INTERVIEW: JOHN BENEDICT BUESCHER - AUTHOR The remarkable life of john murray spear

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

R.J. Blake: Let's just start off real easy, can you just introduce yourself and who you are, what your background is, and how you first came to be interested in John Murray Spear?

John B. Buescher: My name is John Buescher and I'm a retired academic researcher. My primary field of research is 19th Century American spiritualism. I first became interested in that subject after I had finished my graduate work studying Asian religions. I wondered at that time who was it that first became interested in Asian religions in the West, and why did they become interested. I was lead to look into the sources, and it was clear to me that those first people were folks like Henry David Thoreau, and Emerson from New England who were reading the Bhagavad Gita, somehow looking for sources of wisdom there.

Among them, also seated next to them in these lectures and discussions sessions were spiritualists. I didn't really know anything about who the spiritualists were, but as I started to look into them, it became clear to me that these people were the real fire engines to this interest in Asian religions. They were real characters in and of themselves. I've always been interested in doing history as a series of biographies. I don't really know how to do history any other way.

RJ: Well, you wrote a great one.

John: I've been writing biographies of spiritualists ever since then just because they're such fascinating folks. I must say that when on my first pass through the history of American spiritualism, when I turned to the story of John Murray Spear who is given a lot of attention in some of the histories of early American spiritualism, I just couldn't believe what I was reading about his projects and what he was doing. It seemed to me like, "Wow, the 19th Century was a whole lot stranger than what I had ever been lead to believe."

This guy seemed to me to have invented steampunk science fiction, even if it's possible to have invented steampunk back in the 1850s. It just seemed incredible what he was trying to do. That's how I first latched onto him, and was interested that nobody had written on him before much. As I turned into the sources and put things together, his life just seemed more and more incredible to me.

RJ: I agree. When we first came on his story, it sounded unbelievable, just from what was on the internet. Then once I dug into your book, it was so much more fascinating than I even thought it was to begin with.

John: When I first started thinking about writing a book on him, I thought, "Oh wow, this is the stuff of science fiction."

RJ: It reads like that, yes.

John: I contemplated trying to write it as a novel, but actually, part of the wonderment of this is watching science fiction. I decided to write it straight history and not exaggerate anything that I couldn't find in the sources, but just tell it straight. I think that, in fact, by doing that, his story is stranger.

RJ: I think that if you did it as a novel, there would be so many things that people would think is a stretch to get to, but having it documented the way you did, it really is mind-blowing, everything that he did throughout his life. Getting into that, who was John Murray Spear? Just a quick overview, especially his early life, his involvement in the Universalist Church, abolitionism, all that jazz.

John: Well, John Murray Spear was born in Boston. I think his father was a fisherman, as I recall, a pretty poor family. He had an older brother Charles, who had been born the year before him-- In 1804, John Murray Spear was born. His parents had become members of a congregation of the preacher who first preached universal salvation in the United States. His name was John Murray. He had a church in Boston, and John Murray Spear was christened by Reverend John Murray, and of course, was given his name by his parents.

The Universalists were in the midst of a tremendous growth during that time, inspired by John Murray. I think the peak of that growth of universalism was probably around 1820. It spread out all over New England and then, into the western portions of what was then the United States, so there were many, many Universalists. They were concerned with their inherited Calvinist notion that every-- Well, the Calvinist atmosphere at the time was that very dark and regarding people's eternal salvation. John Murray and the Universalists proclaimed that in fact, everyone would be saved, universal salvation. That distinguished them from the rest of the denominations that they were surrounded by, but it was taken as a liberation of sorts, this notion of universal salvation.

In the midst of the-- What you would call the decay of Calvinism in New England, it was part of an entire change of attitude towards, not only the next world, but this world as well. That was what universalism was, and John grew up in that environment. He was early trained as an apprentice and became a shoemaker, which was not automated at the time like it became during his lifetime. They were still cobblers who made-- Each person made their individual entire shoe from the beginning. His brother Charles was apprenticed to a printing operation and became a printer himself.

RJ: The shoemakers at the time, John, they were like thinkers, correct? They were kind of very educated people?

John: The shoe makers were typically regarded as being well-read. I think that comes from the fact that shoemaking shops would try to while away the hours by having all the shoemakers in the shop be read to, a little bit like monks in a monastery during meals, always having somebody to read something because silence was required. The same way, they just read constantly to each other. Not only did they have a reputation for being well-read up on things, but they were also regarded as a master of social radicals in the sense that the labor movement began primarily among shoemakers in New England. The first labor strikes were among shoemakers in Massachusetts during that time.

They were up on the news constantly, they were well-read. John was obviously up on the news, and although he didn't really have much of a formal education, same with his brother, obviously you have to be well-read to be a printer’s apprentice. They both spent most of their early childhood in rather impoverished circumstances, but hard at work and improving themselves in their education. They were self-educated essentially.

RJ: Then what happens to John after he is apprenticed for the shoemakers?

John: Well, his brother first decided to study such as he could do for the Universalist ministry, and started that, and convinced his brother as well to start. John Murray Spear started studying for that and was taken into fellowship with the Universalists and became a minister. They both served ministries throughout eastern Massachusetts. John went to Barnstable out on the cape, and his brother was stationed in various places, also north Boston and so on.

They were both Universalist ministers by the time they were young men, and moving from congregation to congregation. John eventually wound up as the Universalist minister in New Bedford and built the first Universalist church there. It was the one that Frederick Douglass wound up associating himself with, at least informally after he had made his way north, having escaped slavery. John and Frederick Douglass were close acquaintances at the time that that happened. I think Frederick Douglass [crosstalk]--

RJ: John was an abolitionist, correct?

John: Yes. It was common for Universalists to be regarded as extreme liberals, or as they said, progressives in social matters. John took up all of those progressive reforms of the time, and that included abolitionism, and would later include women's rights, and prison reform, the abolition of the death penalty, temperance movement, and everything else basically, that came his way. Both he and Charles were progressives in that sense.

RJ: In terms of the Universalist Church, were they pretty in the mainstream in their beliefs, or were they even out on the fringe of that for what progressives were?

