To Lay Bare All of Spiritualism's Shams': Oscar
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
FALL 09 pp 300-364_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/11/09 9:50 AM Page 316 To Lay Bare All of Spiritualism’s Shams: Harry Waite and Oscar Eliason’s Anti-Medium Crusade By BRANDON JOHNSON REPRODUCTION OF LINE DRAWING IN SALT LAKE TRIBUNE, DECEMBER 1, 1899, BY LISA JOHNSON n April 23, 1894, an intriguing letter appeared in the pages of the Salt Lake Tribune under the title “Open Letter to Oscar Eliason.” OThe letter’s author, Harry H. Waite, was a traveling spiritualist medium who, according to an advertisement published in the Tribune only a few weeks earlier, frankly invited curious Salt Lakers to witness his supposedly supernatural skills. “Parlors packed!” read the newspa- per announcement. “Lawyers, doctors, merchants, teachers, ladies. Why? Come and see.” Satisfaction, Waite assured the public, was guaranteed.1 By the looks of the April 23 letter, however, it appears the optimism exhibited in the medium’s earlier advertisement had quickly run its course. Instead of a bold cataloging of Waite’s supposedly mystical talents, this new missive was a tangled bundle of self-pitying declarations and vituperative claims aimed at Oscar Eliason, a magician from Salt Lake City. Eliason, who was born in either 1869 or 1870 to Mormon immigrant jeweler O. L. Eliason and his wife Emma, began his career as a secular conjuror by performing in Mormon meetinghouses, a fact that won him the moniker “Mormon Wizard.” 2 Oscar Eliason Dr. Brandon Johnson is Director of Grants and Historical Programs for the Utah Humanities Council. 1 Salt Lake Tribune, April 23, 1894. 2 Salt Lake Tribune, December 1, 1899; Bureau of the Census. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1880), T9-1337, 153D. The 1880 cen- sus lists Eliason’s birth year as “abt. 1870” and gives his age as 10 rather than 11. In the census, the family’s last name is spelled “Elison” rather than “Eliason.” There is an “O. L. Eliason” listed as a jeweler in the 1890 Salt Lake City directory, published by R. L. Polk and Company. According to the directory, the elder Eliason’s jewelry business was located at 220 South Main Street. See Salt Lake City Directory (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk and Company, 1890), 271. For more on the elder Eliason’s jewelry business, see Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1883. 316 FALL 09 pp 300-364_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/11/09 9:50 AM Page 317 WAITE AND ELIASON (Later, he acquired a second nickname: “Dante the Great.”) According to a biographical news story filed in 1899, Eliason was a graduate of Salt Lake’s St. Mark’s School and had been groomed to follow his father into the jewelry business, but his resistance to the “idea that he would have to spend his life ‘watching wheels go round with a dice-box stuck in his eye’” caused him to haunt the environs of the Salt Lake Theater in the hopes of learning some magic tricks, until he finally broke with family tradition and took to the stage himself.3 According to reports, his performances were usually well attended, likely due to his expert conjuring. Audiences left his shows “thunderstruck” at his ability to turn ink into water, hatch “real birds from … eggs,” produce goldfish from thin air, create “umbrella heaps of flowers,” and make people disappear.4 But where audiences were impressed by Eliason’s act, Waite was sorely disgruntled. To his way of thinking, the magician had slyly—and very skillfully—turned the public against him, by contaminating audiences with silly sleight-of-hand performances and then passing his tricks off as exposés of supposed spiritualist deceptions. The opening salvo of Harry Waite’s April 23 letter focused on Eliason’s perceived bad-mouthing of his father, Dr. A. A. Waite, who was also a medi- um and appears to have been traveling and performing with his son. (An announcement in the Tribune a day earlier had invited the public to witness “the Waites … in their wonderful materialization séance … at Shell’s Auditorium Hall.”)5 In a culture that prized personal honor, the younger Waite would have sensed his own reputation, as well as his father’s, to be on the line, a feeling that probably prompted him to write his angry letter. But it was the charge of conspiracy that lay at the heart of the spiritualist’s communiqué to the Tribune. In Waite’s mind, Eliason was part of a sinister plot to keep mediums from performing in Utah’s capital city. “I have been refused the Salt Lake Theater Sunday nights,” Waite complained, “but you [Eliason] seem to get it. I have had the rent raised upon me to keep me out, and there is not a place in this city where I can challenge you to meet me in open contest. This puts me to a great disadvantage, but I am honor- able enough to meet your bluffs the best way I can—through this paper at so much a line.” Calling on the illusionist to “come to my rooms, 261 South West Temple Street,” with his friends, Waite said that he would give Eliason $100 in gold if he could raise a small table without using his hands, thus duplicating a popular element of many mediums’ acts. Eliason was an untested neophyte, Waite continued, who would prove unable to raise the table, even with the wager on it. But that was only part of Waite’s challenge. He also called on Eliason to “let me come on your stage at your so-called 3 Salt Lake Tribune, December 1, 1899. 