Chicago has long beckoned as a mecca for men and women on the make and on the lam. In the decades following the Civil War, the city played host to an array of transient charlatans and hucksters as well as to the ascendant captains of industry and transportation. Even then, Chicago was proud of its rambunctious characters, even–or especially–when they flouted propriety and the law.
Victoria Woodhull was one such character. A spiritualist, healer, suffragist, free-lover, businesswoman and presidential candidate, Woodhull lived in Chicago for several years in the 1850s and ’60s. In 1864 she set up an establishment for “magnetic healing,” a technique using magnets to redirect the body’s energy flow, at 265 Wabash Ave.; within six years, after moving to New York, she had become a prominent figure in the National Woman Suffrage Association, a commanding public speaker and a lightning rod for scandal. But the real scandal about Woodhull’s life may be that, some 70 years after her death, few of us know a thing about her.
Social historian and author Barbara Goldsmith has set out to change all that in her latest book, “Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull” (Knopf). What Goldsmith began 10 years ago as a biography of Woodhull soon turned into a portrait of an era.
“I wanted the reader to feel as if he’d been put into a time machine and projected back into the period,” Goldsmith says. Assembling and choreographing a huge cast of characters, Goldsmith takes us from Homer, Ohio, to San Francisco to Chicago to New York; the book spans the years between 1837 (when Woodhull’s parents, in a burst of sexual and religious fervor, conceived her on the floor of a revivalist’s tent) and 1927, the year of Lindbergh’s flight and Woodhull’s death. Goldsmith’s book is populated with such luminaries as women’s rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as well as abolitionists and black-suffrage crusaders Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips. Shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt and financier Jim Fisk also make guest appearances. Woodhull knew, inspired and vexed them all.
Goldsmith describes Woodhull’s life as “emblematic of a rapacious, vivid age.” Woodhull’s family, the chaotic, sprawling Claflin clan, made its way from town to Midwestern town. Always looking for a new scam, patriarch Buck Claflin was thrilled to discover that two of his daughters, Victoria and Tennessee, manifested spiritual gifts (the “other powers” of Goldsmith’s title); he promptly put them on display, advertising their powers and probably pimping for them as well. To escape this life, the 15-year-old Victoria eloped with the first of her three husbands, Canning Woodhull. She would keep Woodhull’s name far longer than she kept him, divorcing the alcoholic morphine addict after 10 years of marriage.
However much her father and, later, she herself may have exploited her gifts, Woodhull was a true believer in, and apparently a successful channel for, the spirit world and its messages. And in her research Goldsmith, while not consulting the spirits, did consult a psychic and author, Mary T. Browne. “These people believe they have these powers,” Goldsmith says, maintaining the historian’s benign distance. “Whether I believe it doesn’t matter; they believe it. It is empowering for them.”
Nineteenth Century spiritualism was especially empowering for women: To become a medium for Benjamin Franklin, Plato or, in Woodhull’s case, Demosthenes was to gain, even if only when entranced, the right to speak analytically, forcefully and publicly. As Goldsmith makes clear, 19th Century women’s desire for powerful public speech manifested itself equally, if differently, in the spiritualist movement and the women’s suffrage movement. Sometimes these two movements came together, as when Woodhull presented her “Woodhull Memorial” manifesto on behalf of women’s suffrage to Congress in 1871. She spoke with such articulate passion and logical precision that not a man in the chambers could summon a rebuttal. It was the first time any woman had spoken in Congress.
It may seem odd that the usually sober Elizabeth Cady Stanton should have regarded the extravagant Woodhull–reviled in the press, more or less accurately, as a one-time prostitute–as a sister in the struggle. It may also seem peculiar that Cornelius Vanderbilt should have relied on Woodhull’s spirits for financial advice. (The spirits–possibly assisted by Woodhull’s very much living and well-informed friends in New York’s demimonde–made Vanderbilt a mint when they tipped him off to the imminent collapse of the gold market in 1869; the grateful Vanderbilt then helped Woodhull and sister Tennessee set up the brokerage firm of Woodhull, Claflin and Co.) But as Goldsmith makes clear, such connections are not historical curiosities; they are the very stuff of historical process.
Goldsmith devoted 10 years of her life to weaving into “Other Powers” what she calls “an enormous tapestry.” She is an obsessive researcher, tracking down, among other details, the recipe for the bogus, and in some cases deadly, cancer remedy (scent, sheep’s fat and lye) that Tennessee Claflin offered her patients. With a computer, Goldsmith devised a 400-page chronology that allowed her to trace the to-ings and fro-ings of her various characters over a 90-year period. A composed yet animated woman, Goldsmith becomes especially passionate when she discusses her vocation.