John: Well, John was very-- I'm not quite sure what to say. He was pretty energetic, and you could-- Both he and his brother were in a state of mind where, having thrown off the shackles of the old theology, as they called Calvinism, were prepared to rely on their own leanings, as they thought of this as a spiritual light that would lead them into new reforms and whatever the age demanded.

Their business in a sense was to liberate people from all kinds of societal restrictions and shackles. That was how John became quite active in the abolitionist movement in particular. He was a well-regarded workhorse for the New England Anti-Slavery Society, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He was a lecturer and a traveling lecturer for them, and paid for that. During that, he wandered all over New England giving lectures, abolitionist lectures. He worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison. They were very close, and the other abolitionists at the time.

RJ: His lectures kind of led to some harassments in-- There was an incident, Christmas 1844, when he was giving a lecture, where he was basically beaten, close to death. Can you tell us more about that?

John: Again, on one of these lecture tours by the abolitionist society in Boston, he wound up in Maine, in Portland, Maine, and was on the platform giving a lecture there with another abolitionist, Stephen Symonds Foster. It was not the case that everyone in New England was naturally an abolitionist for various reasons, and they found themselves in these lectures, typically facing a mixed reception, and that was common for all the lectures.

Anyway, at this particular one, after the lecture, as John was leaving the church or town hall where he was giving it, he was set on by a group of men who were obviously not in tune with his thoughts on this and was beaten, and dragged himself across the street through the mob, and was finally rescued and brought into the house of a sympathizer and fell into a coma that lasted for a few days before he finally came out of it, but it took him a long time to recover. He was beaten about the head, and when he came out of the coma, he seemed to have been visited by spirits, perhaps. He wasn't sure of what happened, but in any event, he was-- I think, you might say a different person.

RJ: That was kind of his first experience with spirits, correct?

John: Yes-- He wasn't quite clear on that, but it did-- I think in retrospect, you can see that he was not so worldly attuned after that. He was more tuned toward what was happening in his head, basically.

RJ: Right, because not too long after that, he writes in The Prisoner’s Friend, this review of this book by Andrew Jackson Davis, Principles of Nature, Her Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. Can you talk about what he wrote about that book, and how did it affect John Murray Spear? Because it seemed to really have a profound effect on him.

John: Well, he was at that time editing a periodical that his brother Charles really took over and was the main editor of. They had-- One of the most particular projects of reform was the abolition of the death penalty and the improvement of prison conditions. In that periodical, John reviewed books, and one of the books he wrote a review of was this book by Andrew Jackson Davis. That book was written down by Jackson Davis' close associate who was also a Universalist minister. Davis had dictated these discourses while in trance, about the nature of the universe. Apparently, he believed, and so did his close associates, that these were being dictated to him by the spirit of Emanuel Swedenborg.

The book itself was a sort of cosmic revelation of the past and future, and described realms of visionary places where spirits dwelt. Something like Emanuel Swedenborg himself, who's writing described him visiting places like Saturn, or various realms of spirit land, this is what Davis' book was like. When it was published in 1847, it created a huge sensation. It wasn't just Spear who was deeply inspired by it as a totally new cosmological revelation, but he was certainly one of the ones who was inspired by it.

I think his reaction was different from the other reformers who he was hanging with. You can see throughout Spear’s life at this time, that he was starting to move away from being totally focused on particular reform movements like abolitionism and women's rights and prison reform. He was no longer so focused on being one of the active leaders. He was more inclined to read that sort of hard grit work that his colleagues had depended on him for, and be more concerned with something that he felt was more theoretical, but deeper into the visionary world.

The other folks that he was hanging out with like William Lloyd Garrison and so on, they were certainly aware of this sort of tension between people who were really in it to work for their causes, as opposed to people who seemed to be drifting off into contacting the other world. This was really a big issue in the reformed community back in those days.

RJ: Around this time is when spiritualism starts taking off, correct? In America?

John: Yes, as a self-defined movement

RJ: What was the beginning of spiritualism, and what is spiritualism?

John: Spiritualism, as it crystallized [unintelligible 00:31:19] in a bit of a retrospective way, was-- Well, it began in March 1848 when two sisters, I think their last name was Fox, they began hearing raps in the night, rapping sounds-- Rappings. What turned this from something that was like any ghost story into something that was a little different was that in the sisters' presence, they could send and receive through rappings, using it as a sort of code, messages from the spirit who would talk to them and give them answers to questions. This was something that was new, a little new. It was following not too long after the first enthusiasm over the electronic telegraph which had been such a success starting in 1845.

Part of the excitement about this and the reason it spread like wildfire from them was that it seemed to people at the time to be something like an opening of a spiritual telegraph between spirits in the afterlife and those of us still here in mortal flesh. That was something new, and people were prepared to be excited not only because-- The electronic telegraph had been something that was seemingly so miraculous, so people were open to the possibility that maybe something like this had begun intercourse between earth and heaven, but also because it was something different and progressive in the sense that, here was something that was a sort of religion that was based on empiricism.

It seemed like, "Hey, not only do we have physical evidence for this communication through the sounds, the rappings, the responses, and so on, but also, it was something that was sort of ultra-democratic. You could do it and perform experiments with it on your own kitchen table, and you could do your own theology around what the spirits told you.

RJ: Is that what attracted John Murray Spear to it? Because I know he started getting into it through mesmeric trance, correct?

John: Yes. By that time, the interest that had begun earlier in developing and experimenting with mesmerism, or what we would call hypnotism today, had also spread around New England. There were plenty of people within the progressive movement who turned themselves into experimenters, experts, lecturers, performers of mesmeric trance. Andrew Jackson Davis actually, although he was later associated closely with the spiritualist movement per se, was discovered and made famous at the beginning by his ability to be entranced and to seemingly be able to see into people's bodies and diagnose their hidden ills like an X-ray machine.

RJ: Did it work?

John: [laughs] I don't know what to tell you about that. There's very conflicting evidence. There's conflicting testimony about that.

RJ: What a thing to claim. Then in March--

John: The claim about mesmerism was that you could turn yourself into a seer through developing yourself as a mesmeric subject. The subject of trance sort of fit logically together in the reformer's mind with the notion that, "Now we're on our own and each one of us could find the light of truth and illumination within us through, basically, visionary experiences." It was something that reformers practiced. John Murray Spear didn't necessarily turn himself into a mesmeric subject or operator along the lines that other people were doing, but it was in that same atmosphere. Certainly, the notion that a truly religious experience was one that was an interior experience where you were open to get getting affected by a spiritual reality that you couldn't see, was certainly congruent with what he was thinking himself at the time.

