability. Consider one of the playbills that promoted the extraordinary skills of "Blind" Tom Bethune, a musical ,prodigy and former slave from Georgia. The bombastic heading that dominated the top of the bill boldly summarized Bethune's astonishing talent using exaggerated prose: the blind musician was unequivocally "the eighth wonder of the world," an astounding "musical prodigy," and a "marvellous [sic] genius." The body of the playbill continued the pattern. There, Bethune's rise from slavery, physical disability, and obscurlty-conditions, the ad insinuates, realistically should have kept him from becoming the musical wonder he was-were outlined. The depiction of Bethune in the playbill followed very closely the supernaturalized representation of Scott in the Cleveland paper. "The son of ordinary Southern field hands, untutored and sightless from birth," he too excelled beyond those around him, but "unlike the great masters whose manipulations result from deep and unwearied study, his instructions come from a higher power." These supernatural abilities, the bill went on to state, enabled "him without a knowledge of either language to SING IN GERMAN, FRENCH, and ENGLISH, without understanding a single rudiment of written music to compose artistic gems, evincing a rare natural ability, and to perform the most difficult CLASSICAL COMPOSITIONS with all the correctness, purity of expression, skill and excellence of the most distinguished artists.“42

Other playbills and broadsides also stayed true to this style of advertising as well. A bill that promoted the British tour of Sarah Beffin, a woman born without arms or legs, closely mimicked Bethune's playbill and Scott's newspaper advertisement. Announcing her as "the greatest wonder in the world" and a favorite of the English royal family, the 1811 poster described how Beffin had overcome her physical disability to become a renowned painter and seamstress. According to the playbill, each spectator who visited Beffin at Bartholomew Fair, the famous agglomeration of sideshow entertainments in London, was entitled to a "specimen of her writing" and could have the woman paint a miniature likeness of them for a few guineas. One of P. T. Barnum's handbills publicizing his exhibition of Joice Heth also bears a striking resemblance to Scott's advertisement. Heth, Bamwn advertised, was the "greatest natural and national curiosity on the world," yet, ironically, her slave past did not disqualify her from attaining some semblance of celebrity. Rather, it actually worked for her.43

Such inflated tactics played to an audience interested in the exhibition of the uncanny, odd, and even freakish, and were much more at home in the secular press than in its spiritualist equivalent. Mediums and their managers, it seems, were not above promoting public spiritualist shows in more than one type of newspaper, though their tactics seemed to reflect the understanding that spiritualist and secular papers tended to appeal to very different audiences. Hence, the bombastic promotional pieces in the secular press where readers might respond more favorably to claims that imitated the sensational broadsides and handbills they saw on the street, and the rather simple advertisements and announcements in the spiritualist press where readers generally did not have to be convinced of the supposed supernatural singularity of most public mediums. There were drawbacks, though, to running such threadbare advertisements in spiritualist papers. Perhaps the most obvious weakness of these promotional pieces was that when editors placed them one after another in a column, they ran the risk of creating a bland, monotonous chain of undifferentiated notices that readers might simply gloss over in search of more lively type. In order to counteract this tendency and set their promotional claims apart visually and rhetorically, mediums sometimes included endorsements from satisfied "customers" in their newspaper advertisements. These endorsements, however, were rarely elaborate. An ad marketing the healing skill of self described medical medium and clairvoyant Mrs. Pecallis Clark was actually nothing more than a statement from Paschal Randolph promoting the "Tonic Bitters" she produced under spirit direction. "Recently I was very unwell, " Randolph wrote, "and suffered extremely from a cold and general debility of system, so that I feared a fit of sickness."

Luckily, Randolph continued, one of his friends presented him with Clark's remedy, which, he testified, "cured me in a very short time." Apparently, while the democratic impulse in American culture had gone a long way toward eroding traditional forms of cultural authority since the Revolution, the practice of getting leading intellectual and cultural figures to vouch for one's labor still seemed worth trying, at least for public mediums like Clark.44

Public endorsements like Randolph's were a powerful means of legitimizing the work of what was really a shapeless, transient population of migrant mediums, and mirrored the kinds of statements other itinerant performers lined up to support their efforts. It is no wonder, then, that such an important promotional tactic would also surface in other sections of the nation's spiritualist newspapers, not just on the "advertisements" page. Editors and correspondents, it turns out, also had a habit of trumpeting the skill of their favorite public mediums, just as they did their favorite actors.

