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0807. THE DEATH BLOW TO SPIRITUALISM.
Being the true story of the Fox sisters, as revealed by authority
of Margaret Fox Kane and Catherine Fox Jencken. Written by R. B.
Davenport. 147 pages. Deathblow to Spiritualism. R. B. Davenport 1.00
OCT. 1897. ISSUED MONTHLY. $5.00 PER YEAR.
ENTERED AT THE NEW YORK POST OFFICE AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER.
THE DEATH-BLOW TO SPIRITUALISM:
BEING THE TRUE STORY OF THE FOX SISTERS,
AS REVEALED BY AUTHORITY OF MARGARET FOX
KANE AND CATHERINE FOX JENCKEN.
BY REUBEN BRIGGS DAVENPORT.
NEW YORK:
_G. W. Dillingham Co., Publishers._
MDCCCXCVII.
Copyright, 1888.
BY REUBEN BRIGGS DAVENPORT.
[_All Rights Reserved._]
TO MRS. HESTER S. DWINELLE.
"ALONSO. This is as strange a maze as ere men trod,
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of: some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.
"PROSPERO. Sir, my liege,
Do not infest your mind with beating on
The strangeness of this business: at picked leisure,
Which shall be shortly, single I'll resolve you
(Which to you shall seem probable) of every
These happen'd accidents: till when be cheerful,
And think of each thing well.--Come hither, spirit;
Set Caliban and his companions free:
_Untie the spell._"
SHAKESPEARE.--_The Tempest._
PREFACE.
This book has been written in extreme haste. It does not pretend to
literary style. But it pretends to absolute truthfulness and a reverent
regard for justice.
Its sole value is its character as a contribution to the real history of
Spiritualism. As such, it is unquestionably of great importance, greater
even than any work of the kind that has been published since the beginning
of modern Spiritualism.
It is, in fact, what its title sets forth--"THE DEATH-BLOW TO
SPIRITUALISM."
No one who does not love illusion for illusion's sake--better, in other
words, than he loves the truth--can, after reading this volume, remain a
follower of Spiritualism and its hypocritical apostles.
The full authorization of Mrs. MARGARET FOX KANE and Mrs. CATHERINE FOX
JENCKEN for the publication of this work will be found on the next to the
following page.
_29th October, 1888._
[Illustration: MARGARET FOX KANE IN HER 18TH YEAR.]
[Illustration: KATIE FOX JENCKEN]
We hereby approve of Mr. Reuben B. Davenport's design to write a true
account of the origin of Spiritualism and of our connection therewith, and
we authorize him to make proper use of all data and material that we
furnish him.
New York, 15th Oct., 1888.
Margaret Fox Kane
Catherine Fox Jencken
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION.
Poetic Justice of the Exposure 13
II. RENUNCIATION.
Chapter. Page
I. "God Has Not Ordered It." 25
II. The Discomfited Enemy. 39
III. A Second Blow. 53
IV. The Hand of the Persecutor. 60
V. Solemn Abjuration. 65
III. HISTORY.
VI. Origin of the Fraud. 81
VII. Garbled and Distorted Testimony 94
VIII. Development of the Fraud 102
IX. The Mercenary Campaign. 121
X. Spiritualistic Boomerangs. 131
XI. The Supreme Audacity of Fraud. 150
XII. A Scientific Jury. 164
XIII. The Unalterable Verdict. 201
IV. REPENTANCE.
XIV. The Heart Pleads for the Soul. 209
XV. From Shadow to Light. 231
INDEX. 241
I. INTRODUCTION.
INTRODUCTION.
POETIC JUSTICE OF THE EXPOSURE.
That the inventors of an infamous fraud should deal to it its death-blow,
is the poetic justice of fate.
Over the creature, the creator has power of life and death.
The creators of Spiritualism abjure its infamy.
They decree its death.
They condemn it to final destruction.