RJ: Right. Then in March 1852, John began being a medium, correct?

John: Yes.

RJ: Can you tell us what happened then and the story of the next few days? Because I know a bunch of messages came to him.

John: My memory is an aging one, so is this referring-- What this is subject referring to?

RJ: What I'm trying to get to is the first time that he started communicating with the Association of Beneficents.

John: Okay. Well, he had been practicing with what was later called automatic writing, where it's a little bit of like an Ouija board, but you take a pencil in your hand and wait for it to move by itself. It takes practice for most people, and some people, it never happened, but it did with him. He began receiving such written messages that he believed did not come from anywhere in him for some period, and developed that, fell into it more and more, and he began getting messages from a group of spirits who identified themselves as what they called the Association of Beneficents.

RJ: Beneficents, got it.

John: It turned out that according to these messages, they were some selected and highly noble group of departed spirits who had decided now that this spiritual telegraph had opened up between the afterlife and the mortal life to gather together and deliver messages to the people of this world. They were folks like Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, Thomas Paine, Emmanuel Swedenborg, John Hancock, [crosstalk]--

RJ: Some of the greatest minds.

John: Some of the greatest minds. They were now at leisure to and had the power to communicate. They formed an association that reminds me very much of what you might expect a New England town meeting would produce as an ad hoc committee and so on. They had decided to break up this spirits' reformatory work for the world into committees. I think they were six, and these committees had named themselves the Electricizers, the Elementizers, the Educationizers, the Governmentizers, the Healthfulizers, and the Agriculturalizers. These were like cabinet positions, I suppose, but each of these groups would devote themselves to delivering messages on reform projects and theories to the world, and they had decided to make John Murray Spear the main communicator, the main medium, their main wire to the world.

RJ: Then a few months after he began receiving these messages, I believe it was the spirit of Benjamin Franklin is what John Murray Spear said gave him a message about the new motor.

John: Right.

RJ: What is the new motor?

John: Benjamin Franklin was apparently the head of the Electricizers. Not surprising, given his experiments when he was on Earth.

RJ: Key and a kite.

John: Right. The kite, all that. He had decided to reveal a major project to John Murray Spear and his little group of followers. John Murray Spear had followers who had decided to participate in these projects, and they were consecrated with various names. The one who was John Murray Spear's main associate, on this project anyway, was named Simon Crosby Hewitt. Also a Universalist minister, but a labor organizer. He was also a trained mechanic. I think he worked in textile mills before, so he did in fact have some mechanical skills as a machinist and general mechanic.

It was to Simon Crosby Hewitt and a few other followers, and I must say, mostly these were-- John Murray Spear's followers were heavily sheltered with folks who had some money. In particular, there were three or four patrons that became close associates with Spear that were well-endowed. That probably explains something about the way Spear worked and his ability to conduct some of these projects. John himself had no abilities in electrical work or mechanical work apart from having been a shoemaker, but Hewitt did.

I don't know how much you know about electricity. Maybe not so much, but maybe not many people knew much about electricity, but it was the coming thing at the time. There were new electrical devices that were being invented and brought online, despite the fact that nobody really knew what electricity was. People were inventing devices that could use it in various ways, the signaling devices, and so on. The project that the spirit of Benjamin Franklin began dictating plans to John Murray Spear for was called the New Motor at the beginning, the New Motive Power.

It was a phrase that was used for other projects, non-spiritual projects, but steam engines and new sources of energy-- People were experimenting and developing new kinds of new motors, but this new motor was going to be different. Now, exactly what it was was unclear at the beginning, and it never really came together, but it was more like-- The idea of this is that, for one thing, it would be self-powered. Metaphysically speaking, you might say that was important to reformers because they were convinced that people themselves had to become self-powered, and sovereign individuals, and not slaves or bound to any political power.

RJ: Interesting. Does the self-powered-- Does it necessarily refer to it being a mechanism that doesn't need, for lack of a better phrase, any power, versus a mechanism that was free to do whatever it wanted or needed to? What was the idea there? Because that is something that I've been-- Just the phrasing is a little obtuse. Maybe they didn't really know either at the time, it sounds like, but--

John: Exactly. I think you're onto something. It was pregnant with possibilities, the phrase was. You were free to imagine it in either way, I think. In addition, you were also free to imagine the New Motive Power as referring to people. People needed a new motive. Society needed The New Motive for existence. It was no longer-- The old institutions and arrangements were no longer functioning, so society itself needed a new motive [crosstalk].

RJ: Yes, something new to drive society forward because everything else was failing around that time.

John: Yes, but since it was-- One of the possibilities to think about this thing was that it was self-powered, meant that if it was self-powered, they were talking about creating a perpetual motion machine.

RJ: A machine that's just always moving by itself.

John: It was always moving and by itself. It didn't need to be energized by any mercurial means. It would just keep going. It would go of itself, and it would always be going of itself. That was certainly one of the ideas that's driving what this machine was supposed to be able to accomplish.

It was also something else there, which was that it would continue to go by itself, and it was like an ideal that was in the heads of these folks who were building this machine, and day by day learning more about it as they were giving instructions on its building, that this was something that was a model of what the human would be in the future. It was a new man. It was going to be called the electrical infant. God's last best gift to mankind. They began perceiving each of these parts that were being described as parts analogous to the parts of the human body. Yes, they were also constructing an automaton in their minds.

RJ: Some people thought it was going to be a new messiah. Is that correct?

John: Yes. It was going to be the new messiah because it would do any number of things that were problematic to folks at that time. It would unite heaven and Earth. It would make people less dependent on a nearly material world where you had to harness up the power from forces or from water power or something. It was free labor because energy was going to be free. It would be the model for the way people's lives could be constructed. Reformed and turned into something where people were no longer enslaved to mechanical needs.

It was to be any number of things, and all of those things accumulated. All those ideas accumulated around this mysterious thing that they were being instructed to build. It's like back engineering something where you're blindly being told what to build, but you don't quite know what it is that you're building, and you have to infer what the function of this machine is and what it's possibilities are. Only at the end when you can finally see it working.