By today's standards, this "editorializing" might seem odd, but in the nineteenth-century United States, with its partisan press and the blurring of the lines that separated advertising and news, their statements would not have been out of place. 45 Often, these endorsements were just what lesser-known public mediums needed in order to give their careers a shot in the arm. Mrs. R. M. Henderson, and her manager H. F. Gardner, for instance, must have been overjoyed when an article in the Banner of Light lauded her performance at Boston's Melodeon Hall. She spoke with an "eloquence rarely heard within the walls of that house, brilliant as it has been with great intellects," the article declared, "and we advise all-whatever may be their views upon the subject of Spiritualism-to hear her. The prompt manner in which every question is answered, and the purity and grace of her language is extraordinary." The positive review channeler W. R. Jocelyn enjoyed in the Banner was no less effusive. According to the review's rural author (identified only by the initials "M. C. W."), Jocelyn's "lectures are striking for their peculiar beauty and eloquence," while his "poetical effusions ... seem to lift one as it were, out of the earth's sphere to celestial scenes, as the heavenly inspiration flows from his lips." On the subject of whether or not other interested parties ought to seek the public medium out, the anonymous correspondent was blunt. "As our brother's time with us will soon expire, I would recommend him to your kind consideration, as an efficient and zealous laborer in the great cause, and whose gifted powers of mediumship should be more widely known," he wrote. "May his success be equal to his merits, and may the eyes of many be opened to investigate this beautiful, soul satisfying and elevating philosophy.“46

Public endorsements no doubt made a significant impact on the careers of lesser known mediums, though they certainly were not the only class of spiritualist performer to benefit from such statements. Editors and newspaper correspondents also offered a wealth of written support to star mediums like Cora Hatch. A number of articles in the Banner of Light heaped praise on Hatch for her performances. "There was no failure in any thing she attempted," read one, "no hesitation in answering any question upon any subject, and all answers were satisfactory to the persons submitting the questions." In her hands, another declared, sacred subjects were "finely and ably treated." The coup de grace in the collection of articles about Hatch, however, was a quotation from Cornelius Conway Felton-the future president of Harvard College and an avowed opponent of spiritualism. Apparently Felton had attended one of Hatch's trance-speaking seances in Cambridge and while he made it clear that he had "no confidence in the spiritual idea" and refused to believe "that Isaac Newton would come through a medium" (as the scientist's spirit supposedly did through Hatch), he admitted that the discourse the medium gave was "most truly a Christian one," and had set "forth in the most beautiful   and sublime manner the teachings of our holy religion." Moreover, he hastened to add,"if! were Isaac Newton I would communicate through that medium [meaning Hatch]." Felton's statement, with all its hedging skepticism, ought to be read as near a ringing endorsement as any enemy of spiritualism gave the movement.47

Another strategy performers had for contending with competition in the cultural marketplace and for getting themselves out before the public was to hire a professional or semi-professional manager or agent. An effective manager ideally could do much more than simply promote a medium's shows-he could also structure the medium's life on the road and address some of the common pressures that plagued channelers in the heat of the performance. The career of the professional entertainment manager, however, was not entirely analogous to the experiences of some of his better-educated colleagues (doctors, lawyers, etc.). Not only did he spend a lot of time on the road, unlike many in the other professions (lawyers on the court circuit being the obvious exception), but he also was committed by a contract or some other legal instrument to aid his client over a period of time. What is more, for the average medium's manager, professional status tended not to come from a college education; rather, his right to be included in the ranks of the nation's professional class was purely the result of homegrown creativity, longterm cultivation of skill, and everyday experience. 48

