Radio Script #820

Little Talks on Common Things
November 16, 1969

Two years ago I talked on this program about a distinguished Waterville woman, Mrs. Sarah Crosby, who became nationally known as one of the few female court stenographers in the United States. Mrs. Crosby was a devoted follower of Susan B. Anthony and was the Maine leader in the campaign for women’s rights.

For some reason Mrs. Crosby took strong dislike toward the Christian Science leader, Mary Baker Eddy. Mrs. Crosby kept a scrap book of clippings, which it has been my privilege recently to examine. In that scrap book Mrs. Crosby pasted many newspaper clippings concerning Mrs. Eddy. The most lengthy of these accounts tells of the investigations of a reporter of the New York World in 1900. The story is of special interest to us in Maine because it reveals the part played by a Maine man in Mrs. Eddy’s early career. That man was a faith healer who practiced in Portland Phineas P. Quimby.

It seems that in 1899 the New York World reporter had run across an article in the British monthly magazine Blackwoods, which stated that the real founder of Christian Science had been Phineas Quimby of Portland, Maine. The magazine said: “Mrs. Eddy played Shakespeare to Quimby’s Boccacio. She took his ideas and made a masterpiece of it.” The article continued: “In 1887 Julius A. Dresser published a pamphlet entitled ‘The True History of Mental Science’, a treatise devoted to describing the work and career of a mental healer named Phineas Quimby. Mr. Dresser had been a pupil of Quimby’s. and his wife, Annette Dresser, had been one of Quimby’s regular patients at the same time that Mrs. Eddy was also a patient.”

As for Mrs. Eddy’s own association with Quimby, the Blackwoods article said: “Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Patterson, went to Portland from Hill, New Hampshire, in 1862, expressly to seek treatment from Quimby. She had been a confirmed invalid for six years and having heard of Quimby’s remarkable power, she believed he could cure her.”

The New York World reporter had also found an article published in the Portland Evening Courier in 1862. It was one of the earliest publications from the pen of Mary Baker Eddy. In it she paid special tribute to Phineas Quimby. She wrote: “Three weeks ago I quitted my nurse and sickroom and came to Portland. The hope of my recovery had died out in the hearts of those who were most anxious for it. Under such depression I visited Dr. Quimby, and in less than one week I was able to ascend a stairway of 182 steps to the dome of the Portland City Hall. This demonstrates his power to heal.”

So, according to the New York World, Blackwood’s magazine, and the Dresser pamphlet of 1887, Mrs. Eddy got her basic idea of Christian Science from Quimby.

Said the World, in one of its long articles on this subject: “Mrs. Eddy did not understand that disease is a state of mind and that truth is its cure until her experience with Quimby. It is now easy to see just where and when she discovered Christian Science.”

In a later article Mrs. Eddy became even more enthusiastic in praise of her Portland healer. She wrote: “P.P. Quimby stands upon the plane of wisdom with his truth. Christ healed the sick, but did not use juggling or drugs. Mr. Quimby speaks and heals as no man since Christ has ever done. P.P. Quimby rolls away the stone from the sepulchre of error, and health is the resurrection.”

The indefatigable reporter of the New York World was certainly out to discredit Mrs. Eddy, and we should bear in mind that Mrs. Eddy was still living when the World articles were published and when Sarah Crosby of Waterville pasted them into her scrap book. The World’s investigation had run down a man named James Henry Wiggin, who had been literary adviser to Mrs. Eddy in the preparation of various editions of her famous book, “Science and Health”. There had evidently occurred a break between Mrs. Eddy and Wiggin that caused the latter to make statements reflecting on both Mrs. Eddy’s literary ability and her common sense.

The New York World quoted Wiggin as saying: “In August, 1885 I received a call from a man who announced himself as Calvin Frye. At that time I had done considerable work as literary adviser and critic. Frye told me he was secretary to a woman who had a book manuscript which needed to be revised for publication. Assuming what was needed was putting an already passable manuscript into shape for printing, I told Frye I would talk with the woman.

“A few days later the woman whom Frye represented called on me and said she was Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. I agreed to undertake the work. Just as I was leaving for a trip to the mountains, she left with me a large package. Several days later I opened it and was dumbfounded by what I saw. The misspelling, the bad capitalization and punctuation were dreadful, but what staggered me more was the content. There were passages that flatly contradicted preceding passages, and the manuscript was filled with incorrect historical references.”

Mr. Wiggin went on to say that instead of objecting to his insistence that he would have to deal with the book’s contents as well as its grammar, Mrs. Eddy readily consented, and Wiggin went to work. He told the World reporter: “I was determined to keep Mrs. Eddy from making herself ridiculous. She must be saved from constantly contradicting herself. It has been said that Mrs. Eddy knew something of ancient languages and their literature. I assure you that she knew nothing whatever of ancient languages. She could not translate a line of Latin or Greek, or give a synopsis of the teaching of any ancient philosopher.”