RJ: It sounds like what you're saying is they thought that this would be something that was both practical, in that it would be an actual mechanism almost like, say, a car motor or something except for a car motor requires gas, it wouldn't require that where you could install this and it would free everybody up and be able to push technology forward while at the same time being this ideal that would then let your mind be able to be free from thinking about those obstacles in your life to be able to better connect with the world Is that what the thought was?

John: Exactly, all that. All of that and more, and more, man. It was going to do everything. Not only that. You mentioned about would it walk around. Well, there was one artist or painter who was a spiritualist, and knew John. His name was Josiah Wolcott, and he had a vision about the new motor. In his vision, this is while they were still working on it, putting it together, in his vision, the new motor grew and started walking across the landscape. As it walked, it threw off smaller versions of itself, replicating itself into new motors. These would be marching across the landscape and stepping on and destroying the old cultural artifacts. The churches and all of this and spreading out. It reminds me really a lot of the descriptions of HG Wells in the War of the Worlds.

RJ: Yes, the tripods.

John: Setting up and replicating and so on. I have had some notions that HG Wells, in my research here, got hold of a copy of John Murray Spear's collected writings called The Educator in which a lot of his projects were described, and was familiar with it. I can't say that that's anything more than my own fancy.

RJ: It does sound like it would look almost something like HG Wells' time machine. Something like that. To that idea, can you tell us about where was this built? You've told us the process of getting the instructions, but what was the process of building it, and where was it done, and that kind of stuff?

John: As I recall, John started getting these instructions while he was living in Boston, or just North of Boston in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts. This is in 1853 or so. Just before that time, one of his friends who had been heavily involved in the early days of spiritualism, which this was, who was named Jesse Hutchinson, had built what he called a cottage, but it was much more expensive than that and what the name implies on a high bluff. On one side of Lynn called High Rock, and this thing had an observatory tower attached to it.

It would look out over the bay where Lynn was, and with Jackson Davis had spent some weeks in High Rock Tower, and had a vision of the spirits coming down from heaven with various nationalities of spirits parading down out of the sky into the tower and giving him a series of messages there. Not long after that, John and his little group of followers moved into that place, High Rock Tower.

RJ: It sounds like Frankenstein's tower from the original movie.

John: Like the high place where some mad scientist would look for lightning strikes to power his new man and raise his Frankenstein monster.

RJ: Yes, totally.

John: Very much so. It was high, and so it was thought to be a place that was close to the heavens and had purified airs around it. Part of the-- it was said to be self powered, and that's true, but there were some portion of this machine that was to have aerials that stretched up and pointed into the sky. It was supposed to collect electricity somehow out of the sky, and then channel it into the machine, and that was actually to be the source of power.

RJ: Was it electricity or was it just kind of the general energy of the world?

John: I think it was just like the general energy of the world. Something like in John's spirit, explanations for the way this work was, that there was constantly energy pouring out of the North Pole, and you could see it in the aurora borealis, and it circled down south and around the globe. This etheric energy, atmosphere could be collected, and was in fact, as the spirit said, collected by human beings by their hair.

[laughter]

This was the reason why John and his male followers all let their hair grow. They had long hair from this point, because it would make them more attuned to this theory of energies. These aerials that were pointing up out of the machine, were there to collect this energy. The machine was built out of regular machine parts; brass, steel, iron, and it was described slowly over some months. They didn't quite know what they were doing as they were being given the directions, but were building it up piece by piece. It was set up on a very massive wooden table at the top of High Rock tower in that room, the observatory room.

On that wooden table, there was a metal platform. We don't have any pictures of this thing. We have descriptions of how the thing was built and what it looked like, that were put into publish by this group in Simon Crosby Hewitt's paper that was called The New Era. We have two segments out of three of his complete descriptions, so we can't know exactly what it looked like, but we know a lot about it. One of its features was it had an armature that was supposed to rotate, once it finally started going, and this armature had some little steel balls attached to it that hang down from it.

I mean, I don't really know what these steel balls were supposed to do, except they were supposed to be evidence that the thing was going and was alive then. It had started. Once those steel balls were attached, of course everyone was waiting to see when they would start rotating.

RJ: Those are kind of attached last, as it was getting completed?

John: Yes, like that. I don't know exactly when in the process they were attached. We don't have the original of the instructions, these were all taken down. John would be in trance and would dictate the instructions he was receiving day by day to his followers, and they would take it down, and then they would make the necessary adjustments. It's like, hey, we've got Benjamin Franklin on the phone, sort of, and he's telling us what to do next. The thing kind of built itself up and accreted slowly over time. One part was added one day, another part was added another day, then another part was, "Oh, well, you didn't do that right. You have to attach something else to that." It was trial-- I don't want to call it trial and error, but there were plenty of things that weren't clear when the instructions were first given.

RJ: Yes, plenty of error.

[laughter]

John: It was building to some climax, for sure.

RJ: Yes. It was built, like parts of it were meant to mirror functions in the human body, correct?

John: Yes. At least theoretically. The machine was meant to be some new human in a way, whatever that meant. The aerials were the hair, human hair, and then, I don't know, there were arms of some sort. Some of this was-- I don't know quite exactly how to think about whether or not these were just allegorical correspondences, or whether or not the parts were really made to look like a human body.

RJ: Right.

John: In fact, I kind of think that it didn't look much like a human body, but it was symmetrical. It had parts that were assigned as corresponding to different parts of the human body and so on.

RJ: At a certain point, it was--

John: I have a notion that it looks like the lunar lander.

RJ: Oh, interesting. Sure.

John: Maybe with exposed parts like this armature that was supposed to rotate, and parts that were meant to work like a motor. If you took the casing off of a mechanical motor, and you can see the parts moving inside, it didn't need a casing as such, so maybe you could see it like that or-

RJ: Yes, there was no casing around it.

John: Yes, no casing, but good aerials, of course, looking up. I think it was probably squat in a way it would look to us like something squat, like a lunar lander.

RJ: How big was it?

John: How what?

RJ: Big? What was the size of it?

John: I don't know, exactly. Maybe like a VW bug.

RJ: Oh, wow, wow, that's a lot bigger than what I was thinking it was going to be.