The rise of professional managers in the nineteenth-century radically changed the way business was done in the world of itinerant performance. As early as the 1830s, most American circuses had already chosen to hire a representative to travel in advance of the performing troupe and prepare the way for them. Nineteenth-century freak shows also relied heavily on the work of professional managers whose duties extended well beyond simple promotion: they also made business arrangements and collected admission fees. Yet, despite the useful labor of the nation's agents on behalf of their itinerant performer employers, the American public did not always greet them with esteem, and often described them in derisive terms. Some cultural commentators, like the anonymous author of Mahomet; or, The Unveiled Prophet of Inistan; A Hoquet for Jenny Lind, (1850) assailed the characters of even the nation's most influential showmen. The author of Mahomet, for instance, described P. T. Barnum as "an insolent, shameless, reckless, ambitious reprobate" who "merited [the] scorn and execration of an outraged Christian public." Well-known managers like Barnum, however, were not the only ones to come under public scrutiny. One can practically taste the scorn in Nathaniel Hawthorne's written depiction of an unnamed circus agent he met in the summer of 1838 near Williamstown, Massachusetts. The circus man, Hawthorne recorded, was "a large, portly-paunched ... brandy-burnt, heavy-faced man" who had "a diminutive nose in proportion to the size of his face" and "the air of a man not in subordinate station, though vulgar and coarse.49

Nineteenth-century managers spent much of their time planning the circuits their entertainers would travel. Some, like circus owner Benjamin Brown (who operated in the 1820s), simply followed the route of the circuit courts, confident that the swollen population of the towns they passed through following court day would yield large audiences. Rural areas filled with amusement-starved spectators also offered entertainers the promise of quick profits. One antebellum animal show traversed the states of Illinois,   Indiana, and Missouri in the 1820s, apparently unfazed by the scarcity of settled populations there. More established performers sometimes had the ability to travel internationally, while lesser troupes and entertainers often had only enough resources to stop in principal cities along the eastern seaboard of the United States. P. T. Barnum's initial foray into the showman's life-namely, his exhibition of Joice Heth-began in (and returned several times to) New York City, but also traveled into New England (with stops in Providence, Boston, Hingham, Lowell, Worcester, Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport), as well as New Jersey (stopping in Newark and Paterson), upstate New York, and other destinations in the Northeast. And thanks to careful research by Richard Flint, we also know some tantalizing details about the travels of at least two branches of the Zoological Institute, a voluntary association that in 1835 joined all the animal menagerie companies in the United States. According to Flint, one show affiliated with the Institute traveled more than 2,000 miles in a little over seven months with 36 wagons, 112 horses, 60 people, and 2 elephants. Their route took them from Baltimore through Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. A second unit of only 29 wagons traveled from Philadelphia to Indiana and back in about the same time, covering an average of 14 miles a day. Some early circuses even exploited the low costs of river travel on western waterways, using boats (instead of the traditional caravan of tents and wagons) to float from state to state. In the end, established circuits gave itinerant entertainers the flexibility to both follow a set route and, after judging the reception one community might give them relative to another, target those markets where their performances would gamer the most attention and highest ticket sales.50

Of those managers hired by nineteenth-century channelers, the one who worked for materialization medium C. H. Read was particularly adept at managing his client's affairs inside and outside the seance room. Though we do not even know his name, we do know he regularly ran interference during Read's seances, keeping potential rowdies and overly curious journalists in line. When a reporter from the Cleveland Leader applied to be on the committee to supervise one of the medium's seances, the manager turned the journalist down flat. A second story proves, however, that managers were not miracle workers. In a bid to boost Read's popularity and draw more spectators into his seances, the young man's manager apparently attempted to get the Middleport (Ohio) News to carry a "high-sounding," but arguably misleading, article in its pages. According to the Leader, the Middleport editors refused to publish the article because the medium's so-called news piece "was nothing more than an advertisement in disguise." The only way they would print it would be if Read or his manager "paid at the rate of fifteen cents per line." Undeterred by the uncooperative newspapermen, Read and his manager pressed forward with their promotional plan, and succeeded in convincing a number of Middleport's "leading citizens" to sponsor a benefit for the medium. When the day of the benefit performance arrived, everything seemed to be in order, though it turned out both channeler and manager mistook the spectators' enthusiasm for naivete. Right oft, the audience demanded that Read allow a committee of their own to tie him as a way of preventing deception. When they pressed, he "flared up and told the audience that if there were any among them who believed he was a humbug they could have their money back and leave the hal1." Read's manager stood helplessly by as "all demanded their money back... [and] left fully convinced that Read was a genuine humbug."51

