Other Powers
Keen, Suzanne
Victoria's secret Suzanne Keen ~ eaders interested in absorbing a portrait of an age through the agreeable medium of a group biography will relish this book. The fascinating as well as...
...The vulnerability of an open society to cranks, faddists, and cults (of course Roman Catholics have been included on this list) would therefore seem to make it imperative that those entering the political mainstream avoid strange beliefs and aberrant behavior...
...The implicit question of precedence posed by the Woodhull/Douglass ticket animates one of the many stories told so compellingly here, the post-Civil War struggle to extend the franchise...
...But while Goldsmith's description of a discredited way of thinking contributes a novelistic evocation of a vanished and alien time, her account of the scandal that ruined Woodhull seems completely recognizable as a modem tale of libel suits, character assassination, loss of fortune, and mudslinging, all hinging on the challenge to the status quo posed by "free love...
...and Indy 500 champion Mario Andretti, among others...
...Ultimately, the sex scandal brought down Woodhull, as society IT'S A BIG CHURCH Michael 6 . Garvey ~ hen Thomas Merton remarked that it takes all kinds to make a world religion, he may have had in mind exactly the sort of full-throated and polyphonous chorus of voices which issues from these two books...
...This part of Goldsmith's story is vividly realized: I wanted to shake the feeble Lib Tilton and smack both her husband and her lover...
...Why wouldn't believers and the bereaved be able to tap into the unbroken chain of communication between themselves and the Infinite...
...Americans were still coming to terms with the hundreds of thousands of husbands and sons lost in the war as well as confronting new forces beyond their comprehension, such as long-distance communication by Morse code...
...Though church and state may have been separate (more or less) from the start in the United States, occult practices and references have been present enough in politics to allow conspiracy theories about Freemasons, for instance, to bubble up repeatedly...
...Goldsmith shows that, to the contrary, spiritualism and the fight for women's suffrage were intimately connected and even advertised...
...Maria Shriver...
...Admitting that the Americanist controversy is slightly more complicated than that, if Catholicism truly did require as priggish a witness as most of these ascendant Americans are inclined to recommend, I doubt that Jesus would enlist, let alone Karol Wojtyla...
...The reference is to one of Percy's best and most durable essays, a characteristically wry and fierce apologia which is the only posthumous piece in the Ryans' collection...
...Why invite charges of irrationality and unfitness for the franchise...
...The ex-slave and influential activist Frederick Douglass, whose name has retained its evocative power a century later, filled out Woodhull's slate as her vice-presidential candidate...
...If spiritualism was part of the mainstream of the women's-rights movement, then it cannot (in itself) be the source of the scandal that made Victoria Woodhull notorious...
...If I could give my children my body to eat, again and again without losing it, my body like the loaves and fishes going endlessly into mouths and stomachs, I would do it...
...Woodhull's beef with Beecher lay in his hypocritical refusal to endorse free love from the pulpit, though he practiced it behind the scenes...
...entranced female parishioners surrounded him, and power-broking men cut lucrative real-estate deals that hinged on Beecher's support...
...Maryland's lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend...
...For Percy, the survivor's plight in the "age of the theorist consumer" at the close of "the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history" is to be a pilgrim in search of signs...
...Confined by injury to a wheelchair, the writer packs school lunches for his daughters, knowing that "the sandwiches are sacraments...
...I give you in all seriousness, and with no 'smartmouthedness' Dr...
...Bernard Nathanson's conversion from prominent abortionist to prominent defender of the unborn is one of the few heartening stories in one of the ugliest periods of American history, will be interested in his account of his conversion to Catholicism two years ago...
...Unlike the mortifying revelation that Nancy Reagan consulted astrologers, Victoria Woodhull's clairvoyance and skills as a magnetic healer were prominent items on her r6sumG part of her appeal as a public speaker, newspaper proprietor, investment counselor, and advocate of women's rights...
...The fascinating as well as "scandalous" Victoria Claflin Woodhull is the link among a cast of nineteenth-century Americans that includes the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Horace Greeley, and Commodore Vanderbilt...
...It also tends to justify Pope John Paul II's restraint in celebrating the vaunted "vibrancy" of the Catholic church in this country...
...The sort of reader who responds cynically to such claims may derive a certain furtive amusement from the pedestrian remarks of NBC reporter closed ranks around its adored preacher...
...Walker Percy's only half-facetious answer: What else is there...
...For women--sheltered, repressed, powerless--the line between divine inspiration, the courage of one's convictions, and spirit guidance became blurred...
...If there is one failing in this superb book, it lies in the lack of insight into how such a creep as Beecher could seduce practically everyone but Victoria Woodhull...