John: Maybe smaller than that. Maybe smaller than that.

RJ: Still a pretty sizable machine.

John: Yes, fairly sizable. It was put on a wooden table, so it couldn't have been [unintelligible 01:08:24] or anything.

RJ: Right. At some point, it gets completed. Right? Then what happens when they complete it?

John: Well, it seemed to be completed. Then they spent a lot of days thinking, "Well, maybe we didn't do this quite right or that quite right. It hadn't started yet. Maybe we should go polish these steel balls or something."

[chuckles]

They spent some time doing those sorts of things. Under high expectation, and the word had got out in the community, so everybody knew that this was happening. People were waiting for something to happen, and it didn't happen. Jackson Davis visited it one day and thought, "Oh, this is really interesting, but it really wasn't moving. So what's the payoff here?" Some people had noted that there was some small movement of these suspended steel balls, but they were attributing that to static electricity in the air. Basically, the big armature was not turning. The spirits, or John, really, decided that it needed some kind of jumpstart, that that's what was wrong. It needed some influx of spiritual energy. He was figuring out a way to try to do that, and constructed himself an armored suit being made of plates of metal, maybe zinc and copper or something, that were strung around him. Again, he's got some simple idea that he could attract etheric energy to himself and hold it in himself like a battery. Accumulate it like a light in a jar, and then translate it into the machine.

What we have isn't descriptions of him walking towards machine having himself gotten all juiced up, and then as it's described in the newspaper account by his colleague, Hewitt, an umbilicus of etheric energy was transmitted between John and the machine. There's some language in that description that suggest that we're talking about some ritualized sexual encounter, but that's very difficult to picture a 19th Century mechanic writing for the public in the newspaper, describing in much detail the detail that you'd like to have. You have to leave that to our imagination exactly what they thought was going on in this transmission.

At the same time, or nearly the same time, another of John's followers, who's name was Sarah Newton, she was also a medium. She had become convinced that she was going to become the mother of the new motor of the electrical infant.

RJ: Why was she convinced of this?

John: Well, she was a medium, and she also received messages. Since she was part of this group, you could say because they were all waiting for something to happen and not sure what they were lacking yet, this was the answer that came. She found herself as a result of this series of messages, or convinced that she was experiencing labor pains. She was moved North of Boston, she was living in Boston at the time, North of Boston to Lynn where she came into close proximity, as it were, or as it was described to the machine.

After that, there was joy and tribulation all around because this group had claimed to the world that the machine had moved. It was starting to move. Can you say the movement was apparent only to the followers, whether or not it was--

RJ: When did it start to move?

John: [laughs] After she came in contact with it, is all I could say.

RJ: Can you describe that? I know that in your book, you mentioned that they said that there needed to be both a male and a female energy, and a feminine energy to basically give birth to the new motor, the new motive power.

John: Like with humans, you need the male and then female. John had infused it with a male energy, and Sarah had, by her proximity, somehow infused it with the female. Thus, the electrical infant was born and would move.

RJ: There's no description of what that physical proximity was?

John: No. Again, we're talking about some 19th Century newspaper report. Such matters were somewhat delicate.

[laughter]

I'm sure it was thought to be, "Well, none of you all's business exactly what was going on here." Anyway, context was made.

RJ: It starts to move.

John: Allegedly yes. The announcement was made, "It's moving."

RJ: It's moving. The followers, what did they think was moving on it?

John: They thought that this grand armature that the steel balls were attached, it was supposed to start rotating.

RJ: It was starting to rotate.

John: Yes. In this respect, it was supposed to be like a generator. You've got the armature and it moves, and then you get power out of that. you connect to it. This is how it was going to provide free power among the other things. You can't really pin these things down because as we've noted, a lot of different notions and ideas were accredited to this machine as it was being built, this contraption. Whether it was going to do how it was going to be providing free energy for everyone, how it was going to go on forever, how it was to create a model or an ideal for human society and for individual humans. All of this stuff was just floating around in their heads. One of the ideas was something on the order of which would be an electric motor that you could attach parts to, and it would drive other motors, presumably agricultural implements and all kinds of other stuff. This was the basic way that they fixated on by the time it was complete that it was going to be designed that the thing was alive, that this armature would rotate.

RJ: Then they decide or they're given the message that it's just a baby, and that they need to build a womb for it?

John: Yes. Again, the further development was that when people outside Earth came to look at it, the thing wasn't moving. "Tell me how this thing is working", they would say. Well, it did move, maybe you can imagine and saying, "Well, it did move. We did get movement, but it's not working now, and I don't know what's exactly going on, but we did have initial movement. We're making progress here. Just give us a little more time, and we'll improve it and it really start pumping away here." It was always a struggle to figure out what to do with this thing next, what adjustments to make, what was going to improve it to the eyes of the outside world and make it really effective. I don't know what kind of movement they got out of it at the beginning. Frankly, nobody knows, but it wouldn't move upon further examination.

What they decided was, "Well, what's missing here?" It's just newborn, so it somehow needs to be nourished and protected the way a newborn baby is, it needs to be further matured before it can really take on its own and do what it's supposed to do. Like a mother's womb, or the swaddling that a mother gives to her infant after it's born, it needs to be nurtured more. I don't know exactly what that consisted of. It certainly consisted of something like purifying the environment around it. I think that was part of what was going on in their minds when they decided to move the thing. They took it, they disassembled it and took it out to Randolph, New York, where one of the followers had a big firm and they reassembled it there. That would be a more private place for experimentation or whatever. Tried to continue to work on it. I think that's what are called the [unintelligible 01:20:44] processes that they were trying to struggle through with understanding, was to nurture it, protect it, and make it stronger that way.

RJ: John, you're saying that a lot of this information comes from the newspapers and stuff around then. We have this now. What did people who weren't part of the spiritualist movement, if you weren't part of this, what was the outside reaction to this project?

John: Well, it was a mix, but mostly it was something like, "Okay, here's blasphemy going on in High Rock trying to create a new race of human beings, messing with the creator's prerogatives." Some people regard it as a satanic project. Others regarded it as foolishness and craziness and hopelessness, and found it to be a matter of high comedy. I think there was any number of different reactions, from skepticism to horror.