They fasten upon those who continue to practice it the obloquy of history,
and the scorn of mankind for all time to come.
Margaret and Catharine Fox, the youngest of three sisters, were the first
to produce "spiritualistic manifestations."
They are now the most earnest in denunciation of those impostures; the
most eager to dissipate the foolish belief of thousands in the flimsiest
system of deception that was ever cloaked with the hypocrisy of so-called
religion.
When, as by accident, they discovered a method of deceiving those around
them by means of mysterious noises, they were but little children,
innocent of the thought of wrong, ignorant of the world and the world's
guile, and imagining only that what they did was a clever lark, such as
the adult age easily pardons to exuberant and sprightly youth.
Not to them did the base suggestion come that this singular, this simple
discovery, should be the means of deluding the world, of exalting them in
the minds of the weakly credulous and of bringing them fame and splendor
and sumptuous pleasure.
No one who learns their true history can still believe them guilty of the
willful inception of this most grotesque, most transparent and corrupting
of superstitions.
The idea had its monstrous birth in older heads, heads that were seconded
by hearts lacking the very essence of truth and the fountain of honest
human sympathy.
The two children, who had at first delighted, as younglings will, in what
was but a laughable mystification, were dragged into a sordid, wicked and
loathsome speculation, built upon lying and fraud, as unforgivable as the
sin of Satan, and of which they were but the unthinking instruments, often
reluctant and remorseful, yet docile and compliant by nature.
Thus the "Rochester knockings," the example and prototype of all later
so-called spiritualistic "phenomena," began merely in a curious childish
freak, disguised without effort, and which, from the first, was encouraged
to partly formed understandings by the wonder and intense spirit of
inquiry it provoked.
The young operators were carried away by the undreamt-of current of
enthusiasm and awe in which they soon became involved. They felt the
natural need of maintaining with unabating dexterity, that false sense of
the miraculous which by chance they had called forth.
Thus they went from one stage to another of this queer illusion, and,
being compelled by a harder and more mature intelligence to repeat their
part over and over again, became the chief means of establishing that
injurious belief in communications from the spirits of the departed, of
which such great numbers have become the victims.
Many an older offender against common sense, reason and strict morality
persists through force of circumstance in the pathway he has chosen, and
does not turn backward, merely because he cannot do so without wearing the
face of shame.
From such slight and trivial beginning came the great movement--great
because of the number which it comprised and of the sensation which
attended its progress--that for more than forty years has alternately
surprised, puzzled, disgusted and amused the world.
From so little a plant has grown a gigantic weed of deceit, corruption and
fraud, nurtured upon the fattening lust of money, and of the flesh.
What has developed from it is not alone a system of so-called
communications through a puerile code of signals with an unseen world;
but, as Dante describes, in his incomparable epic, forms of monstrosity
which combine a hideous human semblance and a loathly animal foulness, so
this venomous evil has become conglomerate in its hateful phases of
delusion, and its petty sordidness and depravity.
Thus the Tuscan bard describes the spirit of fraud:
"'Lo! the fell monster with the deadly sting!
Who passes mountains, breaks through fenced walls
And firm embattled spears, and with his filth
Taints all the world! Thus me my guide addressed,
And beckon'd him, that he should come to shore,
Near to the stony causeway's utmost edge.
"Forthwith that image vile of fraud appear'd,
His head and upper part expos'd on land,
But laid not on the shore his bestial train.
His face the semblance of a just man's wore.
So kind and gracious was its outward cheer;
The rest was serpent all; two shaggy claws
Reach'd to the armpits, and the back and breast,
And either side, were painted o'er with nodes
And orbits. Colors variegated more
Nor Turks nor Tartars e'er on cloth of state
With interchangeable embroidery wove,
Nor spread Arachne o'er her curious loom.