As important as their work was to nineteenth-century public channelers, though, most mediums' managers were shadowy, near anonymous, figures who had very little to show for their efforts when they eventually retired. Few enjoyed what we might call financial success or social prestige. Indeed, in an ironic testament to their expert powers of promotion, most of the nation's managers ended up like Hugh Kerr, completely overshadowed by their medium employers. Kerr worked for Henry Gordon: Gordon was known especially for his levitation shows in which spirits reportedly lifted him and carried him through the air. These supposedly astounding performances apparently hit a positive nerve, as they propelled Gordon to almost instant stardom. Apollos Munn, who counted himself one of the medium's staunchest supporters, believed Gordon to be particularly gifted at converting non spiritualists to the cause through his "many beautiful and convincing tests." Munn (who was editor of the Spirit Messenger, a spiritualist periodical based in Springfield, Massachusetts) alleged that when Gordon passed through Springfield in 1850, a large number of the town's citizens became "convinced of the reality of spiritual presence and power, and hundreds are deeply interested to see, hear and read more of the facts and communications." Even as late as the 1 870s, influential spiritualists were still singing Gordon's praises. In her magisterial history of the nineteenth-century spiritualist movement published in 1870, Emma Hardinge Britten counted the medium among "the most highly gifted public test and physical mediums operating throughout the Eastern States.“52

By contrast, no one paid tribute to Hugh Kerr. What little we know about the man comes from hostile sources involved in his imprisonment in 1884. Thus, we can really only speculate about why Gordon hired Kerr.

Presumably it had something to do with the reversal of the medium's fortunes in the late 1870s and early 1880s, after he became ensnared in a series of controversies that threatened to ruin his career. Allegations offraud and insanity, leveled against him by false friends, severely damaged his reputation and threatened to drive him permanently from the public spotlight. It is likely that Gordon hired Kerr at this point specifically to help him rebuild his failing career. According to reports in the secular press, the manager became Gordon's right hand man, and served as his ticketing and booking agent at least while he performed in Philadelphia in the 1880s. Kerr apparently collected speaking fees, vetted spectators who came to see Gordon perform, and even performed in seances himself. (He evidently sang popular hymns between materializations) When Gordon was imprisoned in Philadelphia, Kerr ended up in Moyamensing prison languishing alongside his employer. 53

Kerr's experience brings into sharp relief some of the limits of nineteenth-century professionalization. The foundation of the nineteenth-century culture of professionalism was trust-both in the professional's moral authority and the integrity of his training.

"Laymen," as historian Burton Bledstein has put it, "were neither prepared to comprehend the mystery of the tasks which professionals performed, nor. .. were they equipped to pass judgment upon special skills and technical competence," meaning they seemed to have no choice but to rely on the talents and abilities of experts. Specialized training and indoctrination were the tickets to "the magic circle of . .. knowledge" which only professionals could enter, but which the nation as a whole was expected to respected audiences and civil authorities, however, did not always grant spiritualist managers like Kerr the respect they thought they deserved. This was due, at least in part, to the claims mediums made about the authenticity of their performances. By telling their audiences that they were channeling spirit voices or materializing spirits on stage, mediums fueled the doubt and distrust of observers and invited careful investigation of their performances. Some of the ire directed at managers no doubt was the result of guilt by association, their ties to their medium clients serving to undermine the public's trust in their profession. 54

 

Limits of Professional Mediumship

Behind the promotional practices of public mediums, then, always lay the issue of professionalization. Indeed, the adoption of promotional strategies served as a key marker of professional culture, as much as the routinization and discipline of one's mental labor and the creative designing of predictable systems of knowledge. In spiritualism, promotion and professionalization often became linked through managerial activities.

Putting up posters, distributing trade cards, and keeping one's name in the paper- could  be hard work, and tended to use up time better spent performing or perfecting one's skills. For public mediums who could afford it, hiring an agent or manager was a useful alternative to publicizing one's own show-and could even mean the difference between success and failure. The product of a growing middle-class aspiration to bring discipline and order to the world, the showman-manager had something of the professional in him.