“I have a few pet hates as a historian,” Goldsmith says. “One is psychobabble, and the other is faction,” or the blending of fact and fiction by inserting speculative conversations into historical narratives. Every quotation, conversation and scene in her densely textured book is backed by documents–diaries, letters, court transcripts. Goldsmith offers no speculative interpolations, no pop psychological hand-wringing over the admittedly miserable childhoods of Woodhull and her siblings. She imagines herself to be a dispassionate, comprehensive narrator of the reciprocal play between character and history: “My books, all of them, I think, are like a Rorschach test. I just want to get the facts. I want the reader himself to judge whether this or that person was a hypocrite or an idealist.”
It is something of a paradox that a historian so suspicious of what she calls our “Pantagruelian appetite for scandal” should have organized her book around a most scandalous figure. One of the marvelous aspects of Goldsmith’s historical vision is that the usually rigid lines between crackpotism and sobriety, scandal and seriousness, are made to bend and blur. Woodhull’s own appetite for scandal-mongering–what more sympathetic observers would call her hatred of hypocrisy–contributed to her public downfall. Constrained for cash, pilloried in all the major papers in the early 1870s, Woodhull decided to use her own artillery: She published in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, the paper she had started along with her brokerage firm, the outlines of the sexual shenanigans of several prominent men, including Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and pastor of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church. Arguing that Beecher secretly practiced what she dared to preach–free love–Woodhull brought into the garish light of day what became known as the Beecher-Tilton scandal (Beecher had seduced, among many others, one Elizabeth Tilton, wife of the prominent journalist and his one-time protege Theodore Tilton). Facing repeated obscenity charges, abandoned by most of her former supporters, Woodhull ultimately moved with her sister to England. There she married a wealthy banker, John Biddulph Martin, and began to revise her past in an effort to gain the social approval she had hitherto disdained.
In 1892, Woodhull returned one last time to Chicago. Accompanied by Martin and Tennessee, she planned to attend the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention at the Auditorium Theater. Her hopes of reclaiming her national stature as a prominent, respectable suffragist fizzled. Everyone remembered her as “Mrs. Satan,” the devilish scandal-monger and free-lover who had nearly done in not only Henry Ward Beecher but the women’s movement itself. The Chicago Mail scathingly reported on Woodhull’s return and even dredged up outstanding manslaughter charges (relating to that “cancer remedy”) against Tennessee Claflin. Stung and disappointed, Woodhull, her husband and her sister returned to England, never to set foot in Chicago, or the U.S., again.
Unlike Woodhull, Goldsmith has established a secure position from which to observe and analyze the relations among power, politics, money and fame. A founder of and contributing editor to New York magazine, she seems very much at home in the corridors of social and political influence. This is a writer who refers casually to a lunch she attended at the White House and a dinner-party conversation she had with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
However much Goldsmith may travel in elevated circles, she shows herself to be as critical of abuses of power as Woodhull was. A conversation with Goldsmith soon reveals her profound commitment to civic ideals and political seriousness. She points to the failure of Radical Reconstruction–hijacked as it was by President Andrew Johnson and other apologists for the South–as “the origin of our problems today” with race relations and civil rights in general. Only with great difficulty did blacks win the vote after Emancipation; and practically speaking, many were prevented from exercising their right (by a combination of poll taxes, literacy tests and more violent forms of intimidation) until the mid-1960s. As “Other Powers” makes plain, the opportunity for women’s suffrage was lost for decades as fault lines in the 19th Century movement became unbridgeable chasms; not until 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified, did women finally win the right to vote, and the Equal Rights Amendment seems today to be a dead letter.
It is clear that, despite Goldsmith’s lively rendering of various late 19th Century scandals, Woodhull’s ideas, activism and eloquence compel her as much as–even more than–her unsavory reputation. In several books, including “Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last,” her 1980 biography of Gloria Vanderbilt, Goldsmith has transmuted the stuff of scandal–legal, financial and sexual–into the fabric of comprehensive social history. Despite her historian’s interest in the famous and the infamous, celebrity itself has no appeal for Goldsmith. She is a severe critic of the cult of fame and contributed a long essay in 1983 to the New York Times Magazine on the perils of our celebrity-dominated culture. Fifteen years later, she holds fast to that theme. “We’ve erased the line between notoriety and accomplishment,” she laments.
When Goldsmith considers her own life and reputation, she says, “I never wanted to be famous, but I always did want to make a difference.” She points to her long-standing avocation, paper preservation, as an arena in which she feels she has had a definite impact. Mobilizing writers and librarians, Goldsmith has waged a long and largely successful campaign to get the federal government and publishers to switch to non-acidic paper. Based on her work as both a historian and a preservation advocate, Goldsmith tartly challenges the cynicism and passivity of some fellow citizens: “Anyone who tells you we live in a society in which an individual can’t make a difference doesn’t know what he is talking about.”