As ofttimes a light skiff, moor'd to the shore,
Stands part in water, part upon the land;
Or, as where dwells the greedy German boor,
The beaver settles watching for his prey;
So on the rim, that fenced the sand with rock,
Sat perched the fiend of evil. In the void
Glancing, his tail upturn'd its venomous fork,
With sting like scorpion's armed."
The world has not seen in all its long procession of follies, vagaries,
and strange mania, one so utterly devoid of a reasonable foundation as
this.
Yet none has been more eagerly believed; and this very tendency has
evolved into so strong a desire to believe that thousands of those who
have professed to investigate it have done so only ostensibly, their eyes,
figuratively speaking, tightly bandaged, to shut out everything but the
artificial vision that they were most eager to see.
It is to be hoped that the world will now form its ultimate conclusion
upon this flagrant and audacious system of humbuggery:--that, regarded as
a superstition, it ranks even below voudooism and fetich-worship, and, as
an illusion, below the effects produced by the most ordinary magician at a
country fair.
Dragged into this life when infants, rescued from it for an interval by
two men[1] whose names are historical, the one as a hero and explorer, the
other as a journalist and daily philosopher; borne back to it again by the
tide of ill-fortune; used and controlled, by those whose heart's were "dry
as summer's dust," for their own hateful purposes; menaced when conscience
rebelled and suggested retraction and amends; driven to seek momentary
oblivion of their present degradation in a vice that was the result of
their enforced public career; finally, persecuted in a stealthy and
treacherous way by those who had profited most by the fraud that they had
set up, because it was feared that sooner or later they could no longer
keep silent and would betray its real origin; seeing their existence
slipping away from them with nothing but Dead Sea fruit remaining to their
bitter portion; feeling more and more the need of an atonement to
conscience and the opinion of the world--Margaret and Catherine Fox now
denounce and anathematize Spiritualism as absolutely and utterly false
from beginning to end; and they declare their solemn intention to devote
themselves henceforth to the noble task of undoing the great evil which
they have done, and of leaving no single stone of foundation behind them
for weak-minded future generations to base a futile faith upon.
In these pages will be found the full and truthful story of Spiritualism,
as it was and is, as gathered from the lips of both Margaret Fox Kane and
Catharine Fox Jencken, and verified by letters, documents and published
data. It is written with their full knowledge and earnest sanction.
The bold fabric of lies built up to sustain the claim that the "rappings"
in which all spiritualistic so-called phenomena originated were
unaccountable except on the supernatural hypothesis, can no longer be
cited to an intelligent mind. The elaborate narrative published by the
eldest sister, Mrs. Ann Leah Fox Underhill, who is now the only remaining
stay of spiritualistic deception, is proven to be false from title-page to
finis.
I have given in the following pages, the real lives of Mrs. Kane and Mrs.
Jencken, in so far as they bear in any important degree upon the
development of the fraud of Spiritualism.
II. RENUNCIATION.
CHAPTER I.
GOD HAS NOT ORDERED IT.
The world of "spiritualists" and non-spiritualists was startled on the
24th of September, 1888, by the publication in the New York _Herald_, of
an article with the following head-lines:
"GOD HAS NOT ORDERED IT."
A Celebrated Medium Says the
Spirits Never Return.
CAPTAIN KANE'S WIDOW.
One of the Fox Sisters Promises an
Interesting Exposure of Fraud.
To many, an article of this kind seemed in a degree sensational. Not to
those, however, who had previously had some inkling of the secret history
of Spiritualism, and who for years had looked for the day of its
inevitable confounding.
A sudden disclosure like this, by one of the "Mothers of Spiritualism," if
the term may be used, suggested a sort of reckless vagary, a species of
extravagance, due, as might have been fancied, to some abnormal condition
of the mind.
Yet to those who had had an intimate acquaintance with Maggie Fox Kane
this step had long been foreshadowed. As will appear later, no one could
have imagined the real intensity of moral pain that for years she had
endured.