Even with him by this time, I must say that John Murray Spear had, by his actions, had distanced himself from what you might call a more level headed, or depending on your point of view, more conventionally bound members of the reformed community. He was a very leading member of various organizations and movements, but once you started producing these projects, everybody started to look the other way and pretend that they didn't know the guy, which is really why he didn't show up, is that charted grade schools like William Lloyd Garrison is, or belong the names of the famous, all the reform movement histories just wrote this guy out because he was an embarrassment.

RJ: At a certain point, a mob came for the new motor.

John: That's variously described. John himself, I think, probably in order to dramatize it, describe it as a mob. This was while the machine had been reassembled in Randolph, New York in the barn. They came one night and smashed it. There's some question about that. Obviously, John is thinking about the mob that attacked him earlier in his career. Also, there was a famous incident where a mob came in and destroyed a printing press of an abolitionist and beat the guy up. I forget his name now.

These were the images that were going through his head when he was describing what this mob had done, and the size and extent of the damage. In fact, the other newspaper reports described it as a small group of young men who were out to play a prank and maybe disassembled it or beat it with plows. I don't know what they did to it. In any event, it was an opportunity for John to turn his attention, I think, away from the day by day necessity to get the thing running. It just wouldn't run.

RJ: Because that brought the end of the physical machine part of the new motor project.

John: Well, yes. Although he did also invent, in his own mind, potential applications for the machine when it became operative. These including powering boats and other applications for it. That project was more or less shelved at that point. Although Crosby Hewitt, who was his mechanic for that, had built a small model of it, and he took it around from time to time and showed it off at conventions of reformers, and lectures and gave lectures about it using the model to give people an idea about it.

I think it's safe to say that there might be parts of the original new motor out there somewhere scattered about, but it's possible that across the Crosby Hewitt's completed model of it, and I don't know how big this thing was, maybe a foot in cubic foot or something. I imagine he had to carry it from lecture to lecture. That might still be around somewhere. I don't know.

RJ: Well, that's interesting you say that, John, because there's somebody on the internet who does claim that they have found the new motive, and it's small like that, and it has John Murray Spear engraved in it. I don't know if it's a hoax. I actually reached out to them. I don't know if it's a hoax or not. They never replied to me. You do read interesting things like that online. I read one conspiracy theory that said that it was never that John made up the mob basically so he could rebuild the new motor at another place, and it's still growing and becoming the powerful Messiah it's meant to be.

John: It's now powering our very world.

RJ: Yes, I believe it. I believe it. It's at area 51.

John: [laughs] That's right. Somewhere in the Air Force Base in New Mexico.

RJ: Yes, it's over there. [laughs] You hear all these stories.

John: I saw the picture story about this guy with the John Murray Spear engraved machine. You want my opinion, it's a big hoax. It's a big joke.

RJ: Do you think it just got disassembled and they basically just--

John: Turn their attention elsewhere. They couldn't get the thing running and then some rowdies broke in one night, probably drunk, and beat on it and they didn't bother to redo it. Probably scattered the pieces.

RJ: They start believing that one of the reasons the new motor may not be taking off is that the world isn't ready for it yet, and so they start right trying to build a new society. Can you talk about that society for the new man? I think true marriage versus false marriage is part of that, the free love movement.

John: One of the old things, the mechanical thing, merely mechanical things that was minding the world to matter, as you might say, and changing the spirit was the institution of marriage according to a lot of reformers at that time.

They were influenced by earlier French ideas, particularly by this French socialist named Charles Fourier, who wished to release the natural affinities, as we called, that existed between people, something like electrical energies or vibratory frequencies or something like that, by which people would be freely bound together, magnetized together, and they conceived that these free associations that would be ideal were being hindered by these merely human arrangements contracts called marriage. It was thought that the improvement of the human race would come when we could abolish traditional marriage and allow people to procreate according to their natural affinities. That was the doctrine of free love.

In order to have that happen, you needed to create a society, a small society perhaps at first, where people could follow their leanings in this regard. John had leanings, and his followers had leanings. John pursued those leanings with one of his followers named Caroline Hinckley. The result of pursuing those leanings was that Caroline Hinckley, who was not married to John in the traditional sense, he still had a wife and children in Boston, had gone out to establish a community in Northern New York at a place called Cayenne Town, which is just South of Jamestown, and had set up a commune there. That was to be this new experimental Utopian community.

Caroline gave birth to a boy, as paper said, a bouncing non-spiritual infant of nine pounds or something. Of course, there was a huge scandal to everybody back in Boston and elsewhere. This was supposed to have been created by the higher spiritual affinities that by which humans should decide who should mate, and according to those ideal matings, produce a better human being than we can.

RJ: This is kind of like the next step for the new motive power?

John: Yes, it was the notion of creating this community in which the human race would evolve into something brand new, was all of a piece with the expectations around the new motor too.

RJ: What was the cavity project at Cayenne Town?

John: John's spirits, since there were so many. [laughs] In all these different associations and committees were just feeding him all kinds of projects to do. One of them was to pursue the discovery and uncovering of a mythical to us civilization that had been centered lo and behold just below the territory of this commune that they'd set up in Cayenne Town. He started digging, and there were some expectations about, "Is this what we would call an archaeological dig, or what was going on? What was down there?" The remains of a highly technologically developed society, or maybe even speculation that, "Hey, there was some underground cavity down there where these people had been driven to and were still down there. Somehow when we broke through, we could find and come in contact with this advanced civilization down there."

Again, like with the new motor, these ideas were not well developed but developed first in people's imaginations and speculations about what it was that they were doing. They were being clearly directed to dig this cavity, and they were told that this was in order to find this ancient civilization. What it was that they were going to be finding, nobody was really quite sure about, and they were waiting to see what would turn up. In any event, one of the followers was extremely rich. Well, two of them were extremely rich and funded this elaborate excavation digging a tunnel that you could walk down into hundreds of feet into the ground in order to make contact.

The thing was, as I said, down a couple of hundred feet, I think, and then started to fill up the water. It's not surprising because there are a lot of underground springs in the region. I think they installed pumps and tried to keep going, but nothing ever happened, and finally they were defeated by the water and couldn't continue it. That cavity, that tunnel is, I think it's still there although it's on private property and some farm and has been boarded up, and I don't think the owner, from where I can tell, is particularly keen on having people [crosstalk]

RJ: Somebody died in the tunnel. That seems very not safe. [laughs] Very not good toward people. All this--

John: I think it's been mapped. I think it's been found lately, some kind of project to map the area geologically, but I don't think people really go down there. I've never been down there.