...Spiritualism, by enabling Woodhull to call on advisers such as Demosthenes, Napoleon, and Josephine, empowered women to speak and to defy the proscriptions that otherwise governed their behavior: Spiritualism and woman's rights Commonweal 3 4 September 11, 1998 drew from the same well: Both were responses to the control, subjugation, and repression of women by church and state...
...Kunkel and the Ryans have provided reassurance that the song of the great church is still able to subsume and even exalt the worst whining, howling, croaking, and caterwauling...
...And God knows there is plenty of all that on offer here...
...And why did women end up waiting well into the twentieth century for the franchise they demanded at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848...
...There are only two signs of significance in this postmodern desert, oneself and the Jews, and '%y 'the Jews,' I mean not only Israel, the Commonweal 3 6 September 11, 1998...
...Though Woodhull collected quite a batch of antagonists in her life, Beecher was the most powerful...
...Readers who believe, as I do, that Dr...
...And each motion is a sacrament, this holding of plastic bags, of knives, of bread, of cutting board, this pushing of the chair, this spreading of mustard on bread...even if I do not feel or acknowledge it, this is a sacrament...it simply means that I know what I am doing in the presence of God...
...Suzanne Keen, a longtime Commonweal contributor, teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia...
...Both believed in universal suffrage-the equality of all human beings...
...The Ryans have selected "twenty-five storytellers from among the famous, the near-famous, and the soon-to-be famous" to demonstrate the validity of their conviction "that one can be a success, can do good work in the world and still be a vital Catholic...
...Knowing relatively little about it, I would have assumed that women seeking access to power would have kept the mesmerism, the mediums, the table-rappings, and the otherworldly visitors to the late Victorian parlor behind the drawing-room curtain...
...Why did it have to be one group or the other...
...But the very gates of hell can't prevail against our church, and the pomposity which pervades the Ryans' collection is relieved by several pieces which, to borrow a phrase from one of them, the late Walker Percy, "deliver religion from the merely edifying...
...It is a life blemished by sin, burdened by physical pain and handicap, and broken open by grace...
...Who would get the vote first, women or black men...
...Not the miracle of transubstantiation, but certainly parallel with it, moving in the same direction...
...In presenting expressions of Catholic faith solely from "accomplished Americans," this anthology provides an opportunity to marvel anew at the prophetic wisdom of Pope Leo XIII's denunciation of the "phantom heresy," Americanism...
...When I picked up Other Powers, I had never heard of Woodhull, who was born in 1838 to poverty, obscurity, and abuse, but managed to collect a fistful of firsts before retiring from the public eye: She was the first woman to address the United States Congress, the first woman broker on Wall Street, and the first woman to run for president (against Ulysses S. Grant...
...Woodhull herself evokes a more complex response: She is audacious, impolitic, noisy, selfdeceiving, and seemingly bent on selfdestruction...
...She can be exasperating, admirable, and pitiable all at once: The reader knows that she was once a prostitute and waits for the revelation of this fact to seal her fate...
...Woodhull, an avowed free-lover, precipitated her own downfall by publishing articles revealing the adulterous liaison of Henry Ward Beecher, one of America's most prominent ministers, with his parishioner Lib Triton, who was herself a wronged wife...
...His charismatCommonweal 3 5 September 11, 1998 ic orations made his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn hugely popular and prosperous...
...Not all woman's-rights advocates became spiritualists, but spiritualism embraced woman's rights...
...Goldsmith persuasively argues that spiritualism seemed significantly less wacky in the post-Civil War years...
...Doubtless Victoria's part in her con-artist father's deceptions and frauds made her talents seem more opportunistic than inspired...
...Now safely enwombed in that love, Nathanson is able to write: "Why am I a Catholic...
...The story he tells of his first flirtations with the church, lurking as a fascinated nonparticipant in Manhattan parish Masses, includes this agreeable observation: '~nd there was that moment in the Mass when each turned to his neighbor-most likely a stranger--and shook the proffered hand, murmuring 'Peace be with you' or responded 'and with you.' It was a moment of human contact, of touching, of warm flesh upon flesh--as welcome to me as the heat and security and utter safety of a mother's enveloping love...
...Boston Celtic color commentator Bob Cousy...
...That this story of rival factions struggling for the vote would be complicated by the widespread belief in spiritualism provides one of the fascinating surprises of Other Powers...
...Goldsmith depicts Beecher as manipulative, selfregarding, and thoroughly repulsive, though she duly records his immense popularity...
...In his numinous essay, "Sacraments," for instance, Andr6 Dubus provides a detailed account of an interior life made excruciatingly comprehensible by the Eucharist...
...More important, Goldsmith explains how influential advocates of women's rights, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, could combine beliefs in suffrage and spiritualism...
...former treasury secretary William Simon...
Vol. 125 • September 1998 • No. 15