In recent years, both she and her sister, Catharine Fox Jencken, had been
but poorly provided with this world's goods. Obliged to depend almost
wholly on themselves for support, they had dropped more and more out of
sight, till the public at last hardly recognized their names, if perchance
they appeared in print, as those of the principal instruments in the
founding of Spiritualism. For this, there was a reason. It was a
deep-seated and long increasing disgust with their fraudulent
profession--the fuller realization to their minds, as their knowledge of
the world grew broader, of the monstrous evil to which, innocently at
first, they had given birth. So at intervals they were filled with
despairing despondency and remorse. Their weaknesses, their
self-indulgence, their lack of providence for themselves, are largely
attributable to these causes. It could not be said of them that they were
ever remarkably selfish, or cold-hearted or calculating. Such a character,
however, has of right been coupled with the name of their elder sister,
who by reason of the ties of blood and of her older experience ought long
ago to have led them out of the by-ways of imposture, instead of
persistently seeking to shut off their escape from this horrible bondage,
and to plunge them deeper into the mire of guilt and infamy, so that the
chance of their rising above it, and denouncing it, might grow less and
less.
The impulse to set herself right on the record of the world, after years
of enslavement in the hateful gyves of charlatanism, must stand to Maggie
Fox's credit alone. It sprang from her own bosom, not from the
inspiration, suggestion or persuasion of any one else. Returning from
Europe in September, 1888, after a peculiar experience, which had
convinced her that those chiefs of spiritualistic fraud who feared her and
her sister, because they held the key of the whole of the artificial
mystery, were bent upon persecuting them into an abject silence, she at
once put in execution the resolution which had been so long in process of
growth, but until then had never been fully ripened.
This was to effect the unqualified exposure of the false system of
Spiritualism. She naturally chose as a medium for her repentant message to
the world, that great cosmopolitan journal, the _New York Herald_, which
is known in every corner of the earth, and is ever ready to perform an
important service to mankind. Before she started on her homeward voyage,
she committed herself once and for all to this courageous and worthy step.
The disclosures regarding the notorious Madam Diss De Barr had offended
Mrs. Kane more than anything which had occurred in Spiritualism in a long
time, for they presented the enforced association of her name and the
simple, childish origin of the "Rochester knockings," with the gross and
revolting frauds which had been their outgrowth. So imbued had she become,
by this time, with the idea that the developed system of Spiritualism was
something to be loathed, as Milton loathed the hideous creature who sat by
the inner portals of hell, that words could not express her utter scorn
and hatred of this common woman, who posed as an agent of sacred
communications between the living and the dead.
The New York _Herald_ of May 27, 1888, contained this letter, written by
Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane in London:
THE CURSE OF SPIRITUALISM.
GOWER STREET, BEDFORD SQUARE, W. C.,
LONDON, MAY 14, 1888.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE HERALD:
I read in the _Herald_ of Saturday, May 5, an account of the sad
misfortune that has befallen my dear sister Katie, Mrs. Kate Fox
Jencken, and in the article it is stated that I am still a resident
of New York, which is a mistake. I sailed for England on the 22d of
March, and I presume my absence has added to my darling sister's
depressed state of mind. The sad news has nearly killed me. My
sister's two beautiful boys referred to are her idols.
Spiritualism is a curse. God has set His seal against it! I call it a
curse, for it is made use of as a covering for heartless persons like
the Diss De Barrs, and the vilest miscreants make use of it to cloak
their evil doings. Fanatics like Mr. Luther R. Marsh, Mr. John L.
O'Sullivan, ex-Minister to Portugal, and hundreds equally as learned,
ignore the "rappings" (which is the only part of the phenomena that
is worthy of notice) and rush madly after the glaring humbugs that
flood New York. But a harmless "message" that is given through the
"rappings" is of little account to them; they want the "spirit" to
come to them in full form, to walk before them, talk to them, to
embrace them, and all such nonsense, and what is the result? Like old
Judge Edmonds and Mr. Seybert, of Philadelphia, they become crazed,
and at the direction of their fraud "mediums" they are induced to
part with all their worldly possessions as well as their common
sense, which God intended they should hold sacred. Mr. Marsh's
experience is but another example of hundreds who have preceded him.