RJ: All these projects are kind of all in service of the same idea, though, of creating this new society where people can basically be free to do what they want, and gives them that peace and freedom, right? That's what all these--

John: Sound good, doesn't it?

RJ: Yes, sounds great. Wish they had done it. Sounds awesome.

John: Let's do it.

RJ: Yes. I'm in. Then through all of this--

John: I know where it is, that perfect society may be the afterlife, or it may be under the ground in the center of the earth or somewhere, but it's not here, it's not here where I am right now. Let's get up an expedition and get to it.

RJ: Eventually, I know you mentioned that the new motor was he had ideas for other things. Eventually, the new motor kind of morphs into an automatic sewing machine?

John: Well, before we get to the sewing machine, there was one other project that had to do with the importance of sexual congress between people who were regarded as spiritual affinities. They would gain, it was thought, this mediumistic power to transmit thoughts to read each other clairvoyance and all of this. Based on this notion, the spirits described John a project where a male and female medium would be together in some fashion or another in a room at the base of a tower. The tower, I don't know what it-- Nobody knows what these towers really would look like, but in my imagination, I've thought of them as like a giant obelisk, maybe with mystic symbols carved on the side or something, I'm not sure. Down in the operating room, the uniformed mediums maybe would be entranced maybe through sexual activity, I'm not sure, but in any event, they'd be entranced, and they could transmit, through this amplification that was afforded by the towers, they could transmit thoughts to other towers that have been build around the region. It would form a microwave network. I don't know, I haven't been-- You have to--

RJ: It's like a telegraph that way. It's like a telephone company but with--

John: Well, it's not just one to one transmission here. From one point to another, this is an advanced, this is more like what we've got now with microwave towers.

RJ: Yes, sure.

John: It's a network, and it was going to compete with the underground cables, the submarine cables across the Atlantic, and those were bad, apparently, according to the spirits, because they were owned by monopolies, and it was going to cost a lot of money to send messages, and so it wouldn't serve the general people's purpose. Here, your mediumistic network would become at people's service, presumably free, I don't know how, but would transmit messages all over the country. It would become the center of the world's communications network to serve up in Randolph, but this was all notional.

RJ: Yes. Did they do anything to implement this?

John: No, I don't think so. There's no evidence that any of this was ever even begun. You can imagine the money it would have taken.

RJ: Well, would they use the same weird mechanical suit that John used to try to--

John: I don't know, but I do know this, that John did do what he called experiments with clairvoyant thought transmission, and it probably involved sexual intercourse to ramp up the powers.

RJ: A lot of his ideas involve sexual intercourse.

John: Sensitivity. Yes. Well, you can see how this is going.

[laughter]

RJ: Yes.

John: He was a male like any other male, and so he starts off enjoying the fairy sex.

RJ: I'm sure that for the time in the 19th century, that's-- Even for now, his ideas would be very far out there. For that 19th century, to free love, people brains must've been melting. They couldn't--

John: Right. You're describing my brain melting, when I first read about these projects in these old books. How could this be happening? This is like some eruption of the Buck Rogers in 25th century into 19th century America.

RJ: Yes. Do you have any idea of why this kind of movement may have been springing up kind of in direct opposition to a lot of the mainstream ideals at the time?

John: Talk more about that.

RJ: I just find it very interesting that the free love movement, especially, just seems so diametrically opposed to at least our idea of what the 19th century was today. I was wondering, it was obviously a time of major unrest. a lot of this takes place before, during and after the civil war. Does that have anything to do with--

John: I don't know if the civil war did it in itself, but there was a lot of talk about reforming marriage.

RJ: Right, because it went hand in hand with the abolitionism and the death penalty, and he also didn't believe in prison. One thing I don't think we talked much about earlier was he didn't believe in prisons, correct?

John: Yes. Well, you know what? In his brother's, Charles's, diary-- Charles was like his brother, but not quite so much the same way, but I think it's reflective of the way people's standard operating procedure was, at least among the reformers, was daily expectations about what next? Where will I be led next? Man, I'm surprised that my views on this have changed so much. Now I don't believe in the death penalty, but tomorrow I'm beginning to think, "Hey, I'll probably be led into thinking nobody should even be imprisoned", that it's impossible to justify one human being imprisoning another.

RJ: Right. It's looks like these projects it's, once you take one step, they never take the step back. They always keep moving forward, and so once you're past that point and once you give into one belief, it becomes a lot easier to then buy into the next thing that maybe to somebody in mainstream thought is super radical, but for you it's just a little more extreme.

John: It's one further step, yes. The logic is leading me in this direction. I don't know where I'll be tomorrow, but I may be even further along in this thread.

RJ: Part of it too is John particularly believes that a lot of his life is being led through some purpose, not just of his own wants and needs, he believes he's following to some kind of destiny.

John: Yes. Isn't that amazing?

RJ: It is amazing.

John: He did not necessarily question it. Although there are hints that he may have been playing his followers in some sense, at least massaging them so that they provided him with support and funding for these projects and so on. It's hard to look deeply down into him, but he was certainly unique in this regard, that he took his visions, what we would call dreams or even fever dreams, to be real enough that he believed in them enough to actually go out and try to construct them. That step was what made him seem insane to people who weren't among his followers.

RJ: That leads us back to the sewing machine. How does the new motive power become a sewing machine? When I read your book, I got to be honest with you, that got me laughing because it just seemed like such a huge change, such a common place thing is given birth from this miraculous idea.

John: Yes. That's a nice point. It does have that aspect to it, doesn't it?

RJ: Yes.

John: I don't mean to speak against that because it gets true when I think about it.

RJ: Please speak against it.

John: However, our understanding of what a sewing machine was is a little different, or the importance of it is a little different from how it was understood in those days. It was a new invention. It was thought to radically change the domestic life. It would free women from laborious hand sewing. That was one huge change, because women spend a lot of time sewing. It would also change other things around that about the way the family was organized. They could take in work and be contract workers and still stay at home, for example.