Indeed, managers of popular entertainments were full participants in the development of a nineteenth-century culture of professionalism; like lawyers, doctors, and college professors, a performer's manager provided assistance to people wanting to navigate an increasingly modem, irrational world by helping them structure and discipline time and space. We may also, however, identify many mediums as professionals in their own right. (After all, channelers, to borrow a phrase from Bledstein, exhibited a certain "command over the profundities of a discipline," a quintessential mark of the professional.) Together medium and agent accepted the professional's charge of "penetrat[ing] beyond the rich confusion of ordinary experience" and "isolat[ing] and controll[ing] the factors, hidden to the untrained eye, which made an elaborate system workable or impracticable, successful or unattainable." Their influence and authority depended on their ability, first, to see through the fog of everyday life and grasp the overlapping essentials of their own needs and the spectator's desires, and then to translate those needs and desires into a successful experience for themselves and their audience.55

What about those mediums who operated alone, without the assistance of managers? 'How did they fare? Some no doubt closely followed patterns of behavior and labor set by professional managers, only choosing to "fly solo" because of the horror stories they heard about other mediums' exploitation at the hands of unprincipled managers. The story of teenage trance speaker Cora Hatch served' as a cautionary tale for those channelers who were tempted by the idea of employing someone to oversee their affairs. Hatch's relationship to her manager-husband Benjamin will be examined in the next part , but it should be mentioned here that by all accounts (except his own), Benjamin mercilessly exploited young Cora in order to further his own corrupt agenda, until she finally filed for divorce in 1858.56 (Of course, Cora was also exploiting her audiences in turn.) Other mediums, however, distanced themselves from the "managerial turn" in public mediumship for the sake of principle. The experience of Achsa Sprague, who made her own plans, mapped out her own itineraries, and responded personally to letters from people who asked her to perform in their towns, may prove instructive here.

Sprague exhibited a kindhearted willingness to travel to small, out-of-the-way locations, where the chances of finding fame and earning anything more than the usual paltry fees were low. Yet, despite the numerous stresses she had to bear, including a hectic speaking schedule, Sprague openly declared in a letter to an inquirer that she "wish[ ed] for no Associate in the business." Of course, it is doubtful she could have even afforded to employ a manager, had she actually wanted to hire one: her disdain for money always seemed to keep her in near poverty. By her own assessment, her performances could easily have commanded quadruple the amount she actually earned, yet she always claimed she was adamantly against profiting from what she considered to be her spiritual gift. "I wish to make no money... out of this affair," Sprague swore. "Money is not my object. "57

We can rightly challenge Sprague's claims of not wanting to profit from her mediumship, because she, in fact, did benefit financial and socially from it. Yet, in stark contrast to mediums who more easily embraced professional culture, Sprague seemed to subscribe to a more traditional-almost amateur-understanding of mediumship that was rooted in the ideals of simple itinerancyand spontaneity. Sprague showed that there were indeed alternatives to more polished systems of professional promotion and management.

Like other antebellum religious itinerants, she said she was firmly dedicated to the principle of self-sacrifice, and claimed that she eschewed any notion that she needed special training or skills to carry out her mission. All that was required of her, she believed, was a dedication to advancing the truth of spiritualism: the "spirits" would take care of everything else, including her physical well-being. 58 She did very little in the way of overtly publicizing her abilities (though she did allow the spiritualist press to publish her whereabouts), yet her uncanny abilities as a trance lecturer seemed to garner widespread attention. Each year, she received a pile of written invitations from people begging her to perform in their towns. 59 Benjamin Starbuck carried on a remarkably regular correspondence with Sprague, and wrote her frequently in the hopes of getting her to visit his town of Troy, New York, more often and to stay for longer periods of time. In one request, written in 1856, Starbuck attempted to coax Sprague to town: "We would like to have you with us [on] the 18th and to remain as long as it shall be profitable to do so. Not less than three or four weeks and longer if it shall be deemed best." He then went on to try and get her to visit nearby Glenns Falls as well, where there were "many spiritualists" who "want lectures." Requests like this were fairly normal for Sprague;