No matter in what form Spiritualism may be presented, it is, has been
and always will be a curse and a snare to all who meddle with it. No
right minded man or woman can think otherwise.
I have found that fanatics are as plentiful among "inferior men and
women" as they are among the more learned. They are all alike. They
cannot hold their fanaticism in check, and it increases as their
years increase. All they will ever achieve for their foolish
fanaticism will be loss of money, softening of the brain and a
lingering death.
MARGARET F. KANE.
This anathema dismayed those who had basely profited by Spiritualism, and
it brought a deeper shock to the hearts of many who were sincere
believers. The publication, however, in the _Herald_, three months later,
of an interview with Mrs. Kane on her arrival in this city, the striking
head-lines of which I have cited above, capped the climax of
consternation. This article is well worthy of reproduction.
The eccentric circles wherein "isms" reign in discordant supremacy
will be probably as deeply exercised over an approaching exposure of
the tricks and illusions of Spiritualism, as they were over the rude
logic of common sense and justice which drew aside the thin veil of
fraud in the case of Madam Diss De Barr, and revealed the real nature
of her flimsy system of deception in all its vulgar absurdity.
I called yesterday at a modest little house in West Forty-fourth
street, and was received by a small, magnetic woman of middle age,
whose face bears the traces of much sorrow and of a world-wide
experience. She was negligently dressed, and she was not in the
calmest possible mood. But she knew what she was talking about when,
in response to my questions, she told a story of as strange and
fantastic a life as has ever been recorded, and declared over and
over again her intention of balancing the account which the world of
humbug-loving mortals held against her, by making a clean breast of
all her former miracles and wonders. In intervals of her talk, when
she had risen from her chair, and paced the room, or had covered her
face with her hands and almost sobbed with emotion, she would seat
herself suddenly at a piano and pour forth fitful floods of wild,
incoherent melody, which coincided strangely with that reminiscent
weirdness which, despite its cynical reality, still characterized the
scene.
This woman, albeit a notorious career has classed her with
mountebanks and worse in the minds of reasonable beings, had yet by
some element or other in her character retained a degree of public
respect. Perhaps it is because months ago she abandoned the art of
deception and has since to her intimate friends evinced no ordinary
measure of contempt for all who still pursue it. She is known on both
sides of the Atlantic, and when in London, is entertained by some of
the best-to-do of the great and comprehensive middle class.
Circumstances had brought me to this house, and I did not at first
know her. I soon found, however, that this was the most famous of the
celebrated trio of witches, the Fox sisters, among the earliest
spiritualistic mediums in this country. She is also the widow of Dr.
Elisha Kent Kane, the heroic Arctic explorer, who died of the effects
of his exposure in searching for Sir John Franklin and his ill-fated
party. Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane has lately returned from England for a
brief visit here, and she purposes in a very short time to deliver
just one lecture, and no more, which shall shame and dumfound all the
spiritualistic frauds who have not yet repented into poverty or exile
of their nebulous ways. She will reveal one after another of the
methods by which willing believers have been so briskly duped and
robbed, and will herself demonstrate how simple, natural and easy are
most of those methods.
Brooding upon the troubles that had been brought upon her by Spiritualism
and on her personal guilt in connection with it, it is hardly strange that
Mrs. Kane, even when bent upon making a sweeping confession of the whole
imposture, should in intervals of nervous excitement have turned to the
thought of suicide.
"'My troubles weighed upon me,' she said, 'and when I was coming over on
the _Italy_, I do believe that I should have gone overboard but for the
Captain and the doctor and some of the sailors. They prevented me, and
when I landed, I could not express to them the gratitude I felt. I had
very little English money with me, but all of that I distributed to the
men.'"