Wiggin claimed that he saved Mrs. Eddy from law suit and conviction for libel. This is the story he told to the New York World: “There was a chapter in which Mrs. Eddy attacked several physicians because her husband had died under their treatment. She accused them of causing her husband’s death by arsenic poisoning. In the autopsy performed after Asa Eddy’s death, there was no evidence of arsenic. I knew, of course, that publication of the charges would get her into serious trouble, but it took me several weeks of repeated interviews to convince Mrs. Eddy that the chapter must be omitted.”

Wiggin claimed that he even wrote sermons for Mrs. Eddy. “Mrs. Eddy”, said Wiggin, “when she delivered those sermons, did pretty well for a person who was striving to elaborate on someone else’s plans and pulpit injunctions. She impressed her hearers with her eloquence.”

I have no doubt those attempts to derogate Mrs. Eddy nearly 70 years ago caused a lot of stir at the time they were published, and I have no intent of claiming that they were either true or false. I am not a Christian Scientist, but I respect those who are, and I have the highest regard for such distinguished Christian Science leaders as our own Maine native, Erwin Lanham, editor of the Monitor. The proof of any pudding is in the eating. Seventy years after those front page stories in the New York World, Henry Wiggin and Phineas Quimby have long been forgotten, but everybody knows that a woman named Mary Baker Eddy fostered and developed a faith called Christian Science that has among its believers some of the most respected persons in many a community.

Judging from her scrap book, opposition to Christian Science and support of Woman’s Suffrage were not the only issues that interested Waterville’s famous court reporter, Sarah Crosby. In 1869 the minister at the Christian Church in Albion was the Rev. David Knowlton. A fellow clergyman, Rev. B.P. Reed of Newport, charges Knowlton with being a Universalist, and thus per se an infidel. The controversy hit the press and the Albion church became badly divided. On April 5, 1869 Mrs. Crosby got into the fray with a letter to the Waterville Mail. She came stoutly to the defense of the accused Knowlton. She wrote: “All of Mr. Knowlton’s friends know that his trials have originated in such little minds as that of Reverend Reed. If Mr. Knowlton discarded the doctrine of endless punishment, it is all the more to his credit. When Mr. Reed states that Mr. Knowlton once had to be placed in an asylum and is crazy because he now accepts Universalist belief, that is going too far. That is outrageous slander. Let those who know both Mr. Reed and Mr. Knowlton judge for themselves which one is the true Christian.”

As always when I examine these old scrap books, I am often as much interested in the book in which the clippings are pasted as in the clippings themselves. In the last half of the 19th and in the opening years of the 20th centuries, few persons bought a regular, album-type, blank book to make a scrap book. They took some old printed book and pasted clippings on its pages.

The book in which Sarah Crosby pasted her clippings about Mrs. Eddy, Susan Anthony, Rev. Knowlton, and a lot of other persons, was a publication of the U.S. Federal Government, entitled “Messages and Documents, 1866-67”. It was actually an abridgment of the reports and supporting documents of the members of the cabinet of President Andrew Johnson.

The Civil War had been ended less than two years when this book was published. Mrs. Crosby’s clippings fill the first half of the book, but leave unblemished the section that carries the report of the Secretary of War. That report casts light on the big job of getting the boys home when the war was over. The Secretary said: “The entire number to be mustered out totaled on May 1, 1865, 1,034,064. By November 15, 800,963 troops had been transported, mustered out and paid. On June 30, 1866 the number had reached 1,010,670. By November 1 there were left in service only 11,043 volunteers, white and colored. Commenced in May, 1865, the work of discharging and returning to their homes 1,034,064 volunteers would have been completed within three months, except for the necessity of retaining in service part of that force. Past experience shows that, should any future national emergency require a larger force than is provided by the regular army in peace time, armies can be swiftly organized to at least the full strength of a million men.”

Because the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency set up to help the emancipated Negroes, was headed by a Maine man, General O.O. Howard, I was interested to see what the 1867 report of the Secretary of War said about that agency. It said: “It is now estimated that 150,000 freedmen and their children are now attending school in the southern states. Transportation has been furnished for 6,352 destitute freed people. Between June 1 and September 1, 1865 there were issued 13,412,273 rations. Officers were directed to hold each plantation, county, parish and town responsible for its own poor.”

In his report to the Secretary of War Gen. Howard pointed out a serious problem. He wrote: “Until a system of free labor shall be understood and accepted in the South, and be protected by laws impartially enforced, some agency like this bureau is essential to every enterprise in the states of the late Confederacy that must depend upon free labor. But the evils attendant on such an agency are apparent whenever an agent is corrupt or incompetent. It is our determined intent to weed out of the service all such agents.”

So, as we conclude this broadcast, we note that the book in which Mrs. Sarah Crosby pasted her clippings contained one of the earliest reports of the Freedmen’s Bureau — the very agency that made it possible for the former slave Sam Osborne to come to Waterville, and subsequent years revealed that, with all the dishonesty and chicanery of Reconstruction, there was at the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau the incorruptable General Howard of Maine.

Year: 1969