most invitations from spiritualist groups asked her to stay on for at least several weeks, if not months. They also encouraged her to consider the potential benefits of visiting the smaller villages that surrounded their own towns. An insistent letter from the man responsible for procuring mediums to perform in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, did just that. "I have been thinking for some time," his letter read, "about writing you in sufferance to coming [sic] to this place to speak to the people. We need some one here very much and also in some of the adjoining towns... and I have not the least doubt in my own mind but what you could spend a few weeks in this vicinity proffitably [ sic] not only to yourself but also to others." Then in what appears to have been an altruistic bid to aid Sprague once she agreed to make the trip, the man sent a second letter with a suggested itinerary. 60

Sprague's experiences call into question the idea of a complete, full-scale shift toward professionalization by the nineteenth century, a point reinforced by an examination of how professionalization played out in another important facet of American culture, namely religion. According to historian Donald Scott (an expert on the professionalization of religious culture), as early as the 1850s Protestant clerics (at least those from New England) had become infused with a professional consciousness.

The "clergy" writes Scott, "had become a profession, a coherent, self-conscious occupational body, organized and defined by a set of institutions ... which controlled the special learning needed to become a clergyman, and which possessed the power to determine who could enter the clerical ranks." On the front lines of clerical professionalization were the theological seminaries, which strove to inculcate young applicants to the ministry with a consciousness of their own unique identity as clergymen.

In contrast to the eighteenth-century pastor who held tightly to the concept of a settled life ofloca1 service, the new minister of the nineteenth century often "appeared to be an entrepreneur, privately negotiating the contractual terms of a successful career as he moved upward from congregation to congregation.61

Of course, other historians have already called this interpretation of the nation's religious culture into question. If antebellum American religion really was beginning to be pulled into the orbit of a burgeoning culture of professionalism, the transition was long and uneven at best Significant forces within the nation's religious movements strongly resisted the change. The rise, for instance, of the Methodist circuit rider who was generally untrained in theological matters (at least in a formal sense), stands as an unmistakable challenge to the idea of clerical professionalization. The ultimate religious amateurs, itinerant Methodists received small salaries, contended with an almost daily uncertainty about where they would eat or sleep at night, underwent nearly every physical and emotional hardship imaginable, and preached spontaneously whenever they were moved upon by the Holy Spirit. Their preaching, of the rough, vernacular sort, was exceedingly different from the more polished homilies of their seminary-trained counterparts in settled churches. Other itinerant preachers, particularly women, followed the circuit riders' lead, as did lay preachers from the Mormon, Universalist, Christian, and Baptist denominations. As Nathan Hatch has put it, these insurgent religious sects "dared to raise preachers from obscurity and send them forth only with a sense of divine calling and the sheer talent of being able to move people." Like Achsa Sprague (at least as she represented herself), these Christian populists believed professionalization ultimately deadened the spiritual senses and choked the flower of piety with the tares of the world. 62

For other mediums and spiritualists, the limits of professional culture were equally clear, and sparked furious debates over the proper place of professional mediums in the spiritualist movement. The call to "settle" the nation's mediums was an especially important front in the battle over the professionalization of mediumship-a veritable hot topic because of the potentially negative impact "settling" would supposedly have on small-town spiritualist groups and mediums alike. (The idea behind "settling" was to have a solid cadre of professional channelers divide themselves among the nation's cities and settle down permanently.) According to Moses Hull, a spiritualist from Wisconsin and a proponent of professionalization, "the interests of Spiritualism, and lecturers also, have been crippled by our present system of itinerating." Travel was too costly, draining mediums' pockets of whatever money they could eke out from life on the road. More importantly, the practice of itinerancy had stunted the movement and robbed mediums of an opportunity to develop spiritually. Public mediums, traveling at "enormous expense,"ended up occupying "the same rostrums" and giving "the same general drift of lectures" in each town they visited: The truth must be acknowledged though it pierces like a two edged sword. We have followed each other around and repeated the same thing, until sensible and logical minds with our profoundest thinkers have become disgusted with the monotony of Spiritual lectures. Nor is this all:Spiritualist lecturers themselves have not grown as they would have, under other circumstances. They have traveled in a treadmill method from place to place, sarng their say. Their story is endless, but it is an endless repetition.63

Would William Ellery Channing or Henry Ward Beecher have become the great men they had become if they had gone around "repeating and re-repeating the same lectures?" asked Hull. 64

In Hull's mind, the trick to making spiritualist mediumship more effective was for mediums to become more like professional clergymen: they should stop traveling, permanently locate or "settle" where they would be of greatest use to a benighted public, and hang out a shingle. The extra time mediums saved by letting go of their itinerant ways would allow their creative juices to flow more readily and give them more time to prepare for seances. "If there is anything I love," wrote Hull, "it is being compelled to prepare two new discourses each week for Sunday delivery. The mental effort richly repays myself [sic], and satisfies the longing and deep-soul wants of the people." As for the issue of spontaneity in the seance, Hull quickly put it to rest by urging mediums to "take [their] notes with [them] into the pulpit. II Such a habit, the spiritualist critic argued, "virtually says I have got something which, in my own estimation, at least, is worth delivering, and assures me that he [the medium] knows what he is going to say, and why he says it.“65

Hull's salvo in the debate over professionalization was answered in the Banner of Light the next month. The author of the Banner article, one A. C. Robinson, appears to have been an out-of-work medium whose ire for critics like Hull had no bounds. Hull, he fumed, "evidently seems to be laboring under some mistake in the conclusions which he has arrived at concerning our lecturers, and it is to be hoped that the Spiritualists will never adopt any such system as he suggests." The minute a medium is "located," his "independence is gone, and he would soon become the pliant tool of the Society which had hired his services. Moreover, it might be convenient to write one's lecture out before "going into the pulpit" to deliver it, but "that is not what the Spiritualists of America want. They want inspiration, soul-inspiring discourses, that will give life and impart vitality to the soul.“66

On the issue of spontaneity, Robinson retorted that if "Bro. Hull" were "commissioned by the angel-world to preach the glad tidings of this glorious gospel," he would not "want any notes, for it will be given you in that hour what you shall say; and if they can't say anything interesting and instructive through you, why then had they better wait until they can and not compel you." Furthermore, if readers believed what Hull had written about Channing and Beecher, Robinson had news for them. "I heard Beecher deliver a lecture in Flushing, L[ong] I[sland] in 1857," he recalled, "upon 'Common  Wealth,' and three years afterward I heard the same lecture in Fall River, Mass[achusetts]." If Beecher, a virtual pa,ragon of rhetorical skill, could repeat his lectures, how could mediums be barred from doing the same? For Robinson, itinerancy and spontaneity were the irreducible minimums .of public mediumship; repetition of lectures turned out to be a non-issue.67

The same issues that surfaced in the exchange between Hull and Robinson in the Banner of Light also emerged in other ways in the spiritualist press. Consider, for example, the pleas for mediums' services that circulated in the movement press. At first glance, such requests appear to be a form of "reverse advertising" in which spectators attempted to draw traveling channelers to regions they rarely visited, particularly the trans-Appalachian West. A closer read, however, suggests that what really was being discussed was the professionalization of mediumship. Several articles from the eponymous Banner of Light give us the chance to test this thesis. In one, we find a correspondent from Dubuque, Iowa, virtually begging his spiritualist brothers and sisters in the eastern states to let some mediums travel west, where local channelers often were scarce. "Our greatest want here," the correspondent wrote, "is that of test mediums, through whom strong and convincing tests may be had ... We are in great need of help of the right kinds; and while I am speaking for this place, I think I am expressing. the wants of this whole northwestern region." His purpose in writing was to induce those "stars of progress" to "turn missionaries for a few months, and visit these far-off comers of our common country." The easterners, he charged, were "literally surfeiting" in their "spiritual feasts" while "hundreds of thousands" out west were "destitute of those glorios privileges" and starving spiritually. "Ask yourselves," he begged the eastern spiritualist community, "if something cannot be done to assist mediums in reaching portions of our country where a reform lecture or spiritual test has never been given.“68