As Mrs. Kane told of her impulse to commit suicide her manner became
tragic and she clutched her listener's arm. After a moment, however, she
reverted quietly enough to the original subject.
But she speedily became much excited again, as what follows will show. It
was but natural:
"Since you now despise Spiritualism, how was it that you were engaged
in it so long?" I asked.
"Another sister of mine," and she coupled the name with an injurious
adjective, "made me take up with it. She's my damnable enemy. I hate
her. My God! I'd poison her! No, I wouldn't, but I'll lash her with
my tongue. She was twenty-three years old the day I was born. I was
an aunt seven years before I was born. Ha! ha!
"Yes, I am going to expose Spiritualism from its very foundation. I
have had the idea in my head for many a year, but I have never come
to a determination before. I've thought of it day and night. I loath
the thing I have been. As I used to say to those who wanted me to
give a seance, 'You are driving me into hell.' Then the next day I
would drown my remorse in wine. I was too honest to remain a
'medium.' That's why I gave up my exhibitions.
"When Spiritualism first began Kate and I were little children, and
this old woman, my other sister, made us her tools. Mother was a
silly woman. She was a fanatic. I call her that because she was
honest. She believed in these things. Spiritualism started from just
nothing. We were but innocent little children. What did we know? Ah,
we grew to know too much! Our sister used us in her exhibitions and
we made money for her. Now she turns upon us because she's the wife
of a rich man, and she opposes us both wherever she can. Oh, I am
after her! You can kill sometimes without using weapons, you know.
"Dr. Kane found me when I was leading this life. [The woman's voice
trembled just here and she nearly broke down.] I was only thirteen
when he took me out of it and placed me at school. I was educated in
Philadelphia. When I was sixteen years old he returned from the
Arctic and we were married. Now comes the sad, sad tale. He was very
ill. The physicians ordered him to London, but before he arrived he
had a paralytic stroke of the heart. Then he was sent back from
London and to Havana. Newsboys shouted in the streets of New York
the news of his critical condition. Oh, my God! it was anguish to my
ears! Mother and I were to have joined him in two weeks. He died
before we arrived. Then I had brain fever. No one but God can know
what sorrows I have had!
"When I recovered I was driven again into Spiritualism, and I gave
exhibitions with my sister Katie. I knew, of course, then, that every
effect produced by us was absolute fraud. Why, I have explored the
unknown as far as human will can. I have gone to the dead so that I
might get from them some little token. Nothing ever came of
it--nothing, nothing. I have been in graveyards at dead of night,
having permission to enter from those in charge. I have sat alone on
a gravestone, that the spirits of those who slept underneath might
come to me. I have tried to obtain some sign. Not a thing! No, no,
the dead shall not return, nor shall any that go down into hell. So
says the Catholic Bible, and so say I. The spirits will not come
back. God has not ordered it.
"You want to know what are the points of my coming expose? First the
'rappings.'"
Mrs. Kane paused here, and I heard first a rapping under the floor
near my feet, then under the chair in which I was seated, and again
under a table on which I was leaning. She led me to the door and I
heard the same sound on the other side of it. Then, when she sat on
the piano stool, the legs of the instrument reverberated more loudly,
and the tap, tap, resounded throughout its hollow structure.
"It is all a trick?"
"Absolutely. Spirits, is he not easily fooled?"
Rap, rap, rap!
"I can always get an affirmative answer to that question," she
remarked.
Then I addressed certain suppositions to her. At last she said, "Yes,
you have hit it. It is, as you say, the manner in which the joints of
the foot can be used without lifting it from the floor. The power of
doing this can only be acquired by practice begun in early youth. One
must begin as early as twelve years. Thirteen is rather late. We
children, when we were playing together, years ago, discovered it,
and it was my eldest sister who first put the discovery to such an
infamous use.
"I call it infamous, for it was."