4 Ibid., April 8, 1895. 5 Ibid., April 22 and April 28, 1894. For more on A. A. Waite’s experiences in Utah, see Salt Lake Tribune, April 27, 1894; and April 28, 1893. 317 FALL 09 pp 300-364_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/11/09 9:50 AM Page 318 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY exposé. In fair contest; if you duplicate my spirit manifestations as they are produced, before an honest committee, you stand acquitted. If not, you stand convicted as an impostor, and the winner takes the gate receipts.”6 Not surprisingly, Waite’s tartly-worded letter found its mark, setting in motion an epistolary mêlée between the hometown magician and the traveling medium. For a brief moment in 1894, Salt Lake City became a primary front in the rhetorical war between practitioners of secular magic (alternatively called “magicians,” “illusionists,” and “conjurors” by nineteenth-century Americans) and public spiritualist mediums. Played out in the pages of the Salt Lake Tribune, this local manifestation of the national dust-up between magicians and spiritualists might best be described as an internecine brawl between cultural cousins whose public performances were remarkably similar, but who disagreed fervently about the source of their power. While mediums sought to convince audiences they possessed special supernatural knowledge and could communicate directly with spirits, conjurors were bent on establishing, once and for all, the natural— even mundane—origins of their own tricks, and, by extension, those of the nation’s mediums. But there was more to the illusionists’ desire to expose spiritualist mediums in public than a simple drive to naturalize the super- natural. Their dispute with mediumship was primarily about the respectability and credibility of their profession. In a world where supernatural magical practice and secular conjuring were often still entangled in the minds of spectators, the late-nineteenth-century magician had to struggle mightily to set himself apart from lingering associations with supernaturalism. In a fundamental way, secular magic’s forceful collision with spirit materialization across the country—and in Utah—can be attributed to this issue. Secular illusionists like Oscar Eliason saw any association with otherworldliness as a threat to their desires for professional status, and believed that any conflation of the secular and the supernatural in the public mind promised to re-associate the magical profession with an older, bankrupt culture of superstition and necromancy. The story of Oscar Eliason’s spirited exchange with Harry Waite, then, plainly illuminates the strong cultural bond between spiritualist mediumship and secular magic in American culture, while at the same time revealing the vast cultural distance that still separated the magical and medium professions. Eliason and Waite (as well as other mediums and illusionists across the country) shared elements of a common repertoire. Yet, at the same time, the professional imperatives of conjuror and medium did not allow them to coexist peacefully. There is, however, something else the tussle between Eliason and Waite illuminates, namely the modern character of Salt Lake City at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the exchange between Eliason and Waite shows just how far Salt Lake City had progressed along the path toward 6 Salt Lake Tribune, April 23, 1894. 318 FALL 09 pp 300-364_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/11/09 9:50 AM Page 319 WAITE AND ELIASON UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. We St. Mark’s School, founded by the might think of it as evidence of what Gustive Episcopal Church, where Oscar Larson (when talking about politics) dubbed Eliason attended school. the “Americanization of Utah,” but on the register of culture. According to Larson, in the final few decades of the nineteenth century, Utah’s mostly Mormon polity, once highly antagonistic to federal supervision, underwent a profound ideological change that ulti- mately opened the way to statehood for the long-lived territory. At the heart of that change—Larson’s process of “Americanization”—was the “demand for undivided loyalty to the United States government, for the acceptance of the country’s democratic process under the Constitution, including the separation of church and state.”7 The separation of church and culture in late-nineteenth-century Utah was just as profound, and it is this transformation—what we might identify as “cultural Americanization”—that the public debate between Eliason and Waite unmistakably marks.