They could be involved in the money economy. There was a lot of things that came together in why the sewing machine, the invention of the sewing machine was important to domestic life. Of course, John was a huge advocate of women's rights and freeing women from the bondage of domestic slavery, et cetera. In one sense, it was a continuation of this. It was machine that would free women from domestic slavery. It was an important invention. Also, it could make some money for the group. That's not to be denied. They decided to try to put together a machine that would be cheap, and so would be affordable to many women. That was important, the democratic ideal, and so it would be the people's machine. That would somehow work, despite the fact that nobody knew how to build a machine except with the patents that we had the license from a couple of combines of Singer and how had sort of cornered these fundamental patents on the machine.

Ordinarily, people who made different brands of machines had to license rights from them, and thus the price of these machines were prohibitive for most folks. The idea was to reinvent a sewing machine that would bypass those patent lines. The way they did it, of course, was through visionary work. I don't know how to describe this except to say that they tried to get visions and dreams that could suggest to them different ways of constructing the mechanism that they needed to make a sewing machine. By that time, they had moved into a second spot that they had acquired along the Ohio River. A lot of this experimentation to try to build this machine was conducted there, but it was, again, this big John Murray Spear, it's not like, "Hey, here's a workshop. Let's go work and try to think of something."

It was, first go into a trance, and then have sexual intercourse, then have a dream where something would come to you based on these powers that you-- these spirits with affinity to the project would visit you and give you ideas. They developed what looked like-- Again, we're dealing with instructions and descriptions that have all the ambiguity of what you would expect out of the middle of the 19th century, but fragmentary descriptions of something that looks like each person being assigned or consecrated to the name of a different mechanical function of machine. One was called a medalist, for example, and then they did some kind of improvised ritual or dance where they would-- all the parts would interact to do some basic functions as if they were doing the functions of sewing. Then they would retire to room next door where they would go to sleep. Then hopefully have some visual wake with some kind of vision in the morning about how to build a machine piece by piece in the way they had done the new motor project, but it would be a new sewing machine.

RJ: Wow. Was this something that she never completed?

John: One can only imagine. Yes, somehow they produced a machine. I get the impression that it wasn't a great one, but it wasn't all that expensive. I don't know anybody that's got a model of it. If I'd spent the last 20 years looking for one, I might have been able to retrieve one. They did sell a few, I don't know. They tried to send an agent to Europe, and at least England, and open up a showroom there. I don't know whether or not they sold much of anything, many or anything. I don't know if they stole patents. I don't know how they [unintelligible 01:56:30] the thing, but they did produce a machine.

RJ: Right. You mentioned they go to Europe, kind of starting to wind things down a little bit. John Murray, he goes to Europe for a little bit. Can you talk about him leaving spiritualism, how he fell out of love with it, I guess, and then kind of just the end of his life and how he spent the rest of his days after all these inventions?

John: Well, I tend to think that he was constantly enlivened by these visions he had. Of course, he found obstacles in the way to making them real. Some of them are not only obstacles in the way that the natural world really works, but also maybe disappointment among his followers and opposition, mocking and so on. He eventually decided, or was told by his spirit friends, that he could retire more or less and transfer his responsibilities to someone else, which he did around 1872, I think.

After that, he continued to be a medium but not really the public figure that he thought of himself as and that actually had been. He still continued in participating in reform movements, organizing peace societies and attending spiritualist conventions and so on, but really, he wrapped down his own activities. He still was, by that time, he was like, I don't know, some-- if he would appear at one of these conventions, his earlier eccentricities were softened around the edges of the Eastern people's memories.

He is just more or less treated as the grand old man and reformer. Usually his mechanical visionary projects were forgotten to put aside, and he was remembered for his prison reform work or his position in the abolitionist movement. He was still welcomed as a medium that spiritualism conventions and so on, but he wasn't publicly active anymore.

RJ: Right. When did he pass away?

John: My memory is, 1887 or '88.

RJ: How is he kind of remembered by everybody once he passed away?

John: By that time, he'd been really essentially written out of all the histories of the reform movements, not surprisingly. You don't ever hear of him anymore until I decided to write this book. It's not entirely true, but his life wasn't put together as a whole for a long time, and he appeared only if you really dug out stuff and looked for him. There was one very famous book called the Modern American spiritualism written by a spiritualist who is John's contemporary, Emma Hardinge Britten. It's so chock full of details that it's usually been used as a source book for historians for a long time since then.

She was quite negative about John and his various projects. She did spend quite a bit of time talking about him in bits and pieces, and recorded first on the new motor project quoting a lot of the discrepancy at the time. She was very much repelled, or at least she said she was, by this pre-love activities, and by the sheer simplicity of these physical projects that he was trying to do. Even she didn't really treat the subject well. It was in her book that I first ran across him, and when I read about him, I just couldn't believe what I was reading.

RJ: He was even on the mainstream, on the fringes of even spiritualism. Like what you're saying, in terms of how mainstream spiritualism was, she seemed like a pretty mainstream leader of the spiritualist movement.

John: Trying to get spiritualists together is the Proverbs verse like herding cats. They're all individuals. They've all got their own individual visions and so on. They didn't really organize for a long time. One of the big divisions among spiritualists was, "Well, is this really true to Christianity? Or is it a refutation of Christianity?" There were Christian spiritualists and atheist spiritualists or whatever category.

Certainly one of the pictures that many spiritualists tried to portray to the outside world was, "Look, this doesn't question tradition, society, traditional beliefs, and so on. It simply fulfills your longing for reassurance that there's an afterlife, and that your dearly departed one are still with us in a way, and still alive." Because of that, there was real reluctance by many people to either broadcast to the world or even to admit to themselves that this was-- spiritualism was as an open-ended visionary project that could undermine all kinds of things.

Emma Hardinge Britten was one of those who put on a happy face, as it were, for the outside world, and portrayed spiritualism as just unadulterated pure blessing to the human race. You can see why she treated Spear's projects and ideas gratefully in a way.

RJ: Yes, those two ideas do not gel at all. John, I'm at the end. Do you have any final thoughts, anything you'd like to say to summarize things?

John: Oh, I wish I did, but I think you've drained me here.

RJ: Oh, John, thank you so much. This has been great.