Spiritualism

Spiritualism, a quasi‐mystical movement that began in Hydesville, New York, on 31 March 1848 when mysterious rapping sounds in the farmhouse of John D. Fox were said by the family to emanate from a spirit communicating with Fox's daughters, Margaret (age thirteen) and Kate (age twelve). The girls were soon taken by their older sister, Leah Fox Fish, to Rochester, which became the center of the new movement. The three Fox sisters, the first “mediums,” introduced the major features of subsequent Spiritualism: the séance; the trance of the medium (borrowed from still‐novel demonstrations of hypnotism); and the asking of questions through the medium to spirits, who supposedly answered by rapping or by other phenomena such as jiggling the table at which the medium and her clients sat. (Mediums were usually, though not always, women.)

Spiritualism spread quickly through the United States in the 1850s, and into Europe as well. The novelist William D. Howells reported, with doubtless some exaggeration, that in the Ohio of his boyhood every household had its medium and its tipping table. Séances, as Howells's comment indicates, were conducted by amateur as well as professional mediums, and many occasional practitioners regarded Spiritualism simply as a parlor pastime. The proportions of genuine belief, casual entertainment, and outright fraud in the movement are impossible to assess. Spiritualism waned in the late 1850s, but regained popularity after the Civil War as bereaved families attempted to communicate with the spirits of lost soldiers.

In 1888 Margaret Fox recanted, explaining how she and her sisters produced the original rapping noises by cracking their toe joints. This date may be considered the effective end of the movement, though mediums continued to practice their craft in the twentieth century.

Spiritualism in its prime had many of the qualities of a religion, since to believers it offered proof of an afterlife. It was thus to some degree in competition with the older Protestant orthodoxies and profited from their decline. The growth of Spiritualism paralleled for a time that of Mormonism and Christian Science, although these others movements had a strength of leadership and coherency of belief that the Rochester movement never attained. The prolific Spiritualist writer Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), among others, did attempt to compose a Spiritualist theology, and the movement established some links with reforms such as feminism and utopian socialism. The sex reformer and woman‐suffrage advocate Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927) and Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877) of the New Harmony community in Indiana were proponents of Spiritualism, as was, for a time, the Populist writer Hamlin Garland.
See also Antebellum Era; Gilded Age; Protestantism; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Howard Kerr , Mediums, and Spirit‐Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900, 1973.
Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow, eds., The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, 1983.

Charles L. Crow