A second article, this one a public invitation from a Michigan man, promising the illustrious Davenport Brothers that they would "be well paid for their trouble" if they agreed to visit his town, mirrors the Iowa correspondent's frustration. Or read the desperation in the language of a corespondent who pledged one-month's free use of the local spiritualist lecture hall to any traveling medium who volunteered to make the trip to his hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts. According to the writer, there were "hundreds" in Fall River "who, if opportunity offered, would be glad to test the truth of Spiritualism." The only trouble was that public mediums rarely passed through town. "The only public test medium we have had over here," he lamented, "was Mrs. [Ada] Coan, and she stayed but one evening.“69

What these letter writers were lamenting was a rising inequality of public access to mediums being driven by the growing power of a professional system of star channelers. In their letters, we can already see the formation of tiny cracks that would ultimately grow into the monstrous fractures that would help put an end to the practice of public mediumship. The writers may have seen those cracks too, though they seemed to have remained optimistic, collectively offering a new vision of the common good that

called upon spiritualists and mediums to find a way where all could benefit from star mediums' unique gifts. Acknowledging that success among mediums could, in fact, be a two-edged sword, the columnists offered everything they could to attract the attention of the nation's best mediums-money, free rent, sincere thanks-but in the end, what they were hoping for really was change in the system, a return to what they believed was mediumship's amateur roots a IS. Achsa Sprague.

It is unlikely their dream could or would ever have become a reality. The fact is, there really was never a time when mediumship was not affected by commercialization. Mediums like Achsa Sprague may have operated as though they stood outside the world of commercialized and professionalized mediumship. But the fact is, they too were implicated in it. Still, they argued that professionalization had an acidic effect on the institution of public mediumship, slowly corroding its authority and cultural power.

Some spiritualists seriously questioned whether or not the promotional strategies that many public mediums employed would damage the spiritualist movement by desensitizing channelers to the holy work they supposedly had been called to do. These critics might be willing at times to see the need for some promotional activity on the part of public mediums, but they believed there were limits to what was appropriate. "The moral fields are white," one correspondent to the Banner of Light asserted, "and hundreds   of harvesters are needed." But, he told his readers, humility counted for something.

Even if a medium made the "professional turn" and chose to hire a manager or learn the ropes of advertising in the spiritualist press, he or she would do well to remember "another beatitude," that Jesus presumably left out of his Sermon on the Mount: "blessed are the modest, for they will be promoted!" There is no explicit repudiation of mediumistic promotion here-in fact, the author seems to acknowledge the need for it openly-but the aphorism's calculus leaves no room for immodest self-marketing.

Indeed, it appears that the correspondent has something quite different in mind here; it is almost as ifhe envisions the supposed denizens of the spirit world (rather than the mediums themselves) as the true marketers of mediumistic talent or the true "professionals." In his "beatitude," channelers do not promote themselves. Rather, they "are promoted." And who better to do the promoting, he seems to be saying, than the spirits. 70

All of this raises an important question: how did the controversy about mediums' promotional strategies compare with similar debates that revolved around other professions (such as lawyers, doctors, and professors) and other institutions (like churches)? The words of the "other beatitude" suggest that for many spiritualist commentators the accepted limits of mediumistic promotion were rather liberal: as long as they remained modest and honest, mediuins were free to exploit any strategy they found useful. Like other nineteenth-century producers of both culture and goods,  mediums and their observers seem to have adopted a "moral economy" of sorts, in which behavior was only limited by a popular consensus about what was legitimate (and what remained illegitimate) in the realm of marketing. What was at issue, then, was not mediums' use of marketing practices per se, but whether or not they used promotional, strategies to defraud or mislead. By making this distinction, mediums accepted a notion that other professions and institutions had already internalized: that marketing, as an idea and as a practice, was allowable, but was limited to the realm of ethical practice. The irony here is that public mediumship was built on trickery and fraud. 71

Were audiences won over by the way mediums and their managers marketed their shows? Were the performances behind the promotion convincing? As we next  will show, trance speaking and spirit materialization persuaded numerous spectators and led many to believe that these kinds of performances provided answers to a range of religious questions.  
 

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Bibliography and Works Cited